Pros, cons, and lessons of working with dispersed teams

Although Millennials, Gen Xers and Baby-boomers all want the same basic things from their career environments, the incoming millennial generation is pushing for a flexible work schedule to fit our daily lives. This has a lot of people predicting the end of the classic 9-5 workday. But it also brings up another question: is working with a dispersed team right for your business?

Now to be clear, dispersed teams are nothing new. For years workers have been telecommuting, working from home, and conferencing in with coworkers and clients across the world. Between 2005 and 2012, telecommuting rose by 79% in the US alone. Yet companies are still concerned about incorporating flexible schedules into their existing processes, and for good reason. Below are a few issues surrounding the debate around flexible work hours, and the pros, cons, and lessons for each.

Who’s working?

When you have teams working from home or in different locations, you’re not going to have the same type of accountability that you do when you can see them sitting at their desks in the office. You can’t just walk by and make sure they are working instead of browsing social media or online shopping. If someone is slacking off, you can’t subtly remind them about a project to get them back on track. A remote team means that you have to trust that your people are committed and doing their job even without your supervision.

Con: This lack of accountability will probably mean that someone is going to take advantage and fool around instead of working. You can’t see it, so unless they are simply not getting any work done, you might not even know that they slacking off.

Pro: While there are employees who are bound to goof off when working remotely, studies show that people are actually more productive when working from home.

Lesson: If you find that your remote employees are slacking off, it’s time to take a look at your hiring processes. When you hire the right people, train them well, set clear expectations, and trust them to do their job, most people will work hard no matter where they are. It might be more difficult to measure accountability, especially with managers who don’t know how to work with remote teams, but if you have the right people and processes in place then it shouldn’t be a problem.

Time zones

Dispersed teams take a variety of forms, and can often include people who live in different time zones (if not different countries). This type of situation calls for a lot of patience and cooperation among the team in order to function properly. Sometimes you’ll have to work late in the night or wake up earlier in order to fix a problem or clear up an explanation regarding the current project. Before committing to working with a team that spans many time zones, you should consider the points below.

Pro: When your team covers a few time zones—even if it’s just an hour difference—your company’s work day gets longer. This essentially means that work is being completed during your off hours, which could translate to increased productivity.

Con: However, if a task you’re working on is dependent on a team member in another time zone completing their own task, dispersed teams can make small projects take longer. This is especially true with teams that work on different sides of the world, when an issue that should take an hour to complete is not even addressed until the next day.

Con: With teams that work drastically different hours, you also risk communication efforts getting lost in translation. Cultural and language differences are their own problem; but on a more simple level, email is less concise than in-person or phone conversations where teams can fully explain certain issues.

Lesson: Time zones are not an easy hurdle to overcome. You want your team to communicate, but you also know that they need downtime and plenty of sleep in order to be productive. The best thing you can do when working with teams that span multiple time zones is to be as transparent as possible. During the hiring process, be clear about communication expectations, and make sure that both new and existing team members are comfortable working the occasional odd hours. Setting communication expectations and incorporating processes for these expectations to be met are vital to success with dispersed teams.

Culture

This point might seem like it applies only to teams that work in different countries with noticeably different cultural norms. While that is certainly an important factor to keep in mind when it comes to forming and working with dispersed teams, the concept of “culture” goes beyond that. That’s right—I’m talking about company culture. The atmosphere and working conditions of your company is greatly affected by teams working from different locations, even if they are all local.

Pro: Working from home lets employees be flexible with their work-life balance. They can do laundry, pick up their kids from school, and still get all of their work done. Eliminating these seemingly little stresses can make a big impact on employee productivity.

Con: At the same time though, working from home can allow for less interaction with co-workers. When employees don’t see each other regularly, they don’t talk as much, which makes it harder to fix a problem and ask for help.

Lesson: Just like you need to be transparent when working with teams across time zones, you should also make sure your local teams are working together, even when they aren’t in the same office. A company culture that encourages a healthy work-life balance is great, but employees need to know that work is still a big part of that balance. Ensure that everyone is able to communicate with the latest technologies, such as video chat. Outside of your typical work day, bring local teams together for team bonding over fun activities or happy hour. Your employees might not see each other every day, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t know one another.

At the end of the day, it’s up to management to decide whether or not working with dispersed teams is right for their company. As in any major decision, there are pros and cons for having a remote work force and/or incorporating flexible schedules. The best thing to do is to remain open and honest about your policies and expectations, and to build clear processes for your employees to succeed. In addition, you’ll want to keep the channels of communication open so that you can receive valuable feedback from your employees and see what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your business and dispersed teams.

This blog was originally posted on Hoooley.com.

Photos from Creative Commons: leoplus, 드림포유, Listener42, Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, jamjar.