by Jason Snell
‘No, We Won’t Have a Video Call for That!’
Via Merlin Mann and Gabe Weatherhead, I discovered this presentation by Florian Haas about the right and wrong ways to run a distributed workforce:
- Distributed teams are better than localized teams — not because they’re distributed, but because they’re asynchronous.
- Avoid anything that makes a distributed team run synchronously.
- Use less chat.
- Have fewer meetings.
- Write. Things. Down.
Asynchrony is the secret sauce of distributed workgroups. It’s not that synchrony can’t be valuable, but its value is overstated—and the tyranny of the synchronous should not be imported into distributed workgroups.
Haas makes some excellent points about trying to adjust workgroup culture to store important information in retrievable places—a wiki or a Google Doc, rather than a thread somewhere months ago in Slack that nobody can find. More excellent advice.