Working across time zones

We have had two retrospectives in a row now that have flagged difficulties with remote working. Most of the issues have revolved around the question of how to synchronise across time zones. The biggest issues we are having:

• Some meetings are difficult if people aren’t all in attendance; such as sprint planning or stand ups
• Most communication software is buggy or sub-par. We have had issues with Hangouts, Webex, Skype and others. The best we seem to be able to do is Webex for voice and hangouts for video. We always waste time at the start of a meeting trying to debug issues.

The solution?

We aren’t really sure there is a solution. We can’t bring the teams together; the cost would be prohibitively high. Some workarounds have been suggested

How do we leverage this rather than fight against it?

Can we use more asynchronous comms?

Seems possible to minimise these types of synchronous discussions with more asynchronous types of communication. One example would be using the decision page on Confluence rather than having a meeting. Ideas/solutions could be put forward by one team and then completed by the next team to come online. I think this is a great idea. It has some issues with efficiency as its much faster to just talk with people, but I think the benefits are fairly good here. Other benefits include having a record of the decision and the ideas and assumptions that went into making it captured in a point of time.

There is potentially the downside here of removing most of the human-human interaction but I’m not sure that would happen. Even if it did, the potential upsides seem worth the risk.

Be flexible with work times to accommodate time differences

I think this is good but only up to a point. I think it sounds OK initially but I see many potential problems including:

• Head office always takes priority thus ‘flexibility’ becomes ‘get up earlier to accommodate us’
• Changing work times could impact productivity personally. E.g. many personal circumstances such as getting children to school could make this difficult
• Could drift more towards ‘manager schedule’ for the makers
• Accommodating the meetings could take priority over delivering working solutions

I think this is a case of ‘solutioneering’ that could make peoples lives more difficult and not capitalise on some of the benefits of remote working

Isn’t this a solved problem?

I am fairly short on ideas here. It’s a much more difficult problem than I anticipated going into it. I’d read about so many successful, fully-remote teams that I thought this must have been a solved problem. I feel like I’m missing something obvious. Surely the successful teams that I have read about don’t have anywhere near these level of issues? I will continue to investigate to see if we can really make the most of the distributed team.