SBA

Can You Work With Me?

As employers, business people, senior managers etc., many of those of you reading this article will have built teams, some of you may even list team-building as one of your strengths on your resume. You will each have your own approach to the problem of bringing together a group of people and enabling them to cooperate, so here’s a challenge to think about: bring together half a dozen people who are complete strangers to each other and get them to achieve something without them needing to meet, without having a boss or appointed leader or office or facilities etc., and without the knowledge to tell them what to do or how to do it  ….  All you can communicate is a desired outcome. 

Tough, huh? Most of us have enough difficulty getting our teams to function well when they share the same office.

The reality is that there are many thousands of such teams - previously unconnected people working together without ever meeting, self-managing and with no defined hierarchy - and their existence and effectiveness has largely been spawned and enabled by online collaboration tools. A very large proportion of open source computer software is developed by self-directing, self-managing collaborators, many political movements operate similarly - including “hacktivists”, as do some criminal and terrorist groupings. Each category demonstrates that previously unconnected people without supervisory direction can coalesce and collaborate to achieve efficient delivery of their “products”. 

Frankly at times it makes me question why we bother with “managers”. Long ago I used to work in a major global technology company where self-managed workgroups were the norm and the role of executives was to provide enabling servant leadership - we produced some awesome technology which everyone benefits from today. We were not “unconnected”, but we were scattered across several continents and timezones and yet we were able to collaborate more efficiently than many, perhaps most, managed teams located in a single building or campus.

Enabling this collaborative nirvana is much easier today, the collaboration toolkits necessary are much cheaper and easier to access, and they offer more features, meaning that almost anyone with Internet access can create, or become part of, a distributed collaborative team. Even within the same building modern collaboration tools can make a huge difference to productivity, although there are some advantages to distributed teams because personality conflicts are less common amongst team members who never meet in person.

So why am I telling you this? I am a member of several distributed self-managed teams, but one in particular sprung to mind. Last year I collaborated with a few other geeks to create a new online database system and accompanying web site, hosting etc. I had never met or communicated with or even heard of these other techies before, I literally knew nothing about them. Nevertheless we discussed our intended product, and various technology options for creating it, online, and the skills each of us could bring to the process, and we collaborated online to produce it quickly and cheaply - and it works well. Only when we had actually delivered the working product did we arrange to meet up for a coffee and discuss how we would  going forward. My collaborators did not match my preconceptions - if I were interviewing them for employment I certainly wouldn’t have regarded them all as outstanding candidates - but they delivered very effectively and I would have no hesitation in hiring  them now. 

Online collaboration tools don’t just enable teams to work together more effectively, they also allow teams to be more diverse and inclusive because they provide a layer of insulation which allows team members to focus on delivering outcomes without the distractions of personalities and preconceptions. 

For the development work we did last year we collaborated using an online tool called “Slack”. It allowed us to chat and share ideas and files and “product” asynchronously, so team members could contribute when they were available instead of all having to be online at the same time. Slack notifies you when someone has posted something, so you don’t have to monitor it constantly, but you can jump in quickly if you need to respond immediately, or leave it until you have time and then catch up with what’s been said. It’s probably the market leading tool for online discussion between software developers, in the three years since it launched it has ramped up to around six million regular users.

There are of course many other online collaboration tools, each have subtly different capabilities and ways of working - not all tools suit all users or all types of projects. I am a great fan of Google Docs, because multiple people can edit a document at the same time and see each other’s changes in real time. Using video-conferencing tools such as Skype or Google Hangouts a geographically group of people can work together on a Google Docs document, reviewing and changing it as they discuss it. This makes the process of producing marketing copy, technical documents, legal contracts etc. infinitely faster. Clearly this is a synchronous activity, unlike Slack the team members have to be online at the same time to participate, but compared with each member reviewing and amending individually, or emailing comments to an appointed editor, the productivity benefits are huge.

Videoconferencing has been with us for a long time, I first started using it in the late 1980’s in Xerox to meet with teams scattered across the globe. We had a dedicated videoconferencing suite at each office location and it was hugely expensive. Now anyone can videoconference, often for free, but premium online systems such as GotoMeeting or Skype for Business make it quick, easy and cheap to network rooms and individuals together, see and hear each other, share their screens so that any team member can show the others what they’re looking at, and if necessary record the meeting so that someone can write up the minutes. I regularly use GotoMeeting for board meetings - some of us meet in our boardroom in London and those members who are not in London can join the videoconference using our computers or smartphones. As a meeting technology it works far better than most voice-based teleconferencing and very often the audio quality is better than using a teleconference system.

Sharing documents and files in a single storage location accessible to team members wherever they are is another basic, but crucial, collaboration enabler. In the office we will all share a file server, or maybe use Sharepoint, but for collaborators scattered around the globe these methods are challenging to distribute to them securely. Internet based folder and document sharing tools such as Dropbox have sprung up to fill the gap, enabling us to create a secure file server on the Internet which only our team members may access.

The interesting thing about these collaboration technologies, especially the newer examples such as Slack and Google Docs, is that they not only permit distributed teams to work more effectively, they often enable distributed teams to work more efficiently than teams co-located in the same office. This is something we probably all need to learn from, because the same technologies can be used to help co-located teams to become more productive. 

How often do we call a colleague or walk over to their desk to clarify something, interrupting their current task? When we want input or consensus from multiple team members we arrange to interrupt them all to gather and sit in a meeting room for an hour when most of the discussion and agreement could be achieved asynchronously at a cost of five to ten minutes for each participant? 

Modern online collaboration tools have evolved to the extent that using them is no longer an inferior substitute for having our team in one office, instead they are the superior option. By default we only turn to them when we need them because our team members are distributed across many locations or participating from different companies, but the evidence of recent years, especially in enabling the development of complex software, shows that we should be looking to use these tools everyday, in our offices, even for our local teams. They reduce interruptions, minimise time wasted in meetings or travelling, and enable each team member to work more to their own rhythm - the zone in which they are most productive.