Introduction

Communicating within distributed teams is challenging for most people. Communicating with people in your own country with whom you share a language, culture, and many other similarities is already challenging. With people from another country, time zone, culture, and language, it is even more challenging. With any distributed project that does not proceed as expected, people often name communication as the main reason.

Remote communication can be both enjoyable and frustrating. I still love opening my PC, starting Skype, and talking with my colleagues from India, Indonesia, Ukraine, or Sweden. I find it exciting to share with my own development team in India the many things I have learned from talking with people who work in Latvia, Ukraine, and India. I enjoy having a Monday morning meeting with team members from three locations and deciding our strategy for the week. Collaborating withdifferent nationalities to complete projects is highly rewarding. At the same time, I have also been misunderstood as well as not understood what is happening on ‘the other side’. If one of my managers in India is unsatisfied, and I need to figure out what is going on, it is more difficult to resolve through Skype than it would be locally. Her perspective is also different from mine, so it takes skill and practice to understand. It is frustrating when you thought you clearly communicated your ideas for a certain function or design only to receive something that is entirely different from what you had in mind 2 weeks later.

Through practice, we learn how to communicate. This was true when we were kids, and it is still true as adults when we find ourselves in a new team with people from different locations who are using tools instead of face-to-face communication. If you focus on the frustrating part above, it becomes difficult. However, if you view it as enjoyable, you will find ways to make it work. If you are a strong communicator and/or lucky, and you have the right team that has remote work experience, communication may even work as if the team is in your local office.

In this article, we share experiences that can help you communicate better with your distributed team members. The structure of the article is based on our distributed agile framework:

The framework consists of 9 'bubbles':

1. Culture
2. Organization
3. Leadership
4. Product
5. Team
6. Architecture
7. Engineering Practices
8. Communication
9. Tools

Each of the bubbles has 3 elements:

A. Questions: a set of questions that organisations can use to assess their current state

B. Virtues: behaviors that foster distributed collaboration

C. Practices: things that have worked, shared by practitioners

We will use this structure to share what you can do to improve communication within your distributed team. But the first question is....

What do we mean by communication?

I think everything people do in business is some form of communication. We continually communicate in different forms (e.g., writing, speaking), through different media (e.g., email, Skype, Slack, Whats App Messenger), and on different levels (e.g., chitchat, operational, reflective, strategic). Communication is influenced by many subtle factors such as the participants’ cultures and accents as well as whether they are introverted or extroverted. Because communication covers such a wide spectrum with so many variables, focusing on communication per se is not the solution to making distributed collaboration work. We need to look at other aspects.

How does communicating with a distributed team differ from communicating with a local team?

In many ways, it is not different at all, and in other ways, it is very different. On an individual level, members of distributed teams lack face time in the office. Face time with your colleagues allows you the opportunity to bond and chitchat about things that matter to you. Because remote team members lack face time, we do not have the same chance to build strong bonds as those who see each other regularly, resulting in a weaker understanding of one another’s motives. Even if we use video conferencing to ‘see’ each other, we miss the emotional cues.

At the project level, we miss chatting at the coffee machine about the task we are working on together. We miss the brainstorming sessions about the product we are creating and the clients
we are serving. This lack of face-to-face communication has a strong impact on the level of understanding that remote team members have about the product, its purpose, and the clients who use it.

At an organizational level, we miss the inspiration gained from talking with the company CEO over a beer at Friday night gatherings. We miss the way the core values of the company influence the behavior of the people working within the onshore office.

To bridge these divides, we need to give more thought to remote communication. When we communicate with people in our office who are from the same culture, we do not experience (high) conversational barriers. However, when we speak with remote colleagues who are from another country, we have to think more deeply about the forms, media, and levels of communication we choose. Let us look more closely at how we can go about this.

Questions

To assess the current state of communication within your distributed organization, the following questions are helpful:

• Do we have a communication rhythm at different levels of the organization (strategic, operational, team)?
• What agenda do we follow in our meetings?
• How do we make (work) progress transparent?
• What type of communication is supported by what tool?
• Do we have emphatic facilitators?
• (How) do we substitute water cooler chat?

Virtues

• Align: create a communication rhythm at all levels
• Match communication modes with the right tools
• Facilitate the discussions
• Inclusion
• Transparency
• Openness

In order to make an organization agile, we need buy in and support at different levels, especially leadership and management. To make a distributed organization work smoothly, suchalignmentis even more important. On the team level, agile has built in meeting rhythms. It helps to add a communication rhythm at the managerial and leadership level; a quarterly strategic meeting, a monthly product ownership meeting are some examples. Alignment is key.

There is an abundance oftools for communicationnowadays. Many people still rely on traditional media like email and phone calls and those are not always the most effective tools. Big enterprises also restrict people from using modern tools. We believe it's crucial to open up the possibility of using tools that can improve communication. Teams can self-select their tools. Or organizations can make matrices to match certain types of communication with the best tools available.

A strongfacilitatorhelps create meaningful discussions. Distributed team members are often uncomfortable talking through video conferencing, in a different language with people they have never met. An effective team has equal 'talk-time' for every team member. Effective teams have a clear agenda and timebox for their meetings. A facilitator can ensure this happens.

Includingeveryone affected by a certain discussion topic in a meeting helps spread the right knowledge. As many remote people miss watercooler chat and customer interaction, it is paramount to include them in all important communication.Transparencybeing one of the key agile values, in distributed teams, we need to enable everybody to see what is going on. Sharing product vision boards, strategic plans, product backlogs, help spread important information across the distributed organization.Opennessempowers people to help each other solve problems and create a better understanding between team members. Sharing everything that's important with your peers fosters effective collaboration.