“I wish I could chat more, but I gotta be at my desk by 1pm on the dot, or my boss is going to give me the stink eye again! The last time I was five minutes late, I swear I could feel his disapproving gaze burrowing into the back of my head.”
Sound familiar? If it does, then you’re probably familiar with the concept of face-time – the amount of time your boss gets to see your face at work.
It might seem like an antiquated idea, but even today many organizations follow this unspoken rule: if you’re not at your desk from 9-5 everyday, you’re not working – simple as that. Of course, we know the reality isn’t that simple. Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, anyone?
Not only is it incorrect to equate face-time with work-time, but being hardball about the minutes and seconds that employees clock also engender a sense of mistrust. Workers will feel like they’re being treated like children, and will behave as such, finding creative ways to skive and entertain themselves. With the focus being diverted toward the hours they spend in the office instead of measurable goals to meet, naturally their performance will suffer.
Thankfully, the rise of flexible working arrangements in recent years has sought to correct this imbalance. Some companies have started allowing their employees to work from home once or twice a week, while others have gone all the way and given their entire team the freedom to work from wherever in the world they want to.
The perks of being global
Communication-as-a-service platform Unified Inbox is one of these progressive companies (as is Tech in Asia, too). Spread across Singapore, New Zealand, Germany, the US, and India, CEO Toby Ruckert and his employees believe strongly in the power of a distributed team.
The Unified Inbox team, who hail from all over the globe.
“A distributed team enables you to think simultaneously globally, and in a very diversified way from day one. For a startup, this isn’t easy to achieve,” he explains. Ruckert adds that it allows the company to understand and overcome cultural differences quickly “by internationalizing your product and making it broadly attractive early on.”
A common complaint that startups tend to have is that the local talent pool is too small. For Ruckert, this is never a problem, simply because he has the entire world to pick from when hiring. “The best are everywhere [...] While they can afford not to move, you as an entrepreneur can’t afford not to hire them. Everybody knows – the best team wins,” he says.
Having employees across multiple time zones also offers the unique advantage of being able to be “online” every hour of the day. “[We are able to] keep the energy constantly coming [...] being live all the time can be done only by truly overcoming timezones and appearing ‘alive’ all the time,” Ruckert says. “Your audience lives in every single time zone if you’re a global startup, so equally your business needs to be active constantly as well.”
The downside isn’t so bad
That being said, a huge problem that distributed teams face is in the area of communication. Ruckert admits that it’s difficult to get people who speak different languages and reside in different time zones together for a meeting.
Above and beyond that, not having a physical office means that employees will miss out on “water cooler chats.” “Sure, there is Yammer and other tools, but they aren’t quite the same,” he claims. “Often the best ideas evolve over a cuppa, and they do so because there is no work pressure involved.”
So how does one overcome these problems? Ruckert compensates by putting processes in place. “We’ve come up with our own ‘communication guideline’ where everyone commits to being online at specific times during the day [...] We also made it a point to track our time very clearly – what we’re working on, the nature of our work, and so on,” he explains.
Interestingly, the team also has a unique communication protocol around interrupting each other, specifically relating to asynchronous and synchronous messaging. For asynchronous – non-synchronized – messaging, the general rule of thumb is that “all your notifications are set up in such a way that you respond to all requests within 24 hours.” However, the guideline adds that during working hours, responses are expected to be made within two hours or so.
For more pressing issues, or matters that require discussion or synchronous messaging, employees can “request a meeting time that suits all parties, or you can ping directly on Skype.” Pinging someone directly is considered to be a last resort, however:
Your recipients workflow will be interrupted by your request. Research shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into the flow of work after an interruption. We also have no visual guides to whether a person is deep in thought, or sitting back drinking a coffee, so your direct question may be interrupting some very important work [...] That said, you should feel free to make the request, if the need is important. You are the person who decides if it is important enough to ping. And you can ping any team member.
Being able to put a face to the name, of course, fosters a greater sense of camaraderie which helps communication. With this in mind, Ruckert organizes company-wide retreats once or twice a year. Most recently, their destination of choice was Cat Ba Island, Vietnam. “It was an amazing get-together where we set the strategy and plan for the coming months, which we now execute from our distributed positions,” he says.
For the benefit of future recruits, Ruckert has also gone to great lengths to create “a great internal repository of knowledge” – a wiki, so to speak – with which new team members could be onboarded quickly, no matter where they are.
See: Unified Inbox wants to make communication simple again
This post Scrap face-time at work – this CEO believes that distributed teams are the way to go appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Scrap face-time at work – this CEO believes that distributed teams are the way to go
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