Rob Napier on remote culture.
Today, Rob Napier had some great thoughts on remote culture.
(emphasis mine)
āThe best remote cultures Iāve been in had most or everyone remote, or they at least pretended they did. For example, one team I was on dramatically improved its remote culture when the āon siteā team started calling into meetings from their desks rather than getting together in room. One of my favorite executives used this for the big all-hands meetings. Even though he was in San Jose with much of the team, he would go to a separate room and do a video stream from there. That meant all questions were on equal footing; it wasnāt 10 from people in the room, and then āanything from folks on the phone?ā
Agreed that getting together occasionally is very valuable. Iāve always said that team building cannot occur in any place that does not have beer. You donāt have to drink the beer; thatās not the important part. But Iāve never seen it occur in a place that didnāt have it. (I like to tell the story this way, and itās a good rule of thumb, but the real underlying lesson is that team building happens best in places with a mix of unstructured and semistructured interaction. Excessive structure is the bane of team building, and totally unstructured tends to just reinforce existing relationships. Activities with excessive structure are highly anti-correlated with locations with beer. Thus ābeer is necessary but not sufficient for effective team building.ā)
I especially like to get teams together for a few days, up to a week, at the beginning of some large project, which for most teams translates roughly to 1-2 times a year. Sadly, I have only been on a couple of teams willing to do that (and it usually stopped when budgets got tight), but it was highly effective.ā
Here it is again in image form: