When COVID hit I was 3 months in as team leader for a small development team in a product organization. We had just went by the norming/forming stages and I felt we were performing and making a lot of headway.

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Besides worrying for the world at large, I remember a sad, puzzled feeling when we closed out our area jokingly telling each others “See you on the other side”. But as the leader I was heading home with something else on my mind, what should I do now?

The answer in my case was talking with peers and friends while consuming any content on the topic I could find. I told the team that we would contiuosly experiment until we found what worked the best for us. When we found a structure that I liked I decided to share that with the world to help anyone in my shoes.

Today, three years later, and part time remote working is not going away. Do I still agree with our thoughts then? Let’s find out!

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5 principles on how to keep up collaboration with distributed teams

7 april 2020

Corona suddenly made working from home business as usual instead of a choice from time to time. The difference between some doing it at times and everyone doing it all the time is enormous.

While it makes some of the things your team is already (probably) doing even more important, (dailies, retrospectives etc) it also makes random encounters and alignment by accident (overhearing what’s going on) something you need to seriously think about how to address.

This text gives you 5 principles but I want to start with a rule.

Trust your team.

Just as you are not hovering your neighbor’s desk to make sure they are working at the office you shouldn’t behave any differently just because people are working at home. That said, you and your peers might need more help to achieve your objectives and the principles below really help my team doing that.

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1. Video on

While this might force you to get up from bed and take a shower just like a regular work day (is that a bad thing?) this is crucial to overcome the 7% rule. Of course bandwidth issues etc. might demand exceptions, this is a principle after all, but I would argue that video on is often times more important than audio. This opinion is most likely a testament to my own inability to remember what was actually said in meetings anyway — thank goodness for meeting minutes!

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2. Use whatever works

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Which tool is best?

Quite a silly question right?

Despite most applications trying to be Swiss army knives currently (and therefore lack that beautiful focus of a trustworthy hammer) there are no correct answers here.

Adhere to company regulations and use whatever works.

Our team is using a combination of Jira,Trello and Miro for coordination, Drive, Projectplace, Confluence and OneNote for documentation and finally Slack, Teams and Discord for communication.

Is it pretty? — No.

Does it work? — Kind of.

(Even though it sometimes feels silly to join yet another daily with Teams for screen sharing and discord for audio.)

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3. Water cooler meetings

There are a lot of conversations erupting spontaneously based on overheard conversations, unexpected bump-ins and those sparks in the moment that just happen, which unleash our astounding ability to work together at solving problems.

With a distributed team this is something you need to address. You might run a recurring 9–5 meeting with people jumping in and out and conversations happening randomly (my team does that), or you might schedule certain times for check-ups and wrap-ups without a predefined agenda (my team does that to). Just remember principle 2 and do whatever works for you — but make sure to invest in a virtual water cooler!

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4. One screen to rule them all

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Entering a meeting with such a powerful communication device as a computer with internet connection is bound to create noise. Entering it with several (cell phone, tablets etc) naturally doesn’t help.

I know that the temptation to respond to a pm, schedule that follow up session while also “listening in” to another meeting is strong, but please don’t. I’m sure you have time for that afterwards, especially if you don’t multitask and instead might end your meeting early? And to be frank, if you can’t participate in the meeting you are in — why did you accept the invite in the first place?

As every half decent evil overlord with ambitions knows — multitasking sucks.

That is not only a principle for online meetings — but while it’s a gentle recommendation for face-to-face meetings this should be considered an absolute rule for virtual ones.

Make sure that someone is sharing what is being discussed, be it meeting notes, a task board or some vague discussion points — there should be one screen to rule them all.

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5. There can be only one

With so many different communication channels at your disposal it’s easy to talk about your email while chatting about your talk. I wrote earlier that you should use whatever works — but it’s still very important to define the purpose of your tools, especially since most of them, as already mentioned, try to do everything for you.

Don’t write in your water cooler channel if that is for random voice conversations.

Don’t phone reciting your latest email.

Make sure to use your collaboration workspace(s) as intended and save your documents where they are supposed to be.

Choose and then trust your weapon, but don’t lose your head.

There can be only one.

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Finally, do you follow other principles or disagree with anyone mentioned here? Don’t be a stranger, please share your comments and feedback.

Stronger together.

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Three years later

I must say, I agree with most and haven’t changed much. If I were to release this article today I would change or add the following.

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1. Video on

Video calls are actually surprisingely taxing, and could lead to what is called video burn-out. While this is a very new field and many questions still remains unanswered I’m paying more attention to the people that don’t want to put on their camera and I try to understand why. We also have a “video-free” Wednesday in my current team.

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2. Use whatever works

Hard to argue with, I sincerly believe many organizations would increase their productivity ten-fold by talking about not only what to use but also why and how to use it.

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3. Water cooler meetings

In theory a quick check-up meeting every day known as the water cooler was good. In practice it was usually kind of awkward. Instead I pay close attention on my team members that are not naturally reaching out to me or to others. Be sure to set aside some extra time to call them every now and then. Their view is equally important.

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4. One screen to rule them all

This is more important than ever I would say. In larger organizations many are spending 90–99% of their time in online meetings meaning the only way to follow through on any actions is to do it while in another meeting. This is simply wrong. Try to really think through who’s actually needed in a meeting, I usually try to represent both UX, Data and Devs in any sort of alignment meeting with other teams which they appreciate a lot. And its really ok to return with an answer to a detailed question later, you don’t need to have the expert listen in just in case.

Finally, I only book meetings xx.05 to xx.55. Those extra minutes are a life-saver!

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5. There can be only one

As already stated I feel we need to start talking more about how and why we use certain tools and not only what tool we use.

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Looking three years ahead

In my experience communication is our primary challenge going forward, and organizations that excel in asynchronous meetings and just-in-time alignment will outperform those that call for all-hands every second day.

Do you agree or not? Please let me know, here or anywhere.

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