Research findings on Good Practices of Distributed Organizations: Culture, Communication and Technology

[edgeryders]

Remote work can provide healthy distance during the COVID-19 pandemic and also helps to minimize an organization’s greenhouse gas emissions. But becoming an efficient distributed organization is not an easy feat. We at Edgeryders have been a distributed organization for a long time. But, even we have to continuously improve our own practices and support others to do the same.

In 2019 we conducted in depth research on effective practices for distributed and remote work in collaboration with EIT Climate Kic, Europe’s leading Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) working to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon economy. We are currently pulling it all together into an extensive manual for running distributed teams and organisations.

During this 20-minute event, Edgeryders will present our research insights around five key areas of good practice: communication, collaboration, socializing, tools and organization building.

This event is a friendly space to share and discuss your findings, experiences and good practices with distributed collaboration. Edgeryders co-founders Matthias and Nadia will provide some scaffolding for that discussion through a brief overview of our learnings around running distributed teams and organisations so far.

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Format

A Zoom meeting. We will send you the link after you register.

A brief presentation of our research findings, followed by an open, moderated discussion. A moderator will give the floor to people who want to contribute something. If you want to share your point of view, use the call’s chat to let us know, and the moderator will give you the floor. If you have a question to ask the speaker, ask it in the chat (better) or let us know you want to ask a question. Questions are taken before we move on to the next speaker.

The call will be recorded for research purposes. Please read details about that process in this info sheet: Participant Information Sheet for online events . By joining the call you confirm that you understand and consent.

Everyone is welcome .

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How to Register

Tickets are free of charge, available by filling in the registration form below.

The zoom links will be send out shortly before the event via email.

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About the organizers:

This event is organised by Edgeryders OÜ, a not for profit enterprise that provides leaders in public, private and third sector organisations with ideas and recommendations that they cannot find through traditional consultancy. It forms part of Edgeryders mission to support work towards more resilient futures. You can learn more about Edgeryders here and follow our policy and strategy work at the Edgeryders research institute.

How is this financed?

This event is part of the NGI Forward project Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, launched by the European Commission in the autumn of 2016. It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 825652 from 2019-2021. You can learn more about the initiative and our involvement in it at https://ngi.edgeryders.eu

[xuanmir]

Which of those categories would best fit you in context with this event?
other

What is your current situation/struggle with remote/non-remote work and what would you change?


What outcome would make you feel like participating in this event was a good investment of your time?


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[MariaEuler]

[Ndagi]

Which of those categories would best fit you in context with this event?
other

What is your current situation/struggle with remote/non-remote work and what would you change?
We have no specific issue with remote working. Our company has been on of the first adopter in Belgium and currently about 1400 colleagues are permanently working from home

What outcome would make you feel like participating in this event was a good investment of your time?
I’d like to know more about You and the services

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[Johan]

Which of those categories would best fit you in context with this event?
industry

What is your current situation/struggle with remote/non-remote work and what would you change?
Keeping access as well devices of all kinds secure in a distributed environment.

What outcome would make you feel like participating in this event was a good investment of your time?
Getting some new insights in improving our remote work and device policies.

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[Alessandro]

Which of those categories would best fit you in context with this event?
industry

What is your current situation/struggle with remote/non-remote work and what would you change?
My co-founder and I have always been remote working, in fact, we only met in person after quite some time of working together. This all happened quite naturally and we work well despite living on different continents.

As soon as we started opening this up with other collaborators, it hasn’t been smooth to get people comfortable in this way of working (asynchronous written communications as default, high degree of independency and accountability, and so on). I guess we didn’t really have a proper onboarding process, and we took things that worked for us for granted?

What outcome would make you feel like participating in this event was a good investment of your time?
Getting some advices on how to onboard new team members, maybe on how to select them, or even better, how to grow new potential members into this kind of work-mindset?

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[joshmccgraham]

What made you interested in this event?
I run a distrubuted startup and also an online community.

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
Interested by the use of open source software to create more customisable workspaces.

**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
I run a startup which I feel is quite good at the asychronous part and we keep meetings to a minimum. Our weekly sprint reviews and retrospectives help us keep getting better and better!

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
Sometimes busyness gets in the way which pushes a person to completely miss their deadlines etc. This then throws a spanner in the works for tight asynchronous deadlines. How an we make sure we have check ins in a non intrusive way to make sure people are reminded to shout about their problems so it doesn’t get to the point of impacting the flow.

On what kind of projects do you work?
Software platform for construction

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
5-7

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
Yes

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
We already have very clear boundaries on this. But we are aways open to being more strategic about this.

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
Me.

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
No

[Juvante]

What made you interested in this event?
In the light of current challenges, I think that learning about the workplace situation changes and its impact on staff.

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
Time scheduling and methods of coping with solitary work.

**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
I had a work meeting with a team with members in four different countries and we had to work with Google Documents, Whatsapp videos and Zoom calls under a short notice. It was high pressure but we met the deadline.

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
Loneliness/mental space out and the need to constantly been in contact with other colleagues over internet (and wait for their reply), which waste valuable time

On what kind of projects do you work?
Research

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
Greater than 1000. I work with teams of 5

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
Research assistant. No

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)


Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?


Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?

[augusto]

What made you interested in this event?
I’ve created an online support community for freelancers and I’m interested in how we can work better remotely

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
I’ve been working this way for a lot of years but your presentation helped me looking habits from the outside.
Asyncronous as default, parallels pipelines, are interesting concepts.
Also the social aspect of remote working is something I’m thinking about.

**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
Working with my partner, me from Milan, he from Lisbon. We developed several digital products and launched them to our community.
We use a Kanban Board to assign us tasks and see what everybody is doing, we use slack for asynchronous comunication, and meetings (once a week) more for the social aspect than to take decisions.

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
I miss the social side of working and trying to find workarounds on this.

On what kind of projects do you work?
I mostly develop live training events for corporate clients

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
My organization is 3 partners and around 10-15 collaborators (freelance)

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
I am the founder, so yes

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
200-500€

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
Nobody

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?

[alberto]

What made you interested in this event?
Remote work has made my fairly nomadic life possible, and I would like to see it done more, and better

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
In the event, Josh asked:

My organisation has a lot of interfacing with other organisations who are very traditional. This makes it hard to do things asynchronously as meetings are a natural part of the “ritual”. How can we keep these necessary evils, whilst also going further down the remote/distributed route ourselves?

This question made me realize that, in Edgeryders, we have been doing a bit of proselitizing with our own clients/collaborators. We use a mix of sticks (to discourage bad practice) and carrots (to seduce them into adopting good ones).

Stick: "No, we can’t have a meeting this afternoon. “e need to schedule a meeting a minimum of five days in advance. This will also allow everyone to prepare – surely you, too, want to prepare it well!”

Carrot: “Here is a 1.5 page meeting minutes, written in decent English (or other working language), in full sentences and with no spelling mistakes.”

**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
Too many to count!

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
Sometimes people want new tools, but introducing a new tool is quite disruptive if not everyone is willing to adopt. It’s hard to find a middle ground that will let adopters experiment, without non-consensually breaking the workflow of the non-adopters.

On what kind of projects do you work?
Mostly research.

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
About 30 people. I work remotely with all of them.

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
I am the research director. I do, in theory, but others in the org are better than me at this, so I just trust them.

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
About 10% of turnover? Currently about 60K

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
The board. But we are already convinced,

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
No

[ThomasVisKom]

What made you interested in this event?
Learning from multiple sources and angles is always good

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
Yes, it’s important to structure work differently. In my case, I work in organizations where people (students and teachers alike) are thrown into a new work environment that they cannot handle. So it’s important for me as the teacher to take the lead and structure all the work differently.


**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
Working with students on a website, share screens and have a conversation, but the number of students has to be very limited.

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
I think it would be better to decide if it’s all remote or all in person. Right now, they are trying half/half and for me, it’s the “worst of both worlds”.

On what kind of projects do you work?
Online classes, academic research, filmmaking, website building, content management, video editing, voice over

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
depends. from 1 to 25

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
in some cases, yes, in other cases, no

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
don’t know

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
Head of research unit

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
Yes

[tmorgan]

What made you interested in this event?
Interested how async work plays into the future of work & creating knowledge communities.

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
The insight that online work as a continuous conversation is a negative was surprising since most collaboration tools (Slack, etc) implicitly assume that is the goal, or accidentally slide into that mode of work. It makes sense based on my recent project coordination experience. I think your emphasis on collaborative culture is a key to protecting against sliding into the continuous conversation mode.


**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
My best remote work experience was on a 2 person team where the responsibilities & decision-making was clearly delineated. This allowed us to easily handle the work, and required minimal coordination most of the time.

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
Knowing if & when others are aware of info updates, current client needs/deadlines, or requests for information. Many of the other collaborators are graduate students and are only associated with individual projects for a single semester. Their attention is being split between work, school, families, & the research project so it becomes difficult to know if they have received necessary information or have made progress on goals if they do not respond or regularly share updates. This makes planning to specific client deadlines difficult and tends to force us back into synchronous meetings, which we would like to minimize

On what kind of projects do you work?
Strategic Foresight research projects (futures research)

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
2 university department employees, 2 as-needed contractors, & 3-4 graduate student researchers for each project

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
As-needed project manager & senior researcher

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
None. There is minimal budget.

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
Not in a position to influence organization to contribute money to crowdfunding campaigns

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
No

[iouxo]

What made you interested in this event?
Heard Edgeryders talk about remote work earlier this year

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
The “How Edgeryders does it” slide was informative for me, creating a manual is good.

**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
Online hackathons where you pitch a simple idea, and suddenly 20 strangers show up willing to work on it for 2-3 days.

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
When the projects’ driving force is everyone’s interest in the topic, there is great innovativeness in the air. But when the interest wanes, the project is immediately stalled. How to keep things rolling even during the times there is no big inspiration?

On what kind of projects do you work?
Startup / ecological / VR / EU / research

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
1-20 depending on the project

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
I want to work on creating such methodologies, but no big budget

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
N/a

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
Not enough info on the campaign

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
Yes

[Alessandro]

What made you interested in this event?
Trusting the experience of who’s doing the distributed organisation thing for a long time.

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
No solutions, really, but maybe three more things I should reflect on to ‘debug’ what hasn’t worked so far:

1. Expanding a remote team is not just an issue of onboarding, nor just a ‘hiring’ problem, but just as likely a management challenge (that I don’t care enough about, hence it’s being a problem?)

2. To create new projects and business opportunities I still need to interface with organisations that ask for in-person meetings just to get to know/trust me. Which is a big drag, but …how do I do without them?!

3. The balance of incentives, financial and other ones, should be looked at…

Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point:
Between the two co-founders who are actively on duty, the workflow has been created organically and the tasks are naturally split between us. This means that, aside from marketing our products (which neither of us are personally interested in - quite a problem…) the technical component of creating and executing projects, even contracts for various clients, has mostly worked quite well for us, as in: we set a goal, we take our time, and get it done, being satisfied with the quality of the delivered work.

With our collaborators who are experts at remote and independent work, we normally have productive collaborations, that are continuing and deepening in nature (new joint ventures are created, which are very good signs).

Finally, the main organisations active in hiking trails’ development in Armenia are recurring clients for us; we have strong relationships with them based on personal knowledge and our ability to meet - so far - their expectations. And we hope we could keep it that way.

What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation?
You can see question number 2.

On what kind of projects do you work?
Creating all sort of maps, especially topographic ones, both for printing and some interactive ones. We offer GIS services to support the nascent hiking industry in Armenia.

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
It’s a fluid team: 3 co-founders, 2 are mainly active, and 2-6 people we regularly collaborate with.

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
I am leading the organisation, and no, we have no budget for that.

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
We don’t have staff, we all work on a project-by-project basis, sort of paying ourselves by task, so I don’t know how to answer really.

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
Nobody. We ran a successful crowdfunder in 2018, and I also participated in a botched one a few years ago. Differences being quite self-evident.

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
Yes

[unclecj]

What made you interested in this event?
Our current engagement with distributed work and that I saw Alberto’s facebook notice of it

Has the event provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
Marginally, because I missed the presentation (meeting URL sent out too late and Zoom issues). However, it was a nice opportunity to discuss and process my own thoughts about the topic. I hope to write about this in the forum later

**Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: **
I was driving my department’s change from Slack and other conventional collaboration methods (email, network drives etc) to Microsoft Office 365. At one point during the pandemic, we had an all-remote large group meeting, where clearly we had finally broken the basic self-stable remote work bad habits. Since then we have had for instance several remote demos, and it’s pretty much awesome every time - presenters manage to juggle back and forth, references and encouraging cheers are provided in the back-channel and we record them for much appreciated later availability

**What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? **
Peripheral vision and “everyone being on board” - there’s a much greater threshold to just lend a colleague a helping hand or even notice when it’s needed. Trivial work environment issues which previously were solved by someone around become much greater impediments.
Social aspects - there is much better focus working from home, but it is hard to replace the everyday social contacts. “Online fika” and similar are poor substitutes which I personally have a strong tendency to reject

On what kind of projects do you work?
Large-scale systems development and research

How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
> 1000 in general, ~ 100 in fairly close contact

What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
Only informally, I’m a consultant “developer experience manager” (wannabe)

What would be a reasonable budget for your team or organisation to invest into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ( Consider the lowering cost of unnecessary loss of staff time)
No idea

Who would you have to convince for your organisation contribute towards our crowdfunding campaign?
I can ask around, but there are severe financial challenges most everywhere

Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event?
No

[unclecj]

@MariaEuler and others - please provide the recorded presentation, if you will have it available?

It’s kind of ironic and I thought I would cope with it better, but the two issues 1) I got the event URL only around 17:20 2) Zoom web wasn’t allowed in the meeting, so I had to jump to mobile where I had the app , became quite the energy-draining curveball (especially after an ordinary work-day). Seems there are learnings to be had from there too - how to ensure participants are present and comfortable in online meetings (also coping with external disturbances you wouldn’t have in a meeting room)… hmm…

[MariaEuler]

We are figuring out why you got your link late and will send the link to the video via pm’s to everyone who filled in the feedback form.

[nadia]

good thing we made a recording in advance

[unclecj]

Thanks. No worries - no need to consider me an “external guest” or anything, I’m just much looking forward to seeing the presentation

If it helps, I registered pretty late (14:05) and the email headers all state sending and delivery around 17:20 as mentioned (Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 16:17:41 +0000 (UTC)). Doesn’t seem to be the case this time, but emails may take days to deliver

[MariaEuler]

just wrote you a pm this secound