People have various images of remote teams. Even though remote work becomes more and more common nowadays, there are still many stereotypes about non-stationary teams. In today’s article I’m demystifying 5 biggest of such myths.

Remote teams are not productive

I think this is the most common misconception about remote teams. We often think that working from home may lead to unproductivity. Sure, it’s tempting, especially for remote work beginners, to do some household duties instead of working. Your favourite couch in a very close proximity also doesn’t help…

However, on the other hand, think how often you are disturbed in the office. People come and ask questions and interrupt you in the middle of working. Another colleague comes and invites you for coffee or lunch. Maybe there’s another, very interesting meeting which you have to – of course – attend? All these interruptions can be easily eliminated while working from home. Most of them are just not present there. The rest of tempting things such as your comfortable couch can be easily forgotten if you organize your day and workspace properly.

From my experience, I can say that I’m much more productive working remotely than being at the office. I like to organize my workspace to suit my needs in the best possible way, so I’m not disturbed by anyone (or anything) while working.

Remote teams have no social interactions

Ever imagined remote workers as sitting in front of their PCs, home alone, without talking to anyone? This might be another of the myths about remote teams.

This image is totally not true! At Yumasoft, half of our team works 100% remotely. The other guys work from home twice a week. During the pandemic in Poland everyone worked remotely for several months. We talk a lot, also about non-work-related stuff. We have team-synchronization video meetings every day. We discuss not only current tasks, but also our personal stuff. Sometimes we also share funny stories and memes ?

Aside from daily meetings, we have a Skype group chat on which we share all kinds of information. When we sometimes meet in person in the office, we don’t feel “out of sync” from each other. Everyone knows much about the others and we really feel like a team.

Feeling connected is a matter of good company’s organization and attitude. If the company doesn’t care about good social interactions, its employees will be out of sync even sitting in the office. What’s more, remote teams need to put more attention to creating social interactions, which might even make such teams more socialized than stationary one.

Communication is very hard in a distributed team

This is one of the mostly repeated myths about remote teams. Bad communication has nothing to do with the type of team you’re part of. If the company and/or team is not well-organized, the communication can’t be smooth.

That’s true, that remote teams face a few more challenges to organize their communication channels. If everyone works from a different place, one can’t go to another person’s desk and ask something immediately. However, there are many tools and applications that make communication super easy. I already mentioned a few of them, as well as a few tips for remote work organization, in this article.

In my team at Yumasoft, we’re not only a distributed remote group of programmers, but our client is based in the Netherlands. It means that we’ve always communicated with them remotely. We’re developing and changing the product and the communication is not an issue at all. There are challenges like in every two teams’ cooperation. However, being distributed is not an excuse for bad communication practices and lack of organization.

It’s hard to find a good remote employee

Remote workers might be considered worse employees than the “stationary” ones. Also, company’s managers might be worried that they won’t be able to assess a given employee well enough before hiring her/him.

The first statement is totally not true. I would look from another perspective: if your team is remote, you can search for the best employees in the whole country (or even the whole world). You’re not limited to people looking for a job in your city or area. This gives a lot of possibilities and flexibility.

Assessing an employee’s skills remotely is also not a challenge anymore. There are many tools that make this process straightforward and easy. One of such tools is Codility – a platform that helps to perform online code assessments. Even Skype has added the Interviews feature to help to perform live recruitment.

Remote workers work less

It might be hard to associate home office with a productive environment. Traditional images of working in the office make us think that home is not a place for working, but rather for resting and relaxation.

The reality is that remote teams are often even more productive than office employees. This research says that only 7% of workers feel more productive in the office. It means that working the same amount of time, remote workers accomplish more than being in the office. That could be the reason to say that remote workers work less. They might work less, because they achieve their results faster. In reality it means that remote workers have more time to focus on quality and deliver better outcomes as a result.

On the other hand, many remote workers are freelancers or people starting their own online business. Such people work much more than office employees. Working on their own projects, especially in the beginning, often requires putting more attention than to traditional 9-5 work. Working hours are not limited and no one pays for hours worked, but for the results. Over-hours work is not uncommon amongst online entrepreneurs.

Myths about remote teams – summary

I hope this article gives a glance over myths around remote teams. Remote work is becoming much more common nowadays, which means that more people will experience it themselves. I’m sure that if you start working in a remote team you’ll see that it might be as good – or even better – as working in the office.

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The tips mentioned in this article can be applied to not only team of software developers, but to any kind of remote team that involves communication and cooperation between its members

Types of remote teams

First of all, we should define what a remote team is. In general, remote team is associated with remote work. However, there can be several types of remote teams:

• Fully remote team – all team members work remotely and there’s no physical office at all. Team members can meet from time to time to socialize, but generally everyone is working 100% remotely.
• Part-remote team – some team members are remotees, while the others are working physically in an office.
• Sometimes-remote team – all members usually work in the office, but can get some home-office days, e.g. 1 or 2 times a week.

In this article we’re focusing on the first and second type of remote teams. We’ll not discuss sometimes-remote teams, because in that case completely different organization rules apply. We assume that our team is mostly remote, so the remote team organization must be put in place.

Let’s now move straight into the remote programmers team organization tips.

Plan constant communication time (if you have a goal in it)

Our team at Yumasoft is the second type – a part-remote team. Half of our team works remotely, while the other half works at the office with 2 days during the week working from home. Thanks to that, everyone – also “non-remote” guys, are remote-minded. Before kicking-off this remote work style, we agreed on a common, constant communication time. We established a daily meeting once per day.

We decided to meet at some constant hour, which suits everyone – also me being in different time-zones. There are a few goals of such a daily video meeting:

• to feel like being a team, seeing everyone at least once per day
• socialize, talk about normal, casual stuff like you’d talk in the office – not necessarily related to work
• to share the status of the work tasks if needed – it somehow helps to unblock someone or perform a live, group “code review”
• to organize help – if anyone needs it, we arrange the next calls/meetings individually during this daily status meeting

As mentioned above, the meeting is a video call. We use Skype or Microsoft Teams for that. It actually doesn’t matter which tool you use. The most important lesson here is that it’s good to create the team feeling between remote workers. Daily meeting is a great way to achieve that.

On the other hand, remember to only schedule such a meeting when you have a precise goal in it. Notice how I listed 4 goals we have in our daily meetings. Nowadays, when more companies are switching to remote work, such scheduled meetings can be a trial to move their office habits into the online world. This is not a good thing. Remote work gives us new possibilities, and we shouldn’t transfer every thing we used to do in the office to an online environment.

Be open to what your team things about the meeting. Ask if they find it useful or disturbing. As soon as it becomes an obstacle for them – try resigning from it and switch to as-hoc calls.

Launch an off-topic communication channel

When working in an office, there are moments for small talks. Coffee break, lunch or just talking in the corridor. You don’t have it in the remote team or… You can have it ? It’s important to keep all team members in the loop, also remote ones, so create an off-topic channel in your communication tool of choice. At Yumasoft, we have some Skype chats for that purpose. It’s very engaging and just funny to have a place where people can share everything, including memes and other interesting stuff ? Socializing is an important aspect of remote work organization.

Try to synchronize working hours

Even if some members of your remote team are in different time-zones, try to organize everyone’s working hours to have some common ground. It’s good to be flexible, but it’s also very efficient to have everyone together at least 3-4 hours every day. If possible, try to organize your team like that.

If that’s not possible or not desired by your team, see the next point.

Learn asynchronous communication

In a remote team, especially in a distributed team, where its members are located in different parts of the world, it’s important to communicate asynchronously. It means that often you’d ask someone about something, but they will not respond immediately. The reason for that could be the above-mentioned time-zones differences.

Asynchronous communication requires the sender to ask precise and clear questions. It’s worth learning how to write short and concrete emails or instant messages. It’s also a good idea to get the other team members used to communicate asynchronously. Especially if the team is like our – part-remote, the non-fully-remote people might get frustrated if you don’t answer or answer late. With time, practice and a lot of understanding from all the team members it all can be learned and dealt with ?

Async communication can make remote work organization much easier. It might limit the need to synchronize working hours as well. You can read more about asynchronous communication in this article.

Use proper, but not too many tools

In a remote team, it becomes much more important than ever to use proper work management tools. It includes both project management apps and communication tools.

It’s good to have the documentation and data about your tasks organized in some kind of system, which is not Word document files only. It’s good to use a system like GitHub, JIRA or Nozbe for tasks management and information exchange within the team. The exact choice is not that important – choose one that suits your team and is easy to use. It’s just important to not keep all information on emails or in Word documents – otherwise you can get lost quickly. Especially if the communication is asynchronous (as it should be in a remote team). Having proper tasks management system, the knowledge can be exchanged using task-based-communication, which suits very well the asynchronous communication model.

The same applies for online communicator tool. If Skype or Slack does its job for everyone – don’t overcomplicate and keep using it. At our team in Yumasoft, we tried few different communicators and while none of them is perfect, we keep using Microsoft Teams for online meetings and screen sharing. It works, so it’s not worth overcomplicating things.

Remote work organization – summary

I hope these tips are helpful for organizing work of your remote team. Remember to not overcomplicate things and always keep all members in the loop on what’s happening in the team ?

What are your ways of working remotely? Share in the comments!

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