Imagine the kinds of things we are capable of now, when we have things like Google Hangouts, Skype, GoToMeeting, Join.Me, WebEx, etc. etc. etc. If my dad could fix a problem in 15 minutes in Japan, over the phone, oh how the technology of today should afford us the luxury of such much better communications.
Sadly, based on what I've seen of the available technology for teleconferencing - talking to someone half way around the world still suffers from drawbacks. First of all, if you're talking to a country with less than adequate network infrastructure you might get cut off mid conversation or suffer from extremely garbled voice data. You might also get to experience the joy of a nasty feedback loop. Because of the limitations created by infrastructure and technology boundaries that still exist, I strongly encourage you to make face to face contact in person with your team mates.
I've telecommuted full time, in fact quite recently within my work history. There are some things you can do to help the telecommuting pain become less of a burden, and I strongly encourage you to do the same.
- Use instant messaging. You cannot possibly expect synchronous conversation to take place all of the time. Send someone an IM. They're going to get back to you as soon as they can, even if it's to tell you "I'll get back to you tomorrow."
- Set up a dedicated chat room for your dedicated team. You likely have a close knit group of people working on solving the same set of problems. You should communicate as a team using team chat, and take conversations to one-on-one chat only when the rest of the team cannot benefit.
- Show up in the office on occasion. And plan on it regularly. I made a point of being in the office during our every other week planning sessions when I worked from home full time. And I asked the other members of my team that worked from home to do the same thing, which they all willingly agreed to do. Camaraderie comes from sharing a room and solving a problem together. It's much harder to build a team without this.
- Use video, not just voice. It's impossible to get non-verbal cues from team members about when they want to join a conversation, or when they're getting angry, or any of the other things we take for granted in a real live person setting.
- Get really good at writing emails that are succinct and effective. Get to the point. And do so without being as expansive as I am when I write. My blog tends to get wordy. Most of the time, my emails do not. I write an email and then serve as my own editor to pare it down to its bare essence.
Working from home is a beautiful luxury that I'm glad is opening up to professionals across the country. Many bosses still don't trust it as a full time solution, many bosses feel like its the only way they can keep their best employees from looking elsewhere for a job. Regardless of which boat you're in, making a point of communicating early and often will always ease the tension off of working from home (or Hawai'i). Do you currently get to work from home sometimes? Do you have any ideas about the best ways to make it work for someone who's hired you if you do?
- I grew up in a house full of programmers. Not only has my dad been a programmer for a long time, my younger brother also writes software for a living.↩
- I wasn't even a teenager yet in the early 90's. From what I know of what dad did back then, it was probably SQL. But, SQL and every other kind of programming talk might has well have been Klingon to me then.↩
