remote-basics - Differability

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remote-basics

A collection of 10 posts

Why You Want a Remote Mentor for Better Remote Work

Why You Want a Remote Mentor for Better Remote Work

Remote work requires shifting many ways of working and thinking about work. Many people have struggled with this during the pandemic and assume it will take years to get them adjusted to this new way of working. Or is there a faster way? One way to be effective is to

Remote Amplifies

Over this first half of 2020, most of the world now knows what long-time remote workers have known for years: Remote amplifies. Remote does amplify some obvious things like distance. But until the last few months, only a few realized that distance is a lever, not the outcome of being

How can remote work be wrong and right for you?

Recently, a friend pointed me to yet another long online conversation debating whether remote work is good or bad. Who was right? Both sides actually. However, they were arguing over outcomes and experience. They missed examining the initial conditions. Looking at the initial conditions will determine if your experience with

Create your Distributed Team’s Workspace with These Six Tools

Many people ask me what is the best tool for distributed agile teams. It’s the wrong question. What many people miss is that a distributed agile team needs a common workspace and a collection of tools that work together in that space. While the team members may not be

Is there a better way to talk about distributed teams?

There is an enormous amount written about distributed teams and I find most of it very frustrating. It’s not that the observations or the ideas are bad. The problem lies with the primary tool we have for exploring the principles and practices of distributed teams: the English language. Terms

What's the Secret Joy of Working Remote?

While speaking recently at a conference, I realized two important things about the nature of remote work. First, I choose to work remotely. Second, many of the people who work remotely, particularly in large organizations, did not choose this way of working. I had roughly 200 people attend my talk

Connect for Community in Distributed Teams

Connect for Community in Distributed Teams

Late in 2015, I participated in a great discussion with Ryan Ripley and David Horowitz on distributed agile teams on the Agile For Humans podcast. In that discussion, I mentioned “the importance of explicitly encouraging communication in the team; otherwise it’s not a company just a bunch of people”

For distributed agile teams, tools come last

Having worked with a number of distributed agile teams over the years, I’m often asked what is the best tool to use. Many people want to find the one tool that will allow their distributed team to work just like a co-located team. I find that there are usually

Why You Want a BackChannel in Distributed Meetings

When I started facilitating my first distributed meetings, I ran into a problem that many encounter: my primary collaboration tool would fail. It usually involved one person “losing connection” or in some cases the whole collaboration software system crashing for everyone. Regardless, it meant that someone in the conversation was

Remotely Agile: The Buddy System

Remotely Agile: The Buddy System

Over the last 10 years, while learning how agile methodologies can work in different industries and organizations, I also discovered how I could help distributed teams work as if they were face-to-face teams. So I am starting a series of posts where I hope to share some practical tips for