Inclusion in a Distributed World - Christoph Nakazawa

This resource first appeared in issue #72 on 30 Apr 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Remote

Inclusion in a Distributed World - Christoph Nakazawa

Most of our teams are going to be moving to some kind of hybrid model of distributed and office work, and this mixed approach is notoriously difficult to get right. So it’s important to start figuring out now how to make the transition and what the future will look like.

Nakazawa talks us through some of the issues - principally, if there is an “in office” and “remote” split in the team, it is really really easy for the “remote” team members to become an afterthought. On top of the obvious stuff - when calling into meetings, everyone has to call in from their own device, so everyone experiences the meeting as a virtual meeting - there have to continue to be structures in place to build a cross team culture.

Nakazawa talks about maintaining virtual team social events, and including team culture as part of retrospectives; but also of doing planning together as a team, and maintaining asynchronous, document based collaboration and decision making (like RFCs above).

We’ve largely learned how to do these things in the coming year; in the rush to get “back to normal” we don’t want to loose these trickier but more flexible and powerful collaboration skills we’ve learned. If we keep using them and keep those muscles in shape, we’ll be able to hire remotely and still maintain the strengths of our skills.