Advantages and Disadvantages of Globally Dispersed Teams

More and more teams are becoming globally distributed, especially as businesses look to take advantage of lower staff salaries overseas. The decision to distribute teams globally is usually made several levels above most technology managers. The task of the technology manager is to make the environment work with the team that is available.

Based on your own experience, you can probably list several obvious advantages of having staff in the same geographic location.

• Communications efficiency. 80% of the content of a conversation is nonverbal (body language, voice intonations, etc), and most of that is most effectively transmitted person-to-person. Telephones let you pick up things like the tone of someone's voice, and let you have immediate feedback to statements that are made. Video conferencing let you see some of the body language. None of these are a replacement for daily face-to-face contact, but they are tools you can use to make the situation better.
• Ease of coordination. When you sit next to someone, there is a lot of informal communication that takes place. All of that makes it easier to coordinate activities. If you at least share a timezone, you can set up regular phone conversations to communicate. When you work across timezones, you have to think a lot more carefully about how to coordinate activities.
• Local control. You can't "manage by walking around" when you manage people in remote locations. YOur subordinates can't get immediate feedback without calling you on the phone and maybe waking you up. Employees usually don't like to wake up the boss if it isn't an absolute emergency.
• Cultural norms. When people have a similar background, cultural differences are less likely to garble communications. Implicit assumptions about requirements are also likely to be similar.
• Cohesion. When people are nearby, it is easier to build a sense of teamwork.
• Local responsiveness. It is easier to get immediate attention when the rest of the team is nearby.
• Uneven workload expectations. If all the escalations go to the remaining small group of employees at the home office, those people end up having to resolve all of the hard problems with a reduced staff.
• Loss of core competencies. Managers need to have an understanding of which functions are strategic advantages to the organization, and which tasks can be carried out by an external person without losing a core competency.

There are also advantages to dispersing the team globally:

• Avoid groupthink. People from different locations and cultures bring different assumptions to the table. This can help avoid groupthink, as assumptions are challenged by having a more diverse group of team members.
• Standardized, documented processes. In order to communicate effectively, senior team members will need to be more diligent about producing high-quality documentated processes and procedures.
• More work hours in a day. “Follow the sun” scheduling has the potential to allow teammates to have better work life balance. Once processes are set up, and a culture of trust is in place, project teams can continue to work problems around the clock.

Book Review: Offshoring Information Technology