This interesting post on Techcrunch ‘Not even remotely possible‘ makes the point that a remote team can be quite more productive than if they are colocated.
“Quite apart from the time and rent saved, there’s growing evidence that remote teams can be more productive than in-person ones. Consider: “We found massive, massive improvement in performance — a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home.” Consider companies like Automattic, Gitlab, InVision, and Zapier, all of which thrive as fully remote companies.” [the Stanford link is a study made on China’s largest travel agency]
The interesting point here is how the way we work changes because of remoteness: “The biggest transition from office to remote work isn’t the geography; that’s incidental. The biggest transition is the mode of communication, which goes from default-synchronous (walk over to your colleague’s desk) to default-asynchronous (PM them on Slack.) I certainly concede that certain forms of work, and certain people, benefit more from synchronous communications; but I put it to you that “most kinds of software development” is not among them, and that an ever-increasing fraction of the world’s work can be described as “most kinds of software development.””
Managing remote teams and getting traction from home is the future. It saves money, environmental disruption and is even more productive! So why wait?
