From the category archives:

Remote Teams

I Love Cowboy Coding, But I Don’t Run Wild West Teams

March 2, 2010 Management

I love being a cowboy coder. It feels great. Just the thought of dreaming up a new feature, coding late into the night, and unveiling it to the astonishment of the rest of my team makes my heart beat a little faster. I love it so much that I once joined a company [...]

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Make Your Goals Measurable

December 22, 2009 Remote Teams

Defining your goals in ways that are easy to measure and demonstrate will make it easier for your team and your boss to see your benefit to the team. This is important because telecommuting means nobody can see how hard you are working. There is no A for effort. You need to show [...]

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3 Hours of Real-Time Communication Is Magic

December 8, 2009 Management

If you’re interested in Firefox you might want to tune in to air.mozilla.com on a Monday at 10:00 AM Pacific time. You can watch Mozilla’s weekly all company staff meeting. Mozilla employees and volunteers work from all over the world. When it’s 10:00 AM in California, what time is it for other Mozilla [...]

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How to Hire Effective Workshifters: 7 Signs and How to Evaluate Them

October 27, 2009 Guest Post

Hiring teleworkers is a stressful experience. Work shifting takes a specific set of skills that are difficult to evaluate in an interview. Even worse, it takes a lot of time and money to find out that you hired the wrong person.
That’s why I created a system for evaluating which candidates make good teleworkers. [...]

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Telecommuter Team Building

October 8, 2009 Remote Teams

Team building is on the wain in the high-tech industry and I’ve missed most of it. My wife, an engineer a few years older than me, tells stories of blindfolded bowling, mall scavenger hunts, and a dozen other team building activities ranging from somewhat useful to downright painful. Never wear open-toed shows to [...]

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4 Reasons Your Distributed Team Should Switch From IM to IRC

October 1, 2009 Good Communication

1. IRC is inclusive, IM is exclusive
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) works like an IM chat with your whole team. Everyone can see what you type instead of just one person. You can ask a question even if you don’t know who to ask. It brings the whole team together and reduces private [...]

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3 Signs You Shouldn’t Telecommute

September 22, 2009 Good Communication

Your team is high-tech. They use email and IM with ease, feel at home on conference calls, and communicate with customers using blogs. Telecommuting seems like a home run, but it fails miserably. This happened to Joe about 10 years ago.
Joe started telecommuting from the Midwest to a team on [...]

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4 Rules For Managing Telecommuting Teams

September 15, 2009 Management

Many managers see distributed teams as a nightmare, but they are a blessing in disguise. They force you to do what you should be doing anyway. Take advantage of the remote status and build good team habits.
Come together. Don’t let the team drift apart. You should always know what [...]

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Zack’s Offline Checklist

September 1, 2009 Office Setup

Right now I am offline. I won’t lie, it’s causing me a little physical discomfort. The rest of my team is in a meeting deciding if our product will ship on time and my Internet and phone died five minutes before the meeting started.
[...]

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6 Ways To Improve Your Telecommunication

August 22, 2009 Good Communication

Seth Godin recently posted a supposedly simple math quiz. He asked this question:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

[...]

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