Wednesday March 30, 2005

Is iWork dangerous?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the dichotomy between the value of people being able to live and work wherever they want and the idea that teams need to be co-located to be most effective and creative. I was in a presentation yesterday where the lady presenting talked about things that work to make teams effective. Among other points she emphasized the need to keep people working on the same thing together, minimize time zone differences, and budget for travel because face to face interaction is particularly important.

On the other hand the success of Sun's iWork program and the evidence before us says that work is becoming more distributed. More and more people are working from home or from where they choose to live. We get feedback all the time that Sun's policy about employee work environment choice is a big incentive for people to come to Sun and stay at Sun. But there are still managers at Sun who believe that their people need to come into the office every day. Are they wrong or are the people who push for choice naïve in thinking that innovation and collaboration can still thrive when workers are geographically distributed?

It seems clear that connectedness, trust and transparency are key. There are certainly lots of ways to foster these characteristics in a team. But what struck me as I was writing this is that what is perhaps most important is the desire to be connected, to build trust, and to be transparent. It really doesn't matter if your co-worker is in the office next to you or half way around the globe. If you don't value and seek out others to connect with, to have conversations with and to build relationships with you aren't going to build an effective, creative team.

But isn't that what managers are for? It is normal to have brilliant people on a team who aren't great communicators or who find relationship building just plain hard work. Isn't a team going to be more effective when these people run into co-workers in the hall and when they have serendipitous conversations while making coffee? Isn't it up to the manager to make sure people are talking to each other? Is it really a trade off based on communication and relationship skills when you make the decision whether to hire a brilliant but not locally available engineer?

So what tools and skills do I need to work more effectively in my highly distributed team? And what can managers do to foster transparency, connectedness and trust in order to create highly effective, creative teams?

Recently, there was a conversation on an internal Sun alias about using group blogs and wikis to keep teams connected. The concept of using a group blog almost like a lab book was suggested. A blog like this could then be read by all members of the team and everyone would know what everyone else on the team was doing. This would work if everyone would keep the group blog current and if everyone would read it. I am some what skeptical. It all comes back to whether team members think it is important.

A lot of people also see personal blogging as a key enabling technology. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a very powerful tool. But it only works for those who use it. What about all the people on my team or on your team who don't read blogs. I bet that for every connection you have made as a blogger or as a blog reader there is someone who you wish would read your blog, someone who you would like to connect with but who doesn't have time or feel that there is value in reading blogs. So we have to be careful to not measure the value of blogs by asking a self selecting sample of people about that value.

Other enablers I have seen used include team meetings, regularly scheduled 1 on 1s, and even managers urging their staff to consciously take the time necessary to stay connected. But so often those kinds of activities are just not high enough on the priority list. As an individual I believe making the time to build the trust, have the conversations and be transparent are almost a secret sauce for being more successful in my job. The most effective and valuable team members I know are often the remote / work from home people who seem to do this naturally. Even knowing this I don't always make the time. I wonder if others do it consciously or if it just comes naturally.

This leads me to transparency. It seems that if I want to be connected and improve my value to my team I need to be transparent about my work and ideas. I have to be transparent not just about my successes but especially about what I don't know and where I am having problems. That is hard. But I think it is key and it may be one of the things that managers can foster.

So are the managers that want everyone to come in to the office every day wrong or right? How do you encourage the behaviors that are key? How do you develop these skills in managers? How do you get people to value them? Are there things that a program like iWork can do to insure that we are increasing Sun's ability to be connected, transparent and creative across distance and time? If you are part of a distributed team has it hurt your ability to collaborate? Has it hurt your team's ability to be effective. How do you encourage people to value the important skills?