Tech Nottingham April - Building Effective Teams When You’re in Different Places
https://www.meetup.com/Tech-Nottingham/events/268712430/
Notes from My Travels: Building Effective Teams When You’re in Different Places by Euan Finlay
More companies are embracing flexible working and distributed teams - whether that’s individuals working remotely, or fully distributed companies with no central hub. This can have great benefits, but the path to success isn’t always smooth. At the FT, we collaborate daily across time zones, from New York to Manila. How do we help our teams remain effective, avoid “us-and-them”, and feel part of a greater whole? Having fixed production issues while up a mountain, I’ll cover:
- effective communication across locations
- what we learnt from other companies
- advice on leading distributed teams
This was the first virtual Tech Nottingham event presented via Zoom and it still managed to feel like a physical Tech Nottingham event even though it was conducted online. Sadly no food or drinks provided!
The talk was about the process of setting up flexible working for the FT, accelerated by the lock down put in place for COVID-19.
There were definitely parallels with my the company I’m working for at the moment as we have several teams in different time zones around the world and half of the local staff normally work from home.
It wasn’t a massive change for us all to start working from home but I’m definitely missing the ease of talking to the other developers, testers or POs in person but we’re working through it.
There is a link to Euan’s slides below although I can’t see speakers notes so the slides might not make much sense without context.
There are full details, discussions and QA in the #tech-nottingham-monthly channel on the Tech Nottingham Slack but I don’t know how long any old posts will be retained.