Beat The Clock

Global teams work 24 hours a day, 7 day a week to “beat the clock.” Here are some tips to increase their effectiveness.

Beat the Clock: Tips for Making Global Teams More Effective

I picked up a used copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s “How the World Was One” which recounts the communications revolutions kicked off first by transatlantic cables starting in the 1860’s and by communications satellites in the 1960’s.  Fiber optic technology has revitalized underwater cables (see a great recap by Neal Stephenson in Wired “Mother Earth, Mother Board.”)

Writing in 1991, he opens with a memory of attending a lecture by the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1947 “The Unification of the World,” at a time when much of the world was still recovering from World War 2. Clarke characterizes Toynbee’s thesis that developments in transportation and communication would seen create a single planetary society as unusually farsighted.

Thanks to transistor and the microchip, that dawn has certainly arrived–if one uses a somewhat generous definition of the word culture… Nevertheless, Toynbee is essentially correct. Except for a few dwindling tribes in equally dwindling forests, the human race has now become almost a single entity, divided by time zones rather than the natural frontiers of geography.

As more and more startups add global team members or even start out as global teams, the key challenges to communication and coordination have less to do with distance and much more to synchronization and managing across different time zones. It’s much easier to manage a team 3,000 miles apart spread from Vancouver to Costa Rica than Palo Alto to Boston for example. Much less a global team where any three members span at least five time zones.

Skype and other low cost VoIP solutions enable easy voice communication. Wikis and source code control repositories allow for the teams works product to be easily revised–sometimes recovered–so that a current snapshot of “the truth” about a product is always available to team members. So applications are being layered onto the basic communications infrastructure to make global teams (and their complex work relationships) more effective.

The rule of thumb a decade ago was to co-locate a team to make it maximally effective. That’s probably still true, but collaboration technologies now make it possible to include a more diverse, and often more collectively creative, group of team members. We find ourselves with a global practice now. Most of our clients are still in Silicon Valley, but perhaps a third at one any one time are “out of region” many 3,9, or even 12.5 hours away.

I have two observations about long distance work relationships:

1. Time zones matter more than miles: once people are not in the same room the offset in their circadian cycles is harder to manage than geographic distance.
2. Anthony Jay suggested  in “Corporation Man”  that managers should embrace systems that augment memory but distrust and minimize the use of systems that replace communication.  Because what matters in communication is not what’s said but what’s understood, synchronous communication enables you to quickly close the feedback loop to make sure that you understand what the other party meant and vice versa.

Interpreting Silence

“That awkward moment when you wonder if everyone forgot about your conference call, until you realize got the time zone wrong. Fortunately I was early.”
John D. Cook (@JohnDCook)

It’s tricky enough getting the time zone difference correct and complicated because daylight savings time changes in different locations at different times.

Another awkward moment on a conference call is when the long silences after a remark you made stretches to the point you realize that it’s not because everyone is in awe of your insight but that your connection has dropped. Older telephone and cellular systems line noise / static fulfilled this function. Today you have no background noise and lose one indicator the line has dropped. Many conference call systems have entrance and exit chimes but you don’t hear your own exit chime when you drop.

Related Blog Posts

• Labor Day 2014: Knowledge Work Productivity
• Remarks from “Future of Professional Consulting” at PATCA June-13-2013
• Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
• Lessons from Working with Teams Who Speak English as a Second Language
• The Shape of Firms to Come: Key Values and Architectural Philosophy

Image Credit: Network Globe by Jozsef Bagota; licensed from 123RF.