In case it’s of interest to anyone, I recently wrote down some short, explicit models of the costs of remote teams (I did not try to write the benefits). Here’s what I wrote:
Substantially increases activation costs of collaboration, leading to highly split focus of staff
Substantially increases costs of creating common knowledge (especially in political situations)
Substantially increases barriers to building trust (in-person interaction is key for interpersonal trust)
Substantially decreases communication bandwidth—both rate and quality of feedback—increasing the cost of subtle, fine-grained and specific positive feedback harder, and making strong negative feedback on bad decisions much easier, leading to risk-aversion.
Substantially increases cost of transmitting potentially embarrassing information, and incentivises covering up of low productivity, as it’s very hard for a manager to see the day-to-day and week-to-week output.
Substantially increases activation costs of collaboration, leading to highly split focus of staff
I think this is a mixed blessing rather than a cost. It makes staff members less likely to be working in alignment with one another, but more likely to be working in their personal flow in the Csikszentmihalyi sense of the word. I believe these two things trade off against each other in general, and things moving the efficient frontier are very valuable.
This is awesome, thanks.
In case it’s of interest to anyone, I recently wrote down some short, explicit models of the costs of remote teams (I did not try to write the benefits). Here’s what I wrote:
Substantially increases activation costs of collaboration, leading to highly split focus of staff
Substantially increases costs of creating common knowledge (especially in political situations)
Substantially increases barriers to building trust (in-person interaction is key for interpersonal trust)
Substantially decreases communication bandwidth—both rate and quality of feedback—increasing the cost of subtle, fine-grained and specific positive feedback harder, and making strong negative feedback on bad decisions much easier, leading to risk-aversion.
Substantially increases cost of transmitting potentially embarrassing information, and incentivises covering up of low productivity, as it’s very hard for a manager to see the day-to-day and week-to-week output.
I think this is a mixed blessing rather than a cost. It makes staff members less likely to be working in alignment with one another, but more likely to be working in their personal flow in the Csikszentmihalyi sense of the word. I believe these two things trade off against each other in general, and things moving the efficient frontier are very valuable.