This is done to ensure the operations continue in case there is any disaster at the main site. As part of this effort, a new team was set up in a different location. Although under 350 miles away, we began to feel they were much farther. I witnessed first hand the pros and cons of managing a remote team. Lots of meetings, lots of scrutiny, lack of trust, preferential treatment to folks on site than those who were remote, stronger unity amongst team members who were based remote, may be because they never had it easy and so on. I understood quickly that remote teams were crucial for success and managing them efficiently, in an unbiased manner was the key to the overall success.
Remote teams may seem like a dream for those who dread having to deal with people every single day, but trust me you, it ain’t as easy as it sounds and promises to be. If you look at the US and India, two major countries handling software development, medical, legal and allied tasks, working with remote teams set off almost two decade ago when thousands of jobs from the US were moved to India, Philippines and China, over half of them concerning IT and computer related.
For companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Dell, having remote teams meant saving a large sum of money that would otherwise would have been spent on salaries at US levels after getting these people to the US, it posed different challenges to leaders. If, for the US companies, remote teams meant saving on valuable real estate and related overheads, for those employees working for these companies from remote locations, it meant the advantage of working for MNCs while staying close to their families.
Origins of remote work and teams
The whole concept of having people working from distant locations would have been unimaginable had there not been what we know as the internet. Not to say that people didn’t work remotely when there was no internet, they did, but internet made it extremely easy, fast, efficient and cost saving for that. Yes, there have been media houses, newspapers, production companies and bullion markets that worked remotely even without internet, but the way they functioned would at best be called ‘crude’ and ‘primitive’ by today’s standards – when people needed to connect to get latest updates on stock markets and news by using telegram and dial-in phones. I wouldn’t blink an eyelid if I dared say that the conquistadors of the past- the Spanish, British, the French, the Romans and the Greek, who conquered and managed colonies as far away as India and Australia, also practiced remote teams in some way, but tales galore of how difficult it was.
Today’s teams connect real time as if they are all sitting together in one hall. However, the grass always looks greener on the other side. If people had, for long, wished they could spend more time at home, they are in for a big shock when working from home became the necessity and the new norm. It does have its own pros and cons and it is upto companies and the employees to decide what works best for them, though there are no other options to continue work at least in the near future. Read more...
