Spooky action at a distance: The future magic of remote collaboration

[Karlston]

Spooky action at a distance: The future magic of remote collaboration

In a world where you have to social distance, how do you scrum?

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The global pandemic and the corporate office shutdowns resulting from it have wrought changes to how work works. While essential people in certain industries have continued their jobs in ways that are relatively familiar under layers upon layers of personal protective equipment, many companies have had to find ways to continue other work at a “social” distance. And in those situations, employees must find ways to continue collaborating as they did when they were packed into cubicles, open floor plans, and all the other various patterns of modern office spaces.

 

Workplace changes due to COVID-19 won’t go away anytime soon. Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have pushed back the return of employees to offices until well into 2021, and Twitter has declared that employees need never return to the corporate office. Companies in other industries are making the same sorts of calculations, while employees are rethinking not just how they work but even where they live.

 

All of this hinges on the evolution of tools that make this remote way of work possible. For some of us—well, like everyone who’s worked for Ars, for instance—that isn’t anything new. As I’ve noted previously, I’ve been working primarily from home for over 25 years, and being an early adopter of every technology that could reduce the remoteness of being remote means I’ve lived through the teething pains of collaboration software and distributed teams.

Enlarge / Remember in-person meetings? From the Before-Times?

Tom Merton / Getty Images

Unfortunately, even as companies have adopted collaboration tools, it seems like the vast majority of them have until recently been confused about how to use them. Past generations of “collaboration” have been about processes and structure—and have done little to reduce the need for out-of-band communication.

 

Whatever passes for “normal” over the next few years will demand a lot from collaboration tools, as organizations re-examine how to achieve their missions and stay financially viable. The new world of collaboration will require organizations to replicate the unstructured interactions of the office and help employees feel like part of a coherent team even when they are distant, enabling social interactions and reinforcing the team agenda in the absence of up-close face time.

 

Based on years of remote collaboration work at various organizations and observations of things multiple organizations have done over the past six months to adjust, here are the things I see as keys to successful team operations in the lockdown and post-lockdown world.

The foundation

In the beginning, “collaboration” software was mostly about communication. “Groupware” products like Lotus Notes moved collaboration away from simple email toward document and data-centric communication. These capabilities—messaging, document-based collaboration, and lightly structured workflow—remain the basis of most organizations’ collaboration.

 

It’s taken a lot to get organizations to budge beyond these basic, unstructured collaboration tools—mostly because they’re unstructured and flexible. Email has been declared dead hundreds of times over in the past two decades, and yet we’re all still using it to send document attachments and route work. And despite the attacks of September 11, 2001 briefly giving a jolt to video conferencing, it took the growth of broadband Internet and ubiquity of devices with built-in cameras—not to mention almost another decade—to make video conferencing collaboration palatable for most organizations.

Enlarge / Lotus Notes. "It's not an email client!" I can hear a thousand exasperated Domino admins howling. "It's a document-centric database!"

John Saunders

Many of these technologies worked pretty well early on, though. I was an early adopter of Ray Ozzie’s Groove back before it had a Microsoft label on it, and I pushed Wikis, SharePoint, and other tools vigorously at companies I worked at because they made my job as a remote employee easier. But there were simple reasons why those companies, and many other organizations, didn’t grab onto those tools: they cost money to deploy and maintain, and they required some cultural changes to embrace.

 

That’s not to say that Microsoft didn’t sell a lot of SharePoint (especially to the government) a decade ago, or that companies didn’t spend big on custom workflow systems. They did, but the results were usually far from collaborative. Like the big ERP projects of the past two decades, these early initiatives were top-down, compliance focused efforts to make major changes to not just technology but how people did their work. (And let's be honest, who really enjoys using these kinds of tools? Show of hands for everyone in the audience who actually-for-real loves SharePoint. Mmm-hmm. I thought so.)

 

However, technological and cultural shifts over the past few years—and the necessity of the past six months—have lowered barriers to new forms of collaboration or leveled them entirely. Many of us live in Slack, Google documents and spreadsheets, and various other ad-hoc collaboration tools already. Many of us have had a taste of the future, and we’re ready for more. Others will have to be coached along the way.

 

Zero friction

My wife Paula works for a public library system. In February, the IT team for the local government rolled out Microsoft Teams along with the rest of the Office 365 suite. But there wasn’t much training on the platform, and few people really saw Teams as being relevant to the library’s operations.

Enlarge / "Look at me! I'm collaborating in the library!"

Nastasic / Getty Images

That changed dramatically within a month, when branches were closed and librarians began working from home, from their own computers. Suddenly, having a browser-based collaboration system integrated with the rest of the library’s IT was more than a novelty—it was how the library continued to function. Zoom became the gateway that patrons used to get to virtual events and services, but Teams became the collaborative workroom. And Teams and other components (such as SharePoint) working well together allowed for rapid improvisation, with one branch using SharePoint to speed workflow for curbside pick-up of books.

 

Teams is far from a perfect platform. (A colleague in my virtual workplace has a Teams status message perma-set that says “Teams: just sayin’.”) But Teams’ ability to work across so many devices as a browser-based application or mobile app makes it nearly a zero-friction platform for the first 60 to 80 percent of collaboration use cases right now: collaborative document editing (through Office Web components), file sharing (through OneDrive), instant messaging, and within-organization video meetings.

 

That’s important, because cloud tools have become part of the popular culture now. So if you can’t provide a way for employees to create ad-hoc collaboration with your official collaboration tools, they’ll probably shadow-IT themselves the solution you didn't give them. All the company’s visibility into compliance and workflow will vanish into a shared Dropbox account someone set up with their personal Gmail address. Zero friction does not have to mean the absence of data loss prevention, compliance enforcement, or security controls.

Face time

When I took a job with a company on the opposite coast back in the late 1990s, I was the only remote editor-in-chief. While my team was distributed, I quickly found that most collaboration at the company involved impromptu physical meetings. My monthly visits to the office were almost always consumed entirely with meetings to overcome the gap.

 

My distributed team used instant messaging for unstructured collaboration, combined with shared documents and phone calls. But for the colleagues outside of the team, I tried to create a virtual physical presence while not in the office using CU-SeeMe, a freeware Internet video conferencing package developed at Cornell University. The desktop I used in-office was semi-permanently connected to my home computer, allowing a “drop in” approximating ones done in person.

Enlarge / If you're one of the six people on the planet who hasn't had to do one of these yet, this is basically what a work video conference looks like. The most unrealistic thing here is that these people have all taken the time to put on nice clothes and comb their hair. At least here at Ars, such niceties stopped months ago.

Luis Alvarez / Getty Images

This was not very successful, for a number of reasons, including the reliability and resolution of CU-SeeMe (both were, shall we say, "not awesome"). But a great portion of it was cultural. And as much as I had done to build processes that made my distributed team work smoothly, there was no way to overcome the gap in informal communications outside of my team other than the gauntlet of monthly catch-ups.

 

It led to more than a few surprises, none of them good.

 

Face-to-face contact is important for teams because non-verbal communication is important to building trust and teamwork, and misreads of intent that can result from a lack of nonverbal cues can have deep negative effects on productivity and morale. That is why while some companies had already embraced video in some form before the COVID-19 pandemic, many more are now finding it essential—as demonstrated by Zoom’s ascent into a cultural phenomenon.

 

Video will continue to be key to collaboration for years to come. Even when people return to the office, it’s unlikely that teams will all jam into a conference room every time they need to talk. Support for BYOD will continue to be essential as well—so will graceful degradation. Zoom’s main advantage at the moment—shared with other Web conferencing companies—is its dial-in capability. You don't even need a smartphone to collaborate in 2020.

The spice must flow

Social distancing has put a serious crimp in some of the most hallowed project flow practices. With no more whiteboards and the physical proximity that Scrum masters love out the window, those daily stand-ups need a refresh. You can’t replicate Agile practices (or just about any other good project flow approach) easily in basic collaboration tools, and email threads are where projects go to die.

Enlarge / A normal workday morning on Slack. Today the Ars staff is tackling the tough journalism question of trying to figure out what birds they are, based on an online quiz.

I was an early adopter of Basecamp for my teams’ workflow and used it as a freelancer on joint projects for years. Now that I’m back in the corporate world, I live in Atlassian’s Jira and Asana’s eponymous software-as-a-service for workflow. The keys to successful use of any of these tools has always been over-communication: dropping all the files, notes, and other lore associated with the project into the collaboration space, and communicating frequently about tasks.

 

These sorts of things may be well-known to people working in the tech space, but they’re going to become increasingly essential across all sorts of companies as collaboration continues at a distance. Video and live collaboration in these sorts of project workspaces is going to be essential in the absence of proximity. (Right now, my team does a weekly kanban review over a shared screen, and it's been essential to keeping projects on track.)

 

Depending on your needs, capturing the knowledge from projects (and enforcing certain compliance rules on their execution) may be nearly as important as keeping the projects themselves on track. All future collaboration will require the ability to automate policies and data capture, especially with teams working remotely. But the companies that succeed the most in the chaotic days ahead and beyond will be the ones that take the routes most supportive of ad-hoc, unstructured, and easily configured collaboration processes that build out from the proven foundations.

 

We’d like to hear about how you see your collaboration processes evolving. If you’ve got any ideas, favorite collaboration platforms, or advice, leave them in the comments below. We’ll share the best of them in a follow-up story later this month.

 

 

Spooky action at a distance: The future magic of remote collaboration