0. Companies pondering fully distributed workforces - please do consider how much of your work is synchronous. (Thread)
1. A lot of creative/product development work is synchronous (people need to be online at the same time and work together). For example, roadmap brainstorming; pair programming; design/engineering iteration on pixels, etc.
2. Even a 3 hour timezone difference can make synchronous collaboration challenging. Eg: if an engineer in CA starts working at 10am local time, it's 1pm in NYC and their teammate might have stepped out of lunch. Similarly, 4-5pm in NYC is lunchtime in CA.
3. With a distributed team, there might only be 2-3 hours in the day for teams to synchronously collaborate, unless people are committed to working outside normal working hours. And this commitment needs to be evergreen and perpetual, which can lead to exhaustion and burnout.
4. One way to solve this is to have teams comprised of clusters of people in the same timezone (+/- 1 hour). So, in the US, "West of Texas" (Vancouver, Denver, San Francisco, LA, etc) could be one cluster, while "Texas and East" (Charlotte, Boston, NYC, Austin), is another.
5. If companies don't take the realities of synchronous collaboration into account when setting up distributed workforces, they can end up with frustrated employees and unproductive teams. (End thread)
6. For same-time zone clusters, or even to just see who’s online, we need collaboration that works with our digital tools and is lower friction than Zoom and higher bandwidth than an unstructured text log (h/t @saranormous)
