Distributed teams more effective than co-located? We say yes!

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to design digital workplaces or “offices in the cloud.” These environments enable companies to allow flexible and remote working for their teams. I also teach the digital literacy, fluency, communication and collaboration skills needed to work in these modern technology-rich workplaces.

We agree wholeheartedly with this comment by Sean Kane of Upwork:

“In fact, a practiced distributed team can be more effective than a co-located team because the need for physical presence becomes insignificant.”

We would argue that a distributed team can move faster than a co-located team. One of the primary reasons for that is that distributed teams can, because of asynchronous communication, be in constant dialogue with each other, whereas in most co-located teams communication happens in real-time, which by its nature is time consuming and you have to wait for everyone to be in the same space at the same time.