One of the secrets of successful remote teams

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

One of the big mistakes some leadership teams make when considering allowing work-from-anywhere is thinking that this way of working means you never see your team in-person.

This in fact is the very opposite of what makes this way of working, work. What most successful fully distributed organisations will tell you is that the times when teams *do* get together in-person is an extremely important element of what makes them successful.

The only thing these teams have done is flip the frequency of that. In a traditional in-office work environment, people who work in them see each other for 49 weeks of the year, and then are apart for 3 weeks of the year. Fully distributed teams flip that to 49 weeks apart and 3 weeks together.

Those 3 weeks during the year when the team is together, is a critical piece of successful work-from-anywhere.

Listen to Matt Mullenweg describe this at the end of his State of the Word presentation a few days ago.

If you are going to work this way, you must intentionally create opportunities for your team to have time together in-person. This is a non-negotiable.