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 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.

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.