Distributed Work — How Remote Teams Collaborate Optimally

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This article is from spring 2020, when the world was suddenly forced into home office. The lessons about decentralized processes, digital communication, and building a transparent work culture are now the foundation for any successful AI implementation. A company that cannot work digitally and in a distributed way will not be able to integrate AI successfully. The principles described here are the basis for any modern, AI-driven organization.

Remote work offers great opportunities for employees and companies—if done right. Learn which factors matter and how a distributed team can work productively, stay involved, and remain motivated in this article.

If you had told me two months ago that most office jobs in Germany would suddenly be done from home, I might have laughed. I probably would have shaken my head and dismissed it. But I never thought it would actually happen.

How quickly things can change—things we once thought were certain and unchangeable—has become very clear in the current corona crisis.

My brother lives in Seoul. South Korea was, at the start of the pandemic, the country with the most corona infections outside China. Through regular conversations with him, I started to think early on about the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on daily life. Even though the measures there seemed very ambitious to me at the time, everything still felt far away and I didn’t expect the same severity to hit Europe or Germany.

Since March, the virus has taken hold in Germany too and has fundamentally changed the way we work.

To slow the spread of the virus, many companies have been forced in recent weeks to figure out how to enable their employees to work productively from home.

We are decentralizing and digitizing at record speed. We are catching up on much that we haven’t prepared for in recent years.

After many companies have now gained their first experiences with home office, many questions remain, but it’s clear that a return to the old ways is not possible—maybe not even sensible.

We are slowly starting to ease contact restrictions, reopen retail with restrictions, and let children return to school in some cases. These steps are meant to help keep the economy and society alive and allow some normality. But since we still have to try—perhaps even more so because of the easing—to slow the spread of the virus, it’s best to keep employees working from home for a while longer.

But how can we create the right structures and processes for this new distributed way of working, so that a temporary solution becomes a successful structure?

With this article, I want to help everyone who is building or managing distributed teams—and, of course, everyone working in such teams. I’ll discuss some advantages of distributed work and focus especially on communication within distributed teams and possible tools.

Working Where It Makes Sense

Work that is primarily digital can be done completely independently of location. That has always been obvious to me.

Of course, there are reasons to provide offices for employees to work together. But there are also reasons why this doesn’t have to be the only way.