Best practices for keeping telecommuters connected?

October 5, 2009 9:33 AM

I'm looking for suggestions of good ways to keep telecommuting software developers fully involved in the team. Recommendations for technical solutions or morale-related ones are equally welcome.

I'm part of a small-ish team of software developers. We have 7 onsite team members, and have recently added two telecommuters. I'm looking for creative ways to ensure that the offsite folks are as much a part of the team as the onsite ones.

Much of our team communication already takes place in a chatroom and by private IM, so in that respect, the telecommuters are on a level playing field. But, having worked offsite myself at a different job, I know that it's very easy to begin feeling disconnected from the rest of the team.

This previous AskMe had some great ideas, but since it's pretty old, I thought there might be some relevant technological advances since then.

posted by SomePerlGeek to work & money (7 comments total)

If they say they need a hand with something, listen to them.

I work at a distributed company, and the single biggest challenge is getting attention for company-critical issues when I can't just walk into someone's office and pigeonhole them.
posted by verb at 9:53 AM on October 5

Run your projects online using Basecamp or TeamWorkPM!
posted by DarlingBri at 10:24 AM on October 5 [1 favorite]

Is there an opportunity to have everyone on-site once a month or once every couple months? I telecommute 60-80% of the time and find that touching base with my coworkers in person every few weeks for a couple days is huge for staying connected.
posted by chiefthe at 11:37 AM on October 5

One solution is to have everyone telecommute. Several Ubuntu developers operate this way (I believe Canonical's offices are mainly for not-strictly-Ubuntu work like hardware support or new software development). There are more VOIP tools now, if you consider going that route for meetings. It helps if the infrastructure is network accessible; buildbots, testing suites, bug tracker, etc. In particular, Exchange is a problem for you if you don't have a VPN. OWA works for checking mail irregularly, but isn't the tool you need during work hours.

If you're worried about team cohesion, make deliberate team conference meetings with some (perhaps hidden) socialization goals. The common techniques of free lunches won't work here; not quite sure what to build there. Sure, it's not directly contributing to meeting a specific deadline, but if you don't think it's important enough to invest time in, why worry?

Oh, and one other thing: even fully distributed projects take time every year to meet in person. Ubuntu runs a week long developer conference to plan out six months of activity, operates a developer camp the week before. Usually these things are punctuated with evening activities like pub crawls and live music by the conference attendees.
posted by pwnguin at 11:38 AM on October 5

Knowing nothing about your team, products, process, or the geography involved, it's hard to make a good suggestion, but my okay suggestion is: IRC.

People can hang out on IRC 24-hours if they want, talk about work and non-work, get to know each other, you can hold impromptu team meetings there, it's easy to link people to wiki documentation all in one place, it's logged (so it's a better medium of communication than email), you can get fun bots like a karmabot, have a bot that comments to the channel whenever anyone checks something in, have a buildbot that comments when someone commits something that breaks the build, opens or closes a ticket, etc. I think IRC is a great way to keep a dispersed team working together.
posted by doteatop at 1:44 PM on October 5

2nding doteatop. We actually lazed out and just use an AIM chatroom, but it has definitely helped me in my telecommuting to have my coworkers in the chat all the time. I worked for a research group during college that did this same kind of interaction via a MOO.

The other day I IM'd one coworker saying "Hey, I hear coworker 2 is in your cube...could you spare him a minute?" because I needed coworker 2 for an impromptu conference call and he wasn't at his desk. It's almost as good as being there, when it works of course...
posted by crinklebat at 10:19 PM on October 5

Thanks, everyone. Good info.
posted by SomePerlGeek at 8:02 AM on October 6