Last month, Inc Magazine announced they were going to leave their fancy office & become a virtual organisation.

At least for a month – for a test run. The April issue of the magazine will let us know how they went.

Along the way they’ve been talking to others who work virtually. I caught this video convo with Matt Mullenweg from Automattic /WordPress.

Matt talks about their distributed organisation & something he said just clicked with me. When asked about the problems with the communicating to his staff around the world he said that communication problems aren’t a problem. That they’re just something to be aware of. Everything has strength & weakness.

That immediately took me back to a conversation I had multiple times with a former boss. Our video conference system was bad (fuzzy video, hard to hear audio). Everyone was aware the system was bad but not many seemed aware of the small things that could make it better… making sure you were close to the microphone when speaking, making sure everyone had received the file electronically before the meeting, letting 1 person talk at a time so the microphone could pick up that 1 sound, etc. Often I pointed out small things like this could make the difference but I could tell it went into the too hard basket. *

Each communication tool has strengths & weaknesses. You just need to understand what those are & how to work with the weakness. It’s not a problem. FANTASTIC!

(*Actually, the more video meetings we had, the more some people adapted but there wasn’t ever a mindset change)

over at harvard business blogs, gina trapani of lifehacker gives her best practice tips for not being in the office – in Master the Art of Working Remotely.

her tips include:

• get better at using email
• using IM so you are ‘present’ in the office for those quick off the cuff conversations
• use online tools that fit the client & the project (like shared calendars & docs or wikis)
• have regular voice/webcam chats

i agree with all 4 of those but want to put extra emphasis on the last item. i recommend organising regular (1-2x a week) voice communication from the very first day of the team or remote working relationship. depending on the stage of the project, increase the frequency (launching in 4 weeks? testing and need quick turn arounds? schedule a phone SCRUM for everyday).

it’s also a good idea to prepare and encourage folks to pick up the phone or use skype IMPROMPTU just as they would if the person was at the other end of the same building. perhaps it’s a hangover of thinking how much this long distance call will cost but email seems to be more popular.

having any sort of real time conversation takes more planning. check a time zone calculator! no one wants to wake someone up at 3am. make sure there’s at least an hour overlap in both people’s schedules and rotate the pain of the 10pm phone call if that’s required.

i have seen situations where emails went back & forth for a week or more with no resolution and only increasing frustration on both sides until a phone call clarified the situation (and then everyone realised the problem was small and easy to fix). This continued frustration hurts the relationship & trust and damages the ability of the team to continue working together.

making sure you have ‘f2f’ time is important. if you’re lucky enough to have overlapping time zones, make sure you use IM and other collaborative tools. being able to look at the same document/picture/video/etc in real time and discuss or mark up the object will save hours of work and cut down on mis-understanding.

Science Daily has an article re: use of IM is good for reducing interruptions (which we know is good for productivity).

It seems IM created conversations which were shorter than if the person had called or had a face to face conversation. People who used IM felt they were interrupted less. Finding out when people were available to have a longer conversation or to get quick answers were some of the IM uses mentioned.

Quite a great finding for those companies who still block IM b/c it’s seen as a productivity drain.

The study, by researchers at Ohio State U & U of California, has been published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. It involved 912 randomly selected participants from 12 metro areas who worked at least 30 hours per week in an office and used a computer for at least five hours in a workday.

Geekpreneur has a nice post on the ways to kill a virtual team fast. these are nice practical tips which all boil down to trust.

• irregular contact – have meetings at regular times, keep regular contact!
• lack of leadership
• lack of responsibility
• sudden disappearances (i kid you not – i had a virtual team leader go on holiday for a week. the person didn’t tell any of the folks outside his office, didn’t have an out of office email set up, and finally on the friday one of his coworkers told us he was on holiday all week. of course we were wondering why our emails weren’t getting replied to!)
• lack of member info (trade IM, facebook, linkedin, etc. mix & match both your communications methods & let them see your world in some way

you can always rely on a list apart for great articles. this time the long hallway – which is defined as ‘the distance between the physical working spaces of the individuals that comprise virtual companies’.

in the past (and very much the present), lots of virtual teams comprised of a hub of individuals in one location (like a head office) with a smattering of individuals in different offices or telecommuting. the long hallway is about companies who are more virtual than physical and have turned our HQ reality on it’s head. the internet, wireless connectivity & the focus on collaboration & productivity of ‘web2.0′ have made it a lot easier for organisations not to have a headquarters.

from a virtual working perspective, this is very exciting. when there’s no hub, no head office, no concentration of people in one singular office, EVERYONE has to think about communication. it’s those little conversations we have in offices that get things moving, that solve problems and if you can’t bump into someone on the way out the door to lunch or chat with them about project A while you’re waiting for a meeting concerning project B to begin, you begin to think about how you can recreate that online. When virtual teams are a mix of HQ & satellite folks, this situation doesn’t get the same front of mind priority.

the article also touches on process, how important scheduled play is, writing skills & setting boundaries (time zones folks!).