Monday morning one of our engineers, Tom, jumped on a plane for Australia. He’s going to be living there with some friends for the next 12 months. Tom’s not leaving us, though. We’re going to use our own products to work productively and effectively with Tom as a part of our team.
Initially I had some concerns with having one of our team members on the other side of the globe. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, however, to design a work routine that would allow us to be this far apart.
- We’ll use the Calliflower network, which already has international conference call dial-in numbers in most of the major Australian centers, to coordinate meetings.
- Brisbane, where he’ll be, has a 14 hour timezone difference with Canada. Tom will be available on a 2 hour overlap with our team here in Canada for any conversations that need real time interactions.
- Most of our infrastructure is already cloud based – email, etc – which will eliminate issues that might normally require an IT manager. Tom should be able to just connect.
I’m hoping we’ll learn a lot from this experience as well, allowing us to incorporate new features designed to target very geographically diverse teams.
Do you have a distributed team? What would you like to see in Calliflower to help you work better with other members of your team?
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