How to make a distributed team work

Like many other companies in 2015, we run a distributed team here at D4 — we're not all in the same place at the same time, and much of our communication and many of our meetings happen virtually rather than physically. It's not a traditional approach for organisations, but it's one that works for us, and we'd like to explain why.

The decision to go distributed was driven by a need to grow quickly: we found demand was going through the roof and we needed to bring top talent on board quickly. Finding and recruiting the best people for the job is a lot easier if you're not limited by geographical boundaries, so we decided to recruit the best candidates we could find, no matter where they happened to be when we discovered them.

From a company perspective, it means every team member has to be a self-starting, motivated individual right from the get-go, and that can do wonders for productivity. In some scenarios it also means a business can be available across multiple timezones, as one staff member's mid-afternoon is another person's late-at-night.

Working remotely means you're a certain type of individual: someone who's comfortable with "getting things done" and who doesn't need the daily influence of a line manager or a team meeting to hit targets. Anyone who's coasting along or who needs constant supervision and support is quickly found out in a remote working scenario, so it's another way of making sure you have the best possible people for the job.

Of course there are perks for the employees too — they can live in a place of their choosing, they can fit work around family commitments, and they don't have to spend hours every day stuck in traffic or wedged into a train carriage. We think that makes for a happier, more motivated, more productive workforce. It also means team members are assessed not by when they clock in and out, or how busy they appear to be, but by what they've actually accomplished during the week.

It's not perfect and it's not for everyone, but today's software is making it more viable than ever. Here at D4 we use Slack for instant messaging, Google Drive for sharing files and working on documents, Skype for video chats and screen-sharing, Trello for keeping track of tasks and collaboration with customers, and Jira, for project team collaboration.

We wouldn't say remote working is better or worse than the alternatives, but it's certainly different. For us, the decision to go distributed was driven by our insistence that quality comes first: so many people have had bad experiences with outsourced software development companies, we knew if we got the quality right, the business would succeed, and if finding the best people to work with meant having to solve the remote working challenge then so be it. Now, we're reaping the benefits.