Blog Week 6 - Two's company, three's a team

Two's company, three's a team

Around two months ago after a few brief and flailing attempts at forming a remote report team on the Stream forum I finally was able to connect with four other people who became the report team I work with. Sadly, within the first week one of our members went silent and seemed to slip off the face of the earth and then another member left, albeit this time with communication, around two weeks ago. Thankfully the remaining two members and myself have been working well together, getting through the initial tasks of setting up a basic team structure and beginning our survey.

There are advantages and disadvantages to remote teams
Having recently worked in a small but effective IT team, where on occasion members would work from home, I understand the benefits of having the flexibility to work remotely but also the pitfalls and hindrances that can arise when members are not physically present in the office. One benefit can be the ability to focus on a task without the distractions you may encounter in the office like "walk-up" questions (face to face interruptions) or general office conversations. The other side of this coin is that you can lose valuable input in conversations about team tasks when a member is working remotely if the conversation is not carried out in some sort of communication tool (forum, chat, email, etc.). So taking these ideas into account you can assert that good electronic communication practices are essential to a well functioning remote team.

The virtual team in a virtual world
A big difference between my previous work team and the study team is that now all members are remote and none of us share any physical space in which to work within. On top of all this, we're in different time zones (I am a day behind) which can make scheduling a little harder. A usual method of communication for remote parties is email but in situations of three of more members in a team email threads can get long and cumbersome to look at and sometimes people's addresses are dropped off the thread (accidentally or not) and others, unrelated to the messages, are added. There are much better tools to organise communications and workflows for online teams now (Wallace, 2016) and so far we've utilised Facebook's tools (a private group and Messenger groups) to do basic shared communications and Trello (a shared task management board) to organise our various tasks and our progress on them.

Laying the foundations; structure and rules
Once our team members began communicating with each other we started to get a feel for what skills each of us brought to the table and after a time we decided to elect a team leader. We elected the member who seemed to have the best overview of the wider course structure and task requirements. We've yet to set any rules but with the structure how it is, one leader and only two assistant members, an ad hoc approach to ground rules or guidelines is working for us.

Reference:
Wallace, C. (2016) The pros and cons of working remotely. Retrieved from
    https://medium.com/remote-work/the-pros-and-cons-of-working-remotely-d526d7a34b0d