Episode Details

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Marcus is the mobile lead at Buffer, and joined us in our first episode of 2019 from maker to manager, but we wanted to catch up with him again to talk about connecting across a global team.

At Buffer they try to avoid giving undue weight to location in recruitment, because it can distract from the hiring criteria which really matter and people move around anyway - so geographical factors can always be overcome. But they now Marcus' team work across 5 timezones from Taiwan to San Francisco, which has made real-time team calls a problem. So they have implemented alternatives, including a useful tool Carrot for sharing updates asynchronously. Communicating in this way has helped them to be more deliberate and intentional, as well as enabling introverted team members to shine in a way that online calls don't always facilitate. It creates an interesting balance between the other channels of communication, to use this tool specifically for sharing updates on a fixed day each week, but across multiple timezones.

Bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to such temporally distributed work is essential, because micromanagement does not work where multiple timezones are in play. Autonomy, initiative and self-motivation are needed, to get things done as part of a team, while the rest of the team is offline or asleep. Marcus considers that there is no such thing as over-communication in remote - you have to repeat things more than once, and this also fits with his personal principles of total transparency and trust within the team and organisation, very much in line with Buffer's publicly stated position as well. Artificial harmony (which we have discussed in a previous episode) has to be avoided at all costs, people need to feel safe to say what they really think - a successful team isn't everybody being happy all of the time, because differences of viewpoint are natural and important. For this reason Buffer have stopped calling themselves a 'family' - qualitatively the relationships are, or should be, very different, and blurring boundaries is unhelpful.

Keep in touch with Marcus on Twitter - he's always happy to connect and expand his network.

We try not to talk about "tips" and "hacks" at Virtual Not Distant on principle, and this art