Laura Hilliger & Bryan Behrenshausen
We're all working in unprecedented times. For months, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has swept steadily across the globe. Concerns over the disease it causes, COVID-19, have spurred shifts—both subtle and seismic—in seemingly all facets of everyday life. Phrases like "contact tracing," "social distancing," and "stay at home order" are common parlance. And organizations everywhere are grappling with the unavoidable consequences of a world that increasingly discourages side-by-side collaborations.
In a way, it's a reckoning. Long-held assumptions—about the necessity of co-located work arrangements, the irreplaceable benefits of shared proximity, and the primacy of synchronous interactions—no longer seem so indisputable. Organizations are experimenting every day with new strategies and tactics for achieving their mission when their people shouldn't be sitting within six feet of one another.
Like most open source projects, the Open Organization community was working remotely long before COVID-19 became a global pandemic. Now, however, we realize organizations everywhere might benefit from some of the same principles and practices that open source communities like ours have embraced for decades as they've successfully developed critical technological and social innovations across vast distances. Hence this book.
But be aware: The Open Organization Guide to Distributed Teamwork is not about the technology that makes remote work possible. It's about the nuances of human collaboration in an asynchronous, digital-first world.
That's why we actually prefer the term "distributed teamwork" to describe the challenge we're all facing today. "Remote work" sounds like a way to describe someone working from the far reaches of the planet, perhaps isolated in a bunker somewhere. It seems to describe a situation that's both temporary and detached from lived reality, one of constant connectedness that now permeates our working lives. We may be physically distant from one another, but we aren't psychologically remote. In fact, we need to be connected in a way that's much more difficult than it would be if we were sharing an office.
Indeed, to work successfully in virtual environments, we have to pay special attention to the humans on the other side of the screen. We don't just need to "be connected"; we need to be building relationships and creating trust in new and challenging ways. And without a doubt, we need to balance constant connection with more intentional inclusivity.
This book will help readers understand how building teams in distributed environments is inherently different. It will provide tips and tricks, resources, and lessons, all couched in the five principles that make open organizations so successful: transparency, inclusivity, collaboration, community, and adaptability. We hope it will help you empower you and your colleagues to build processes and cultivate cultures that help everyone in the organization to not only cope but thrive—no matter how close, or how far apart, they happen to be.
June 2020