At 10Pens we are faced with a rather unique challenge of organizing our team. First, our team is spread out across the various corners of the globe. I live in California; our designer lives in Serbia, and Sidharth is temporarily operating from his laddoo factory in India. (Yes, he owns a laddoo factory, and if you don’t know what a laddoo is, Sidharth will be more than happy to answer all of your questions pertaining to laddoos.)
There are about two hours total in the day, during normal waking hours, when we can even communicate with one another. Furthermore, we have not one, but two projects we are simultaneously building. (The other project is a new “people search engine” called Keeples, which you can read about here ). Finally, we even have two separate teams for each project.
Somehow, miraculously, we can still get things done. The question is — how?
Install Skype
There really is no substitute for face-to-face communication, but in the worst case, voice is still a whole lot better than text. In my experience, it is extremely easy to get into strange arguments over email and text. Somehow, without voice, misunderstandings occur very frequently and without warning. If you go for more than a week without any voice chats, the misunderstandings can pile up into something disastrous. Certainly, for the more serious topics, we definitely use voice rather than email. In fact, more than once we have violated this rule, and several heated debates have erupted over email and gchat which could have easily been avoided if had used voice instead.
I noticed that we have even developed a sixth sense for pending misunderstandings and arguments while we’re texting. Midway during a Gchat exchange, as soon as the conversation turns to a “complicated” topic, immediately we will just know that it’s time to switch over to Skype. Recently, we have actually imposed a rule to have a manditory Skype conversation at least once per day.
In spite of all these efforts, communication is still a challenge. But with some discipline, you can get around the problems.
Tags: Communication, global, startup, team