Collocated team vs. Distributed team – which is more productive?

Is there really any difference in working in a collocated team vs. working in a distributed team? I have worked in teams which were completely collocated as well as worked in teams which were so distributed that no two members were collocated. In my experience working in a collocated team is easy because of the effective and quick communication which is possible because all team members are sitting together but at the same time it would be wrong to say that there is a major difference in the productivity of collocated and distributed teams.

It is easy to claim that Productivity of collocated teams is more. This claim is based on the easiness and effectiveness of face to face communication. But the distance is not a barrier to those who want to communicate. Instant messengers, wiki or forums provide a quick and easy way to communicate even in a distributed environment. In the end it all comes down to how the team members communicate with each other.

In the following paragraphs, I have tried to share the challenges of collocated and distributed teams and how some of those can be addressed. Read on to go through my views and feel free to rave and rant through your comments.

It is easy to talk about the difficulties of distributed teams. Let us start with that. First and foremost, it is difficult to achieve the alignment and commitment of the whole team to the same goal and purpose. People do not really know each other and it is hard to build personal relationships.

Not everyone can perform well in a distributed team environment. The members should be self motivated, cross-functional and able to work independently. They need to be able to keep working effectively without much of big brother watching.

Some people feel isolated while working alone and therefore not able to remain focused.

To overcome these challenges, distributed teams rely heavily on communication and information technologies, such as internet, conference calls, e-mail, video conferencing, and various networking applications like instant messengers to tap into the intelligence expertise of team members.

It is time to move to challenges of collocated teams. Some people might think that there are no issues in collocated teams but that is not true. Face to face communication can bring issues if we are working in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual team. It is sometimes difficult to realize that we are getting affected by body language or other factors like hair style, clothing, smell, accent or whatever. Most of the communication in a collocated team goes undocumented and teams have to discuss the previously discussed topics again and again. If some key members miss the discussion then revisiting of same topics becomes more prevalent, obviously because of no formal documentation of previous discussions. People are more informal and they speak in their local language (slang, code words etc) in formal meetings too which is another problem. The body language might not support the words spoken during a conversation thereby reducing the effectiveness of what is being communicated.

Another interesting problem which is observed in collocated teams is that people avoid dropping emails and notes but rather waiting for other person to become free for a discussion. They continue to wait and sometimes it happens that the issue waits endlessly.

All the impediments whether working in collocated and distributed mode would impact productivity. Since I've had the opportunity to learn about agile methods I have realized that it’s literally a matter of choosing the communication methods that are suited to our environment.

To summarize, I’m not trying to claim that the potential problems of collocated teams outweigh the benefits. I prefer collocated teams, but I also acknowledge the benefits of distributed teams and distributed teams supported by the tools supporting effective communication can be equally productive. Distance would not be a barrier anymore!