RDEL #26: What are the top challenges with meetings for globally distributed teams?

This week we consider how scheduled and unscheduled meetings work in globally distributed software engineering teams, as well as their top challenges.

Welcome back to Research-Driven Engineering Leadership. Each week, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer.

Its 2024, and a vast majority of engineering orgs have some (or all) teammates working distributed. Even with teams physically getting further apart, software engineering continues to be a very high-collaboration effort. That means meetings, whether synchronous or asynchronous, are more important than ever to the success of an organization. This week we ask: what are the biggest trends and challenges with meetings for globally distributed teams?

The context

The 2023 Stack Overflow report showed that 83% of engineering teams are hybrid or remote. While having a more distributed teams offers a great deal of flexibility, it also opens up interesting challenges in how teams collaborate together to complete work. The SPACE framework includes both collaboration and efficiency as key indicators of engineering productivity, highlighting that productive engineers need to balance their time spent collaborating as a team with the need to achieve long stretches of uninterrupted focus time. In remote teams, striking that balance is a frequent challenge, especially when coordinating work across location and timezones.

Coordinating across teams can happen in either personal mode or group mode, and in a scheduled or unscheduled fashion. Synchronous coordination can be through virtual or in-person meetings, and asynchronous coordination can often be done through Slack. This week, we use research to better understand how coordination (via meetings) differs between colocated and distributed engineering teams.

The research

Researchers Viktoria Stray and Nils Brede Moe used a longitudinal study with a mixed-methods approach to investigate how engineering organizations coordinate using both meetings and Slack. The researchers studied one nearshore project and one far-shore project, using a group of six teams that were distributed across Norway, China, and Poland, and had both a local and distributed component. They relied on calendars, Slack notifications, site visits, and interviews to understand the biggest differences between the groups, as well as the top challenges in coordination.

Some of the unique findings from their research were:

1. Both distributed and co-located teams attended the same number of scheduled meetings per day (2 on average). However, distributed teams spent somewhat more time in meetings per day (co-located: 3.0hs, distributed: 3.6hs)

2. The number of participants in a meeting affected how valuable the meetings were perceived to be. This was particularly interesting given distributed teams on average were larger than co-located teams (co-located: 5.8, distributed: 8.7)

   

3. In slack team activity, researchers found that one-third of the most active users wrote 86% of messages. In interviews, some teammates pointed out that this may be due to cultural differences or strength of team dynamics.

Summarizing their findings, the top challenges the researchers found with scheduled and unscheduled meetings in globally distributed teams were:

1. Low availability of key people in far-shore projects

2. Meeting facilitation being missing in virtual meetings

3. Absence of organizational support for unscheduled meetings.

The application

This paper highlights what many teams already feel: coordinating in a distributed fashion is hard, and not perfect. Coordinating more people might mean bigger meetings, which may become less effective. But having more, smaller meetings or frequent unscheduled discussions can take teammates away from their work too much. To address the top challenges with meetings on distributed teams, here are some helpful tips -

1. Consider key stakeholders, and find ways to include them. This study showed that when key stakeholders were not included regularly, distributed teams experienced other meetings being declined or postponed. While scheduling time across timezones can be especially challenging for more busy stakeholders, prioritizing a somewhat regular cadence can ensure distributed projects stay on track.

2. Resist the urge to run a scheduled meeting without a clear goal. It is natural to keep scheduled meetings on the calendar due to habit, or to use meetings as a tool to build connections. However doing so can reduce the overall value of meetings, especially for larger teams.

3. Encourage a culture of transparent conversation on Slack. Keeping team conversations in public slack channels can ensure that all teammates benefit from project discussions, especially teammates who may speak up less frequently. This is a great way to allow communication to flow more asynchronously, reducing the need to manage timezones for a synchronous meeting. (Note: you can learn more about the best Slack communication patterns for engineering teams here).

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Wishing everyone a great (and not too rainy/snowy) week! Happy Research Monday 🎉

Lizzie

From the Quotient team