Working with Distributed Teams

The traditional office setup has certainly been challenged since the pandemic. The most significant shift and one which is hugely advantageous, is now, your colleagues can now truly sit global availing of best talent, regardless of where they are located.

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While it definitely adds certain demands such as culture, digital drain, onboarding and truly getting to know your colleagues, this trend is certainly here to stay.

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We've been working relatively remotely from day one at Stepwise. Even though a large percentage of our team is located in Stavanger Norway, the team is distributed across the globe, with members sitting in New York, Houston, Cape Verde, Oslo and out development partner (Milo Solution) is distributed across Poland. With such a distributed team, certain hygiene factors need specific attention. Your tools, methodologies, and syncing time zones around social working hours to suit everyone needs attention. To make a remote work environment successful, we've tailored our agile methodologies, creating a central digital playground around Miro and other co-working tools, but, investing in face-to-face meetings and workshops is a must. Doing so will build a stronger team dynamic.

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We recently travelled to Krakow to sync with our development team and ran several workshops and prioritization sessions. It was a great couple of days aligning and dining with our partner. However, we mainly focused on the social side and enjoyed lots of great Polish food, from pierogies' to kogel-mogel desserts and of course some amazing vodka! Remote collaboration is great, but meeting in person brings us closer together, creates greater clarity and unites us on our mission to accelerate emission reduction in heavy industries.

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Working remotely always needs adjustments and fine-tuning but when done well it certainly boosts productivity, reduces costs and, not least, reduces emissions! Its a win win. #racetonetzero

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