The Virtual Watercooler For Digital Nomads

by Devin Moore / Oct 30

The virtual watercooler is the net conference.  Workers should be encouraged to meet regularly on phone with a shared screen to go over pending tasks and current issues.  If issues are discussed regularly, the team will feel connected and any irregularities with respect to distance should be minimized.  Another strategy is to have several actual meetings per year, budget permitting, so that people can learn better how to interpret online communications and moods of other team members.  I was surprised at how inefficient “email only” is compared with instant messenger, phone and email together.  A diverse workforce will include employees from high-context and low-context cultures.  You can maximize productivity by providing updates and communication using all forms available, so that if a high-context person is most comfortable on the phone, they are happy with the phone call.  Conversely, if the low-context person prefers to read the email, they have the email available.

Email mailing lists are helpful for making a nomadic workforce easier to manage, but I would like to see a conversation aggregating tool that would save instant messages, phone conversations, and emails all in a searchable format in the same application.  All of these items are communications that may contain valuable data for future reference, and having to rely on everyone on the team to take the same notes is far less efficient than being able to provide everyone with the same notes in the first place.

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