• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Do's and Don'ts for Keeping Distributed Employees Happy

In our last blog, we pointed out the three most important traits for successful remote workers: self-motivation, autonomy and curiosity. We call these highly desirable employees SMAIPs (Self-Motivated, Autonomous, Inquisitive People).

So once you’ve built a killer distributed team of productive SMAIPs, you can just let them do their thing right? Not so fast. Even if you’ve populated your team with the most self-motivated, autonomous and inquisitive employees known to mankind, you have to consistently nurture these traits.

Here are five do’s and don’ts we at Intridea follow to keep our distributed employees motivated, engaged and happy:

1: Don’t Micromanage. Do Give Guidance.

Because SMAIPs require very little direction, they absolutely detest micromanagement. That’s why we try to foster self-directed behavior by giving our team members plenty of independence and elbow room to get the job done.

If you hover over your employees, get involved with every small task and nit-pick every detail, you’ll stifle their creativity and send their confidence into a tail spin. In fact, people who believe they are being watched perform at a lower level, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. So, back off. The more you micromanage, the less productive your team will be.

When leaders expect remote employees to follow overly complicated processes, this can also crush self-motivation. After all, enforcing inflexible rules and procedures is really just another form of micromanagement. We’ve found that if employees have to jump through hoops to get something done, they're less likely to try.

2: Don’t Play It Safe. Do Embrace Failure.

If you punish your team members for each and every failure, you’re going to end up with overly cautious employees who do the bare minimum. And who could blame them? They’d rather play it safe than face your dreadful wrath.

Far too many remote managers paralyze their teams with the fear of failure. Not only does this suffocate their inquisitive and self-driven behavior—it eventually transforms employees into brainless automatons.

At Intridea, we think it’s important to embrace failure and turn each botched attempt into an important lesson. In his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, economic journalist Tim Harford writes, “Biologists have a word for the way in which solutions emerge from failure: evolution.” Harford says we need to learn to accept failure and constantly adapt, which involves lots of improvising. “Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.”

In fact, some research shows that failure is often the quickest path to success. People and organizations that disastrously miss their goals perform much better in the long-run, according to a University of Colorado Denver Business School study.

“We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting while knowledge from failure stuck around for years,” Professor Vinit Desai, the leader of the study, wrote in the Academy of Management Journal. “Organizational leaders should neither ignore failures nor stigmatize those involved with them. Rather leaders should treat failures as invaluable learning opportunities, encouraging the open sharing of information about them.”

3: Don’t Overburden Them. Do Enforce Work-Life Balance.

SMAIPs are often prodigious in their output—which can be both a blessing and a curse. While leaders may be tempted to let highly driven team members pull long hours and work their fingers to the bone, this will quickly lead to employee burnout.

As we mentioned in a previous blog, it’s important to ensure your employees achieve a healthy balance between their work life and personal life. In the long run, work-life balance leads to happier, more productive employees.

“The business climate has become so fiery and competitive that leaders are focused on competition and getting the most out of their people,” John Izzo, author of Values-Shift: The New Work Ethic and What It Means for Business, told CNNMoney. “Everyone's working to their max.” This extreme pressure will quickly derail even your most productive and driven SMAIPs.

Izzo warns that an employee suffering from burnout becomes part of the “working wounded.” Because they’ve lost all of their motivation, they apathetically limp along through their work day. “Ultimately the biggest price companies pay for burnout is a loss of talented people,” he adds.

Because we realize SMAIPs will create Intridea’s most innovative work, we make a point to nurture these employees—not work them to death.

4: Don’t Dishearten Them. Do Give Positive Feedback.

Distributed leaders have to be careful about demoralizing SMAIPs with too much negative feedback. If you only offer a worker feedback when he does something wrong, you’ll quickly crush that employee’s spirit and deflate his motivation.

It’s important to give distributed employees positive feedback, even for normal day-to-day work. When you reward your team members for a job well-done, this will encourage further self-driven behavior. It also ensures they’ll sit up and listen in the instances when you need to offer them negative feedback.

Warren Greshes, author of The Best Damn Management Book Ever has also emphasized the importance of positive feedback. “If you want to point out the mistakes people make, get them to listen to you and fix those mistakes, you better be ready to recognize them when they do something right,” he writes. “Employee recognition is one of the greatest drivers of employee motivation in the workplace. Do you know anyone who doesn’t like to be recognized when they’ve done something right or achieved something special?”

If you only speak up when an employee has done something wrong, they won't bother to take risks that could turn into big wins for the company. In the end, your employees will stop caring because they know no matter what they do, you’re going to criticize them.

5: Don’t Dismiss Their Ideas. Do Set Expectations.

SMAIPs often formulate groundbreaking ideas, and they’re usually bursting with excitement to share these ideas with their manager. So when a self-motivated employee comes to you with her latest brain child, it’s important to give the idea the thought and consideration it deserves.

If you ignore or constantly shoot down an employee’s ideas, she’ll more than likely stop sharing altogether. In fact, more than a third of U.S. workers don’t speak up for fear of retribution, according to a DecisionWise Benchmark study. “These perceptions typically stem from a culture that stifles the free expression of ideas, and from leaders who contribute to or create that culture,” points out Paul Warner, Director of Consulting Services at DecisionWise. “Fear of speaking up is extremely detrimental to organizations, often causing an escalation of dissatisfaction among employees leading to absenteeism, non-productive work behaviors, low team identification, and eventually reduced performance and turnover.”

We’ve found that while it’s critical to listen to our team members’ new ideas, it also helps to set expectations upfront—even before the employee’s idea is hatched. For example, we encourage our team members to use a program called sparktime—an Intridea initiative to encourage side projects and exploration. When one of our employees submits an idea for a side project, our “approval” is contingent on a well-defined plan as well as good timing with other projects. This helps focus our employees and also teaches them how to set themselves up for success.

Check out our next to blog to learn how to spark self-motivation in distributed employees.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: 7 Ways to Enforce Work-Life Balance

In our last blog, we talked about how important work-life balance is to every company, especially for distributed teams. In our opinion, the power of work-life balance cannot be over-emphasized. If you want to cultivate a team of well-adjusted, engaged employees, it’s essential to not only suggest or strongly encourage work-life balance—but to enforce it. Here are seven surefire ways to do just that:

1: Be Flexible

According to an Accenture study, 80 percent of employees say having flexibility in their work schedule is important to achieving a positive work-life balance. Fortunately, when you’re running a distributed team it’s not necessary to force employees to work a traditional 9 to 5 timeframe. Let your team members choose their own hours so they can work when they feel the most productive.

While one employee may prefer to work from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm when her kids are at school and the house is quiet, a night owl may be the most energized after midnight. Of course, to accommodate these varying work hours, it’s important to minimize scheduled events—such as mandatory conference calls at 3 pm each Monday. Here at Intridea, we do that by relying on email, Hipchat and other forms of asynchronous communication.

Over the years, we’ve noticed an interesting trend: When we allow employees to work reasonable hours each week and give them time off when they need a break, they’re more willing to put in extra hours when necessary.

2: Look for Signs of Burnout

Some researchers say distributed workers might be at higher risk for burnout. In the absence of defined work hours, remote workers often end up working longer—leaving them less time for their personal endeavors, according to a MIT Sloan Management Review article by Jay Mulki, Fleura Bardhi, Felicia Lassk and Jayne Nanavaty-Dahl.

Because distributed team members don’t work in clear view of their supervisors, they also tend to take on more projects than they can handle. “The rapidly increasing prevalence of distributed workforces can make demonstrating the extent of your workload incredibly hard, and often even harder to resolve,” writes independent business consultant Oliver Marks in a ZDNet article. “The result is burnout, and the impact of 'always on' work patterns in organizations of all sizes can ultimately have a significant negative effect on results.”

So how do you ensure your team members don’t lose steam? At Intridea, we strive to make employees feel appreciated and connected at every opportunity. It’s also important to establish clear goals for each team member, revisit those goals frequently and offer encouragement and acknowledgement when the employee reaches certain benchmarks. In other words, if you don’t continually stoke an employee’s fire, it will eventually flicker out.

3: Ensure Employees Catch Enough ZZZ’s

Most Americans don’t get nearly enough shuteye, and the lack of sleep has an adverse effect on their work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 30 percent of employed U.S. adults don’t get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep a day. Of course, it’s no surprise that the longer a sleep-deprived person stays awake, the more their productivity level plummets.

In a study by Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, researchers asked sleep deprived participants to perform certain tasks, such as finding information quickly and accurately on computer monitors. As their level of sleep deprivation worsened, the participants’ ability to find the information slowed dramatically.

At Intridea, we strongly encourage our employees to get plenty of sleep. Because our distributed team members have greater control over their working hours, this makes it easier for them to fit a solid eight hours of slumber into their schedule. In the event that one of our employees has to pull an all-nighter on a tight deadline or if they are recovering from a cold or injury, we advise them to catch up on sleep however possible.

We also find it perfectly acceptable for employees to take power naps during the work day. In fact, an increasing number of companies, both distributed and non-distributed, are allowing power naps. For example, Google gives employees an opportunity to nap at work because the company believes it increases productivity—and recent research proves that this notion is absolutely true. In a NASA-financed study, a team of researchers found that allowing subjects to nap for as little as 24 minutes improved their cognitive performance.

4: Encourage Exercise

A study by Jim McKenna from the University of Bristol showed that when employees took a break from work to exercise, their work performance was consistently higher and they demonstrated better time management and improved mental sharpness when they returned to the office. These employees also reported feeling more tolerant of themselves and more forgiving of their colleagues.

At Intridea, not only do we encourage employees to get active—we take it to the next level by holding company-wide Fitbit competitions. If you haven’t heard of this awesome little gadget, the Fitbit tracks steps taken, calories burned, floors climbed, activity duration and intensity and more. Our employees wear it on their wrist all day and then plug it into a wireless base station to upload the data into the Fitbit website. From there, we can see an overview of each employee’s physical activity. At the end of the week, we crown the employee with the most impressive exercise stats as Fitbit champion. It’s a fun way to tap into our team’s competitive spirit while promoting physical fitness.

5: Support Family Time

For many professionals, the definition of work-life balance is simple: they want a fulfilling job that allows them to spend more quality time with their families. Sadly, half of working dads and more than half of working moms say they find balancing work and family responsibilities “very” or “somewhat” difficult, according to a Pew Research report. Based on the report, 46 percent of fathers and 23 percent of moms say they don't get enough time with their kids.

We at Intridea do everything possible to accommodate working moms and dads. While traditional businesses typically offer two weeks or less of paternity leave (if any at all), we work with new parents to create a customized schedule to fit their needs.

For example, our flex hours allowed one team member to care for his newborn child and create an alternating feeding, changing and sleeping schedule with his wife. This gave him the opportunity to bond with his daughter, support his wife and still be a productive member of our team.

6: Make Vacations Mandatory

It’s really no wonder why there are so many unhappy employees in the U.S. Our nation is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time. Consequently, almost one in four Americans do not receive any paid vacations or paid holidays, according to a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. And according to a Harris Interactive study, more than half of American workers have up to two weeks’ worth of unused vacation at the end of the year.

While some employers might applaud this behavior, it’s a lose-lose when workers don’t take some much-needed R&R. Many studies show that a person’s happiness level spikes after a vacation, resulting in a recharged and mentally refreshed employee. The average traveler experiences a 25 percent increase in work performance after returning from vacation, according to the Travel Leisure Monitor.

We give Intridea employees unlimited vacation time. Our vacation policy is quite simple: “Take what you need.” We also offer “workations,” which allow employees to travel the world and work from wherever they are. Like vacations, research shows workations also offer many valuable benefits. For one, multi-cultural experiences and exotic surroundings often generate more inspired and creative work, according to research by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

7: Get Rid of the Commute

If nothing else, distributed businesses offer improved work-life balance simply because employees don’t have to waste hours on end fighting traffic. According to the Department of Transportation, the average American driver logs 37 miles a day. To make matters worse, the typical commuter spends more than 38 hours a year stuck in traffic congestion—and that number is even higher in big cities such as D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco, at 60 hours a year.

By not commuting last year, our team saved a combined total of 9,816 hours. Check out Intridea's YourTime to see examples of what our team members do with the extra time they save by NOT commuting.

Tune into our next blog to learn about the 4 Fatal Leadership Fails.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Work Life Balance

Cue a thousand eye-rolls. Trust us, we know the phrase “work-life balance” has been overused, abused and beaten to a pulp in the corporate world. Even so, this principle is extremely important for every business—especially for distributed teams. Sadly when it comes to ensuring employees live a well-adjusted life, plenty of companies talk the talk; but very few walk the walk.

Here at Intridea, we’ve discovered that when our team members derive joy from activities outside of work hours, they channel that happiness directly into their projects during work hours. In the end, this leads to increased employee productivity and higher quality work. That’s exactly why we urge our employees to maintain a healthy balance between their professional and personal lives.

Can’t Buy Success

According to a study by Accenture, more than half of surveyed workers say work-life balance is the key determiner for whether or not they have a successful career. They place it ahead of recognition, autonomy and even money.

The study was based on surveys of 4,100 business executives from medium to large organizations in 33 countries, including the U.S. Half of those surveyed said they have turned down a job offer because they believed it could negatively impact their work-life balance.

"Companies that can help their employees navigate both their professional and personal lives are likely to see strong employee engagement and enjoy an advantage as they recruit and retain high performers,” said Nellie Borrero, managing director of global inclusion and diversity for Accenture.

Boost Your Bottom Line

Not only does work-life balance lead to more engaged employees—it can also give your company’s earnings a major boost. Based on a study by UK firm Morgan Redwood, businesses that helped workers achieve a healthy work-life balance earned nearly a quarter more per employee each year than companies that did not.

Study participants said their employees were able to manage their personal lives more easily, resulting in fewer missed days, improved well-being and increased productivity—which led to higher profits for the entire company.

The Happiness Factor

Employees with a balanced life are generally more cheerful people—and studies show that happiness pays off big time for businesses.

In The Happiness Advantage: Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, author and researcher Shawn Achor points out that a happy workforce increases sales by 37 percent and productivity by 31 percent.

“It’s irrefutable. We know happy employees are the most successful employees, so happiness brings success, and that brings success to our organizations,” says Helen Mumford Sole, an executive coach who specializes in happiness. “This is a win-win all around.”

Not surprisingly, remote workers are often happier simply because they aren’t forced to schlep to a brick-and-mortar office day after day. According to an annual telecommuting survey issued by Staples Advantage, telecommuting programs are “mutually beneficial” for both employers and employees. That’s because remote working results in more content employees, reduced absenteeism and less stress. “Telecommuting can help achieve balance between workplace demands and life obligations,” explained Tom Heisroth, senior vice president for Staples Advantage.

Because distributed businesses cut out the commute and offer employees a more flexible schedule, these companies inherently lead to improved work-life balance. However, we believe it’s not enough for distributed teams to simply suggest that employees strive for work-life balance—or even strongly encourage it. If you want your business to thrive, it’s essential to put work-life balance front and center.

In our next blog, we’ll reveal seven surefire ways to enforce work-life balance for your distributed team.
Does your company work remote? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Why Synchronous Communication Sucks

We at Intridea have learned that running a distributed business is half art form, half calculated science. Without clear purpose and direction, a remote team will quickly unravel. That’s why we follow a specific set of principles or “rules” to keep our team as effective and connected as possible. One of those rules is to avoid synchronous communication as often as possible.

Ask yourself this: What is the most effective way to communicate with your team? Is it best to meet face-to-face with employees, present them with a problem and attempt to resolve the issue together in real time? Or is it more productive to send your employees an email, give them a couple of hours or days to digest the information and ask them to respond later when they are prepared with an informed answer?

While it may seem inconsequential, the mode of communication you choose can make or break your company—particularly if you run a distributed business.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

Synchronous communication is basically a real-time conversation. For example, if you call up an employee, meet face-to-face or send an instant message to discuss an issue, that’s synchronous communication. Another example would be an online meeting or conference call, when your entire team gets together to chat and offer immediate responses.

Synchronous communication is extremely popular with traditional brick and mortar businesses, where most discussions are handled in-person through conversations and meetings. Usually everyone is in the same location and participates at the same time. Because it necessitates swift answers, synchronous communication often gives an advantage to those who speak fastest—not those who speak the wisest.

On the other hand, asynchronous communication occurs outside of real time. There is a delay or a “lag” between the question and the response. This lag could be any given amount of time specified by the team leader—whether it’s two hours, two days or two weeks. Unlike real-time conversations, asynchronous communication allows your team members to respond when they can focus fully on the discussion.

For example, if you email an employee a question and ask her to respond by the next morning, that’s asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication also takes place through project management tools, wiki or microblogging platforms. With these tools, the organizer posts a question, concern or document and each employee responds with their answers, suggestions and edits on their own time.

Down with Knee-Jerk Responses

Naysayers of asynchronous communication often claim it is ineffective for urgent matters—but this is simply not true. Although there is a delay between the question and the response, the pause may be as little as one minute. If an issue is time-sensitive, it's important and reasonable for a colleague or team leader to request a response within a specific amount of time. For example, when you send an employee an email marked “High Importance!” and ask her to respond within the next five minutes, this is still considered asynchronous communication.

Because synchronous communication always calls for immediate answers, it does not afford much time for reflection—which often leads to impulsive, unimaginative and sometimes downright wrong responses. It also creates distraction that forces the recipient to drop whatever they’re doing and switch focus. On the other hand, asynchronous communication gives an employee time to prepare a thoughtful, educated answer as opposed to a knee-jerk response.

Particularly in a distributed business, it’s important to create a business culture where instant responses are not demanded or expected. When your team members have time to respond carefully, it fosters a culture of creativity and productivity and limits the number of distractions they face in a day. These are just a few of the many reasons why business communication should be handled asynchronously whenever possible—especially with distributed teams that are often dispersed across a variety of time zones.

Four Fatal Pitfalls of Synchronous Communication

So, why do we at Intridea hate on synchronous so much? Because teams that rely on synchronous communication fall into these four common pitfalls:

1. The demand for instant answers, which leads to hasty responses.
2. Increased pressure on employees
3. Constant distractions, which forces employees to drop what they’re doing and shift their focus.
4. Ineffective conversations and meetings dominated by extroverts and chronic interrupters.

We believe asynchronous communication solves each of these common pitfalls. Tune into our next blog to find out how.
Does your company work remote? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: How Distributed Work Benefits Society (As In the Whole Wide World)

In our last two blogs, we detailed the advantages distributed work offers both businesses and their employees. However these benefits extend far beyond the business world. In fact, we’d go so far as to say the distributed trend is benefitting everyone—as in society as a whole.

“Numerous studies find that telecommuting can lead to many economic benefits that accrue to workers, consumers, businesses and society,” states a report by the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research. “[Telecommuting] could lead to less pollution and oil consumption for society, increased benefits for consumers, and a better work life balance and opportunities for the employees, especially for the disabled, stay-at-home parents, and rural residents.”

Here are just a few of the major societal benefits:

Benefit to Society #1: A Breath of Fresh Air

Distributed businesses conserve energy and reduce fuel consumption and pollution. Since remote teams don’t require brick-and-mortar offices, wasteful after hours heating and cooling is eliminated. Instead, employees simply heat and cool their home offices—which would be heated and cooled regardless.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), telecommuting saves 9 to 14 billion kilowatt-hours of energy each year—roughly the amount of energy needed to power 1 million U.S. households annually.

Since remote employees don’t commute to work every day, distributed businesses also help reduce greenhouse gases and conserve tons upon tons of oil. If employees with telework-compatible jobs who want to work from home did so just half of the time, the U.S. would reduce greenhouse gases by 54 million tons—the equivalent of taking almost 10 million cars off the road for a full year. Our nation would also save more than 640 million barrels of oil valued at more than $64 billion, according to Global Workplace Analytics.

Benefit to Society #2: Giving Our Roads a Break

The distributed trend also relieves pressure on our nation’s crumbling highways and interstates. According to Global Workplace Analytics, less than six percent of U.S. city’s roads have kept pace with the droves of commuters over the past decade. If traffic continues to grow at its current rate, we’ll need to build another 104,000 miles of new road—which will cost our nation $530 billion. However, if more companies were to embrace remote work, it would give our nation’s disintegrating transportation infrastructure a much-needed break—and save tax payers billions of dollars.

Benefit to Society #3: Encouraging Family Values

Nearly half of American workers say they are willing to take a pay cut to telecommute or have a flexible work schedule—primarily because it would improve their personal lives and make them better parents, according to survey sponsored by Mom Corps.

“The way the majority of corporate America works no longer aligns with the way U.S. families conduct their daily lives,” Allison O’Kelly, founder and CEO of Mom Corps, points out in a press release. “Participating in some form of flexible work option allows employees to regain a modicum of work/life balance, and successful companies know that this also can yield a significant return on investment for them.”

At YourTime.Intridea.com, we showcase examples of what our team members do with the time they save by not commuting to an office every day. Many of our employees spend those extra hours with their children, partners and other loved ones.

For example, Andy Wang says he spends time, “taking care of my baby girl and playing games with her every day.” Ben Markowitz writes, “As the father of three small children, there are so many moments I get to be a part of. I was able to see my son’s first steps, see my daughter off to her first day of dance class, and greet her every day when she gets home from preschool.”

“Every day I walk my son home from school,” Marc Garrett says. “We throw rocks, talk about girls, and keep an eye out for dragons—all those things fathers and sons do if you don’t have to worry about sitting in traffic. I can’t imagine spending that time any other way.”

Benefit to Society #4: Saving Lives

Because distributed businesses keep their employees off the roads, these companies are literally saving lives. Global Workplace Analytics reports that telework could save more than 1,600 lives, prevent nearly 99,000 injuries and save more than $12 billion a year in traffic accident costs—and that’s just if workers with telework-compatible jobs worked from home half the time.

Benefit to Society #5: Protecting Our Sanity

Sitting in traffic is literally driving commuters crazy, according to a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using data from two national surveys, researchers found negative responses to daily stresses such as conflicts at work or sitting in traffic led to psychological distress or anxiety and mood disorders ten years later. In other words, everyday irritations like sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic can make you slowly lose your mind.

Benefit to Society #6: Down with Discrimination

Whether intentional or not, discrimination, nepotism and favoritism still run rampant in the workplace. Since distributed teams rarely work face-to-face, employees and managers are less likely to judge their colleagues by their appearance.

“Virtual interaction seems to be effective at reducing various kinds of discrimination within team members,” writes Joe Willmore in “Managing Virtual Teams” (Spiro Press, 2003). “With visual stimuli removed, the focus is more on content and less on the person generating the content.”

Benefit to Society #7: Putting Retirees Back to Work

The majority of retirees want to keep working, but they also want the flexibility to enjoy retirement. More than one-third of retired workers say that if they would have had the option to work part-time or work from home, it would have encouraged them to keep working, according to Global Workplace Analytics.

“Holding a job in retirement is becoming more necessary, and re-entering the job market through a telecommuting job is a fantastic option,” writes Brie Weiler Reynolds, the Content and Social Media Manager at FlexJobs. Many distributed businesses are attracting highly skilled retirees back into the working world.

Benefit to Society #8: Business as Usual, Even after a Disaster

Distributed businesses enjoy continuity of operations in the event of an avian flu outbreak, inclement weather, earthquakes or other disasters. Three quarters of teleworkers say they could continue to work in the event of a disaster compared with less than one-third of non-teleworkers, Global Workplace Analytics reports.

"More employers put telework policies in place after 9/11 and various natural disasters," says Susan Bergman, MA, SPHR, The Society for Human Resource Management’s director of the Knowledge Center. “Today, employers see remote work capabilities as key to keeping their business operating when there are disruptions."

Thanks to these valuable advantages, business leaders are realizing that building a remote workforce isn’t just an awesome employee incentive or a smart way to boost the company’s bottom line—it’s also a social responsibility.

Want to learn more about what makes distributed teams tick? Don’t miss our next blog on the power of asynchronous communication.

Does your company work remote? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about Houston | Mission Control for Distributed Teams

A few months ago, we quietly launched a dashboard helping remote distributed companies, like us, keep in touch. Working remote is great, but requires a level of strategy. With differing time zones, multiple projects, and varying schedules it can be difficult to keep everyone in the loop. Houston is our solution.

Since it's launch, we've utilized Houston to see who's on vacation, what cool projects everyone's working on, and revamp our company handbook via a Hipchat-powered Q&A knowledgebase. Best of all? We open sourced it, so you can use it too. Check out this two minute video and get the Houston dashboard up and running for your organization!

We can't wait to see how you use Houston. Fork it, add your own tools, and share it back. Houston is 100% built with Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, and integrates with Google apps, Harvest, and Confluence.

Here's just a few ideas we've got coming up on our own Houston roadmap:

• Who's online? Rollup of statuses across Hipchat, Google, and Github
• Analyze Github commits for visualizing team skills
• Where is everyone? Location and time zone indicator
• Bookmarks: cool finds and helpful tips extracted from Hipchat logs

What do you want to add to Houston? Let us know!

• Read more about Commit to Be Fit

Ah, the joys of working from home. It's only a few steps from getting up in the morning to my home office...and the kitchen.

Given the lack of exercise needed to navigate during my workday (mostly, I sit at my desk) and the close proximity to said kitchen, it would be easy to gain weight and lose fitness over time.

At Intridea, to help combat the relative inactivity of remote working, each employee is given a Fitbit to track daily steps. We even have our own Intridea Fitbit group that ranks our progress and successes with others in the company.

This simple little device has been a life-changer for me and I’m frequently atop the group leaderboard for steps, distance and very active minutes.

Competition and Goals

So, how does an almost fifty-seven year old woman make the top of the company leaderboard?

What began as a fun, competitive attempt to add more activity to my day and climb up the leaderboard has ultimately led me to set new goals for myself.

With virtually no commute, I have extra “found” time I dedicate to fitness. Even so, you can always find the time for things that are important to you.

No longer content to run and/or walk one or two miles a day, I’ve challenged myself to bump it up. Weekday runs have increased to five to eight miles and weekend runs are longer. Throw in some walking, instead of driving, to take care of a few errands and my weekly steps average around 150,000.

More Energy

Through this increase in activity, spurred on by the little Fitbit gadget, I have:

Shed almost thirty lbs

Boosted my energy level

Gained overall body strength

Improved sleep quality

Increased mental alertness at work

Improved general health and fitness

With more energy, I can keep up with my seven grandkids and more fully enjoy favorite pastimes such as backpacking, hiking in the mountains and biking. Other tasks have become easier too, like shoveling snow, chopping wood and mowing the lawn.

Using the Fitbit has helped motivate me to run some marathons, compete in a snowshoe race, raise money for a charity by participating in a 24-hour run/walk event and more.

Commit to Be Fit

Supposedly, it takes thirty days for something to become a habit. So, try it. For thirty days, add more activity to your life. It doesn’t have to be running or walking, but find something you enjoy doing – swimming, dancing, jumping rope, hula-hooping. lifting weights, or a combination of activities - just get out there and do it. My bet is that by the end of thirty days, there will be a noticeable improvement in the way you feel.

Commit to be fit and reap your own rewards. The benefits are there for the taking. If this ol’ gal can do it, so can you.

How does your team stay fit? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about Brooklyn. NeoLucida. Spritzenhaus.

Thanks to the kickstarter campaign NeoLucida, Intridea had the chance to play with 19th century drawing tools last week! As a fully distributed team, we often find excuses to get together, and the Neolucida was the perfect reason for such an event.

Brooklyn became our mecca for this workshop and with a beautiful studio, awesome location, and great instructor, our one day workshop was rather idyllic.

With alligator heads, My Little Pony, and flowers for inspiration, Intridea’s UX team quickly took to the NeoLucida; a tool composed of lenses and mirrors that when angled properly superimpose your subject onto paper.

The icing on the cake though, was having NeoLucida’s brainchild conduct our workshop. Based out of Chicago, Pablo made a special trip for Intridea’s workshop and we couldn’t have had a better instructor. With a background in media archaeology and a passion for visual culture and imaging technologies, Pablo’s excitement was infectious and his insight into the NeoLucida was invaluable.

It was a great experience and ending our day at Brooklyn’s fine establishment, the Spritzenhaus sealed the deal.

Special thanks to all the folks at 67 West St. Studio!

• Read more about Reclaim your "Work from Home Zen"

A morning commute to a home office (or the kitchen table) is a wonderful opportunity to think and work without the typical interruptions that come up in an office. It’s also a potential shortcut to driving off the cliffs of reclaimed productivity and into the sea of the uninspired. Here are a few tips to keep you on track and motivated every day.
Embrace your morning "commute" Wake up to an alarm as if you were commuting to an office. Make a healthy breakfast. Get dressed (shirt and pants optional). Read a chapter in a book, or go for a stroll, or learn meditation. Declare your intention for the day. Waking up on a schedule provides inherent structure to the day, which is vitally important to your productivity - work and otherwise.
Communicate Working from home does not mean working in silence; in fact, it’s more important to communicate regularly when you work from home. Start your day checking in with clients and your team. This will give you a sense of community and ensures everyone is on the same page!
Leverage your evening "commute" It is easy to fall into the habit of not leaving the house, especially when you don’t have to! In the spirit of maintaining a healthy and productive daily schedule, take advantage of the time you save not having to commute to enjoy exercise and fresh air. It may sound cliché but getting the body active and energized will translate to a more inspired work day.
Shower I’m not saying this to acknowledge any stereotypes (ahem, work-from-home developers!). Just because you don’t have to make yourself presentable for the office does not mean you do not benefit from making yourself presentable. As simple as this sounds, taking a shower and putting on clean clothes makes you feel better, makes it easier to get out when the mood strikes, and makes those client/team video chats a little less scary for others.
Capitalize on your creativity Feel a creative wave coming on at 8pm but you’ve already clocked out for the day? Creativity can show up at all hours, and while I do not condone breaking family dinner for an impromptu coding session, make a note and revisit after the dishes are done. This is one of the most important benefits unique to working from home, you can strike when the motivation hits. Optimizing break time is equally important. Lasso your focus and step away for a moment if you’re spinning your wheels.
More working remote goodness below:

• Working from Home in 5 Simple Steps
• Introvert's Guide to Working Remote

• Read more about Distributed Development At Intridea

It is well known that Intridea has maintained a distributed development team since our inception in 2007. In the three years since our inception we have grown from 2 founders to nearly 30 "employees":http://intridea.com/about and one thing has always remained the same: Intrideans are encouraged to live and work from the places we call “home.� This is a serendipitous opportunity, made possible by a combination of technology and gracious managers.

The Rails community saw a surge of companies that were either entirely virtual or at least offered their developers the opportunity to work from home. For some reason the landscape of the agile Rails shop has changed in the last couple of years. And in the wake of what appears to be a declining number of software companies with remote teams, I’d like to take some time to share our strategies for how we make it work so well.

There are three major components to having a successful team of distributed software engineers: talent, autonomy, and technology.

Talent: If you are going to have a team of engineers working from home you’ve got to know that they are incredibly good at what they do. Talented engineers write good code, which turns in to great products, which leads to happy clients, which results in success for the company. Finding the good talent starts with word of mouth and ends with a thorough interview process. You want to find driven and self-motivated people that will work well without a lot of management. When you do secure talented engineers, first give them the tools they need to succeed and then give them some space to rock out.

Autonomy: This is where autonomy comes in. Micromanaging can cripple even the best developers; so allow them enough room to be able to do what you hired them to do without a lot of interference. Talented engineers love what they do and they don’t need to be micromanaged in order to get their work done. Treat your team like adults, not like juveniles and they will reward you by exceeding your expectations. Giving them a reasonable amount of autonomy shows them that you have confidence in their abilities.

Technology: Remote development teams would not be possible without the help of technology. There are so many great applications that make remote communication and collaboration possible. At Intridea we make use of several applications that help us to work together:

* "Present.ly":http://presently.com/ is our most critical day to day application for communication. It is where we exchange general ideas, information, ask questions, and even joke from time to time. It’s the cohesive medium that brings all of us together in the same space each day. Present.ly is our virtual office. When we start work for the day, we hop in and make our presence known. When we step away throughout the day to get lunch, grab coffee or make dinner then we usually update Present.ly to let our colleagues know where we are. When we return from being away, we give a quick “back� to let everyone know our status.

* "Campfire":http://campfirenow.com/ is a well-known application that allows for quick and easy collaboration. It provides a virtual “room� for developers and clients to talk about the project they are working on. Potsiadlo describes Campfire as the application we use for “getting down to business.� It is an effective tool for direct collaboration on a project.

* Instant Messaging and Email is a basic, yet important tool that we use to ping each other directly for specific answers. Two developers can use IMs or email to hash out some details or go over a basic problem.

* Phone/"Skype":http://www.skype.com/ /"GoToMeeting":http://www.gotomeeting.com/fec/: Sometimes you just have to pick up the phone, whether it’s to speak with a client, talk through a problem with a fellow developer, or to get in some voice time with your co-workers. There are a lot of great applications for web-baed communication but sometimes you can’t beat the efficiency of voice.

* "Unfuddle":http://unfuddle.com/: Our ticketing and project management system is what enables us to get actual work done in a seamless manner. Tickets are created by breaking up tasks into small chunks and are color-coded according to their priority level. Unfuddle allows us to run crazy custom reports and create custom fields that are searchable and sortable. One of the coolest features of Unfuddle is the powerful commit messages that “now parses incoming commit messages and appropriately resolves, closes, reassigns or comments upon tickets within your project.� A project management system is critical for any development team; but a great system like Unfuddle is an absolute must for a remote team of engineers.

At Intridea we utilize all of these tools (and many others) to maintain a rock solid team of distributed engineers that can produce high quality code at an incredible speed. Although most of our engineers work remotely we find that having a central office is a valuable asset to the entire team. Our office in DC serves as a space for local Intrideans to gather regularly and a place for out of town Intrideans to meet up when they visit. The office is also a good space to use for project kickoffs and to coordinate our local engineers when they go on site for clients.

Intridea works hard to find great talent and to provide them with the freedom, autonomy, technology, and respect they need to excel. We hire experts and treat them as such. As a result, every Intridean gets to wake up in whatever part of the world they call home. For many of us, “home� happens to be near our main office in DC. But many of us prefer waking up in Maine, California, Kansas, Georgia, and even China. Being able to work from one’s preferred location creates happy developers. And happy developers are more likely to be loyal and to write beautiful code that helps to ensure the longterm success of your company.