Other Research

Improving Remote Collaboration Finding a Job, Continuing to Learn, and Advancing in Your Career

Improving Remote Collaboration With Video Conferencing and Video Portals

Large organizations of all types are often spread across multiple locations. From an organization’s perspective, this can make it easier to hire the best talent or to form the best temporary teams, as employees or contractors can work from almost anywhere and highly skilled employees can be recruited irrespective of their location. The problem is that distance matters, and co-located teams perform better than distributed teams.

Google has offices around the world, and distributed individuals and teams need to collaborate across multiple locations. One way Google assisted teams with remote members was via extensive internal video conferencing (this was pre-COVID, when video meetings surged).

Google hired me to address several questions:

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How well is remote collaboration working within Google?

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What works well, what tools and techniques are effective, and how satisfied are employees with their current situation?

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Will new tools and technologies eliminate the need for travel?

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Can remote collaboration be improved by changes in the technology, physical spaces, or communication patterns or dynamics?

Methodology

An ethnographic approach, with participant observation while I was “embedded” within a Google group. I interviewed employees across multiple locations, studied groups that had spontaneously set up “video portals” (an always-on video connection between different locations), observed video meetings, and conducted a large-scale survey.

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How to Find a Job, Continue to Learn, and Advance in Your Career

Over the years, many people have asked me for advice about finding a job, and in 2015 I finally put my thoughts to paper. I’ve continued to add content since then, and I expanded the paper to include multiple other topics, now arranged in three sections:

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