VM Farms Blog: How we solved the remote employee problem for less than $100 (and had a bit of fun)

Monday, October 31, 2011

How we solved the remote employee problem for less than $100 (and had a bit of fun)

Problem: Running a startup and coordinating with a colleague that’s 4000km away. How do you remain nimble, keep the pace of ideas flowing, and maintain close working relationships without the overhead of initiating a conversation at a moments notice?

How we solved the remote employee problem for less than $100 (and had a bit of fun)

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TKcPRt4awKU

Teleworking is as common in the tech sector as the problems that accompany it. The physical separation and long periods of time between contact often result in significant wasted time. Wasted time in everything from warming up, to repeating explanations, to re-synchronizing efforts. A large organization may be able to navigate these issues by structuring their teams so that components of a project can be handled in multiple locations with well defined touch points and time periods, but this can be anywhere from frustrating to unworkable for a startup.

The theory was that the next best thing to having our colleague, Rudy, in our office, was having an open video line to him all day, effectively putting him in the office. We needed to test this idea to see if had any merit. We configured a spare laptop that was lying around, initiated a video chat, and placed it on a desk for a week.

The change in productivity was obvious to us even before the end of the first day. From our observation it was apparent that our conversational flow was no longer jilted or deflated by having to initiate a conference on the fly. More importantly, there were times where inertia or laziness prevented that call from being made. This was no longer an issue. Duplicate meetings weren’t happening anymore. Most crucially, Rudy was always a part of on-the-fly decision making, rather than simply being informed on the occasion that decisions had to be made quickly. Ultimately, this open channel improved the sociability of our work force. It’s a fact that your team is going to work better if there is a good bond between them. That’s not really an issue when you sit a few feet away from them, but much more challenging when communication is staggered, scheduled and strictly task oriented.

We let the experiment run to an end and were convinced we had our solution. We even had a few ideas on how to improve the experience. The biggest issue was his restricted field of view. We were constantly having to roll in front of the camera to have an interaction. We wanted to give Rudy the ability to rotate the laptop to whomever he was chatting with. This problem lent itself to a fairly simple solution that we thought we could put together rather quickly with an Arduino, a servo motor, a rotating platform, and a simple server that bridged communication between a serial port and TCP/IP port.

Tools List

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http://blog.vmfarms.com/2011/10/how-we-solved-remote-employee-problem.html

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