The U.S. General Services Administration's 18F has a great post on why distributed government is critical to highly-functioning public service teams, emphasizing a 'distributed first' approach to work.
The post touches on key issues that make work cultures great and how distributed operations facilitate these, including issues related to:
- Inclusivity
- Accessibility
- Trust and patience
- Staying present
- Making space for everyone
- Communicating
- Respecting time
18F:
At the General Services Administration’s 18F, we’ve seen that remote work can make teams happier, more productive, and more inclusive. Organizing ourselves in a remote-first way has improved our morale and allowed us to recruit and retain talent from all across the country. But building great distributed teams takes real work.
Building distributed teams
18F has been a distributed-first organization—that means designed for remote work, not just able to accommodate it—for all of its six years, and we pride ourselves on modelling effective remote teams. We were talking about distributed team best practices in 2015, and we’ve learned a lot more since then about how we make a distributed-first culture work.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how we collaborate with one another and with our partners. What we find is that building effective distributed teams is very much a matter of cultural values.