Video calls are even worse than chat or email, because sharing information works but doesn’t scale – you can’t reasonably have more than 5-or-so people in a video call, and sharing the recording of a full video call is just pointless.

Effective distributed teams understand that the record of a call is what counts, not the call itself.

People are not born with the ability to work in a distributed team. Humans function best in groups that collaborate in close proximity to one another; it is only very recently that technology has started to enable us to override that to an extent — giving us other benefits like the ability to work from home, or the ability to hire people residing anywhere, provided they have internet connectivity.

There is one thing that I do believe video calls are good for, and that is to use them for recurring meetings as as an opportunity to feel the pulse of your team.

[Via]