What Building Distributed Teams Actually Requires

I run two companies across geographies that span multiple time zones. My teams work from Odisha, from cities across India, and in coordination with clients and candidates across the US, Europe, and Asia. I did not plan this as a distributed-first model from day one, it emerged as the business grew and the talent I needed was not always in the same city.

What I learned in the process is that building distributed teams is genuinely different from managing co-located ones, and that most companies learn this the hard way.

The common failure pattern looks like this: a company that built its culture and processes in a co-located office shifts to remote or distributed work, discovers that things that used to happen automatically now require effort, and attributes the friction to remote work being harder rather than to co-located assumptions being misapplied. They implement more video calls to recreate the co-located feel. The video calls don't solve the problem. People get fatigued. The team underperforms. The company concludes that distributed doesn't work.

It does work. But it requires building differently from the start.

The documentation imperative

The single most important structural difference between co-located and distributed teams is what happens to information.

In a co-located office, enormous amounts of information travel through informal channels: conversations at desks, overheard discussions, the ambient awareness of who is working on what and how it's going. You absorb context without trying to. You can ask a quick question and get an immediate answer. The organizational knowledge is, to a significant degree, in the air.

In a distributed team, that informal information channel doesn't exist. What isn't written down isn't shared. What isn't shared isn't known.

What isn't written down isn't shared. What isn't shared isn't known.

The discipline I've built, imperfectly, over time, is to treat writing as the primary medium of work rather than a secondary one. Meeting decisions get documented. Strategic decisions get written context. Process changes get recorded in a shared place. Not because writing is more valuable than talking, but because writing is the only thing that travels across time zones and persists after the conversation ends.

This changes who you hire. Written communication ability is a legitimate and important hiring criterion for distributed teams in a way that it is not for co-located ones. People who think clearly and communicate clearly in writing are not the same population as people who think clearly and communicate clearly in person. Both populations are large. They're not identical.

Time zones as organizational architecture

Time zones are not just a scheduling inconvenience. They are an organizational constraint that shapes what is possible in a distributed team.

A team spread across a six-hour time zone difference, say, India and Western Europe, has roughly four hours of real-time overlap per day. That is enough for critical synchronous conversations but not enough for the kind of continuous collaboration that co-located teams use for creative and problem-solving work.

A team spread across a twelve-hour difference, India and the US West Coast, has almost no natural overlap. Even with flexible schedules, the synchronous window is small and expensive (either the India team works late or the US team works early, and both arrangements exact a cost).

The organizational implication is that the larger the time zone spread, the more the work needs to be designed for asynchrony. Decisions that would be made in a quick co-located conversation need to be made through a documented process that doesn't require everyone to be awake at the same time. Projects need to be structured so that handoffs between time zones are clean, one team's output becomes the next team's input without a synchronous meeting to bridge the gap.

This is not natural for most people trained in co-located work environments. It requires explicit design and explicit training. Companies that don't do this design work end up with distributed teams that are effectively not distributed, they're just co-located teams that happen to be in different cities, connected by exhausting amounts of cross-timezone videoconferencing.

What I look for when hiring for distributed roles

The hiring criteria that I have found most predictive of success in distributed roles differ from what I'd weight most heavily in a co-located context.

Self-direction is the most important. In a co-located setting, the work environment itself provides a significant amount of direction and accountability, people around you are working, managers can observe progress, the rhythm of office life structures the day. In a distributed setting, the individual needs to provide that structure for themselves. This is a genuine skill and not everyone has it. Candidates who have a strong track record in co-located environments but have never worked independently are a higher risk than candidates who've demonstrated the ability to manage their own work, time, and priorities.

Communication clarity is the second criterion. Not charisma, not presence, clarity. The ability to explain what they're working on, what they need from others, and what's blocking them, in writing, without ambiguity or excessive length. This correlates with good distributed team performance because it's the primary differentiator between someone who creates alignment and someone who creates confusion.

The third criterion is a genuine comfort with delayed response. In co-located environments, most questions get answered within minutes. In distributed teams, a question sent at end of day in India might not get answered until the start of day in the US. People who are comfortable with that delay, who can move on to the next thing rather than waiting for the response, operate better in distributed contexts than people who need immediate confirmation to proceed.

The relationship investment that distributed teams require

The piece of distributed team building that I think gets underweighted is the investment in human relationship that it requires.

Co-location builds relationships through accumulation: the daily interactions, the lunch conversations, the shared experiences of working in the same physical space. Those relationships provide a foundation of trust and goodwill that teams draw on when things get hard.

Distributed teams don't build that foundation automatically. They have to build it deliberately: structured one-on-ones that go beyond task updates, team rituals that create shared experience across distance, offsites when the economics allow, and the kind of direct and honest communication that allows people to raise issues before they become fractures.

I invest disproportionately in the relationship layer of my distributed teams because I understand that the deficit is structural. The work environment doesn't build the relationship automatically. I have to build it on purpose.

The companies that make distributed work work are the ones that understand this and treat relationship investment as a cost of the distributed model, not an optional add-on. The ones that treat distributed work as co-located work minus the office discover that what they've subtracted is more important than they realized.

For companies hiring leadership into distributed structures, the search process has to account for how the role will actually operate, not just who looks right on paper. Majhi Group's searches include explicit conversation about operating model and leadership context. Request an assessment to discuss.

See also: AI and the Future of Talent Sourcing, Global Talent: How Borders Are Dissolving, Remote Work: What We Now Know

Sources

GitLab: The Remote Work Report

Buffer: State of Remote Work 2024

McKinsey: What Executives Are Saying About the Future of Hybrid Work