How I collaborate with remote team - Colin Watson, Digital Producer at Morpht

Hi Colin nice to meet you. To start off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hi! My name is Colin Watson I live in Sydney, Australia and I work for a company called Morpht.
 

So you mainly work from your office, have you ever thought about working remotely before?  And how far away from work do you live right now?

I’ve actually worked for other companies before where I’ve worked purely off-site. It definitely has its pros and cons. It takes me 15 mins by bicycle to get to work. I also spend at least a month in Japan and during that time I would rent out a space to work out of.

I’ve also had the pleasure of working out from ANNAI’s Osaka office before in the past as well. Being able to bounce ideas off other people while working can give you a boost in terms of creativity and so on, but it could also prove a distraction when you really enjoy talking with the people around you.
 

I definitely agree with you on that one.  It’s fun talking with friends while working but sometimes you just don’t get anything done. Getting back to the subject of working remotely, do you have any colleagues are working remotely?

Yes, we have 4 people in the Czech Republic, 1 in Tasmania, 1 in Melbourne, 1 about 2 hrs outside of Sydney. 

Wow 4 people from the Czech Republic. Do you ever find the time difference to be interfering with your work at all?

Sometimes it does get in the way a little but you find ways to adjust and once you get used to it, the different work hours could be quite rewarding. Actually just within Australia alone we’re already working around 3 time zones.

Not to mention that it gets a little more complicated once “Daylight Savings” comes into play because some regions in Australia doesn’t observe “Daylight Savings”. 
 

Ah yes, good old “Daylight Savings”. I remember having to move all our clocks forward 1 hour around the beginning of Spring and then change it back towards the end of Autumn. Is there anything that you’d like to try doing in the future?

In the future, I'd like to collaborate with more people from around the world: create a hub where we can meet in each other's towns and work on a project together.

Ending

During the interview the talk of how advancements in VR(Virtual Reality) and AR(Augmented Reality) could change the way we work with people in other regions. For example with some camera systems and a huge wall sized screen of some sort we could set up a system where it looks like your office in one city is connected to another office even though you're kilometers apart.

Instead of an empty wall you could have live stream footage of your colleagues working at their office in another city, and the different types of interactions that may lead to would be interesting.