Culture and Happiness in Virtual teams

Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery are the true recipes for a highly motivated team according to Dan Pink, author of ‘Drive’ – and virtual teams more than any other kind of team need these to work well.

In this talk, I as the CEO will deliver a non-engineering focused talk about the how and why the company that brought you InfoQ.com and QCon is organized to deliver these three feelings to the teams that have been running completely virtually for over 7 years:

• How to foster and continually reinforce a feeling of connectedness, shared values and purpose in a virtual environment
• Meeting rhythms needed to keep people aligned
• Coach vs. manager mindset for leaders
• Process ownership vs. task execution delegation mindset for new hires
• Metrics, kpis, and transparency
• Quarterly objective planning and focus
• Transparency and trust
• Key tools: kanban, dashboards, business plan canvases, metrics, yammer (micro-blogging), skype, email, etc

InfoQ and QCon is run by C4Media, a company with 30 full time and networks of 150 part time contributors across over a dozen countries. Collectively we serve over 800,000 unique visitors/month online and 6000 conference attendees/yr.