1. How do you define group productivity?
2. I'm willing to bet that most of those studies looked at what happens when you take some "on-site" positions and simply hand them to remote team members. Why? Because that's what usually happens. Companies do not want to alter any processes, team structures or responsibilities to explicitly deal with remoteness. Naturally, if you pretend that someone from another state is sitting in the next cubicle, bad things will happen. Companies that embrace remoteness from the start (like GitHub) seem to be doing fine, precisely because they treat remoteness as an asses, not a minor concession someone had to make to workers.
* I'm willing to bet that most of those studies looked at what happens when you take some "on-site" positions and simply hand them to remote team members.*
You'd lose that bet. There are a variety of different methodologies and areas studied.
Companies that embrace remoteness from the start (like GitHub) seem to be doing fine, precisely because they treat remoteness as an asses, not a minor concession someone had to make to workers.
Again - not trying to argue at all that people cannot be fantastically successful as a distributed team.
What I am saying is that every single piece of research I can find says that colocated teams are more effective. This is... interesting... to me.
How much of that research includes open source projects and companies like GitHub and 37signals?
How much of it was looking at teams that are "super distributed", for example, between the US and India, where major differences in time and culture can play a huge role compared to say, a team distributed between Chicago and New York?
