Does Distance Matter at Scale? Extending the “Distance Matters” Framework from Distributed Teams to Distributed Organizations

Distributed work has been a major area of focus for CSCW for the past two decades, as improved collaboration tools have made it possible to assemble distributed teams, abandon physical offices, and engage with collaborators across the world. Much of the CSCW literature on distributed work, however, focuses on intra-team dynamics. Notably, the "Distance Matters" framework has been influential in outlining five dimensions along which distributed teams must coordinate in order to work effectively: common ground, collaboration readiness, collaboration technology readiness, coupling of work, and organizational managerial aspects.

However, an under-considered aspect of the literature is the question of how distributed collaboration scales from a single team to an entire organization. As remote work takes hold on an increasingly large scale, this question becomes crucial. Indeed, teams do not exist in a vacuum; realistically, they exist in relation to other teams, which in turn exist within a broader organization. An effective distributed organization must therefore engage with three levels of analysis: intra-team, inter-team, and organizational.

In this paper, we expand the canonical "Distance Matters" framework and introduce a three-tiered model for studying distributed work, in which we describe how the canonical five dimensions of remote collaboration, developed at the intra-team level, should also be considered in a separate design process for the inter-team and organizational levels. The inter-team and organizational levels both produce novel collaboration and coordination challenges, as well as novel opportunities for resolving these challenges. Finally, we build this theory by presenting supporting ethnographic data from a field study at a major California National Laboratory, which transitioned the majority of its workforce to remote operations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.