Jackie Danicki posted the following quote here:

The key question in organizations is not the typical one — how do you motivate people or engage people? It’s how do you keep management from destroying motivation?
– David Sirota

Part of the managers’ credo should be “First, do no harm.” Many managers feel that they need to assert their authority right away by instituting new policies and making big changes as soon as they are assigned to the team. While there are rare occasions where this is called for, it usually isn’t. It is far better to spend a bit of time getting to know the team, as well as how and why they do things today. Even when radical change is called for, you are better positioned to implement radical change when the team feels that you understand them. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for morale and motivation busting fight with the team. This is especially true with bright creative types, such as engineers.

I ran across this post announcing a new competitor to WebEx, called ZOHO Meeting. The article is glowing; though ZOHO is an advertiser on the site, so bring your grain of salt along. The comments following the post are fairly useful, as several other alternatives are mentioned.

I remember how a similar product, Microsoft’s NetMeeting, changed my world. I was working on a team that included people in London, New York, Connecticut, and California. The ability to easily share a pc desktop made it much easier to collaborate. We used it all the time for one-on-one sessions between developers, internal demos, trouble-shooting, and during meetings.

It caught on all over the company and very quickly sales and support saw how valuable this functionality was. While NetMeeting worked well behind the firewall, it wasn’t the right solution for dealing with folks outside. We used WebEx for a while, and then we switched to another similar service. Both worked well and provided a ton of value.

If you have to work in distributed team, I highly recommend using this type of tool.