INTRODUCTION

An Overview of Virtual Teams

Walk into any office today and you know that things are not as they were a decade ago. If you engage employees in conversation, many of them will say that they are working on some projects with colleagues who do not work in the same building, the same city, or even the same country. Ask them if they have met these teammates and some employees may claim to have viewed pictures posted on the Internet, while others may describe introductions made during webcam meetings or a visit to a corporate off-site event.

Clearly our business landscape has changed.

The virtual team, VT for short, is a work arrangement in which a group of people share responsibility for goals that must be accomplished in the total, or near total, absence of face-to-face contact. With the rise of technology and globalization, virtual teams are now reshaping the way we think and do business.

Organizations have always operated in multiple locations, but now, colleagues are increasingly asked to work together across geographic boundaries, with shared responsibility for outcomes. Global operations have emerged throughout the world of commerce, running 24/7 on different continents and across times zones. Many large conglomerates place teams in different countries with the expectation that schedules will fit the project—and follow the sun—as one team hands off work product to another. This arrangement is possible because technology brings efficiencies in creating work product and solving complex business issues quickly.

Although many virtual work arrangements exist today for employees at all levels, the number and diversity of these types of arrangements (whether home offices or office locations) just keep increasing. Enabled by technology, the virtual team is a natural solution for getting deliverables out the door in our fast-paced, global environment. Increasingly, leaders are charged with quickly putting together teams of individuals with appropriate skills and abilities to fit within a project’s time line, regardless of where the talent is physically located. In such situations, e-mail has usurped voice mail while conference calls have replaced conference rooms.

The Need for Virtual Teams

Virtual team arrangements have become increasingly popular as companies rethink their human capital resources and real estate expenditures. Of course, teamwork has long been a common work value, with many companies using teams organized around successive tasks; so, the virtual team is only the latest accommodation to the realities that govern work process. The virtual team is unique, however, because the most appropriate expertise is pulled together from many locations and even organizations—and yet team members may never meet in person. With virtual work arrangements, recruiting talent and expertise is possible, regardless of where people are based.

More than any other factor, information technology has enabled the proliferation of virtual teams. With mobile devices, text messaging, e-learning modules, and cloud computing, team members are able to interact in more accessible ways, anywhere, anytime. Thanks to highspeed networking technology and wireless connectivity, instantaneous communication across the world is possible, at low cost, at a touch of a button, screen, or keyboard. Today, we take for granted this phenomenon; not too long ago, it was the province of futurists. This faster-paced environment, combined with a slowed economy, brutal cost cutting, and relentless outsourcing, has forced companies to rethink every aspect of their operations.

As businesses expand globally to new markets, they launch operations where labor is cheap and the cost of living is lower; opportunities are provided for local employees to collaborate on a wider scale and develop expertise. Reverberations are felt beyond their shores as relentless pressure builds for quickly producing more goods that are less costly, forcing creative solutions for quicker breakthroughs. Virtual teams, then, are beneficiaries of technology-based, cost-conscious, and globally sourced business operations (see Figure I-1).

Figure I-1. Benefits of virtual teams.

The Virtual Landscape

Another force fueling the emergence of virtual teams is the need to move resources quickly. Competitive factors are a compelling motivator to find alternative work arrangements so that work processes and procedures can mirror the accelerated rate at which the world now operates.

Organizations are aware that the marketplace is increasingly multicultural and diverse. They know their business colleagues and customers may come from many different cultures with an inherently different worldview. Trade is dynamic and reflects the easy flow of goods and services across our globe. Hand in hand with business interests creating new global trade links is the relatively new practice of offshoring, where core and noncore business functions are outsourced far from headquarters to take advantage of low labor costs and the availability of highly educated workers, with technology serving as the great equalizer.

Greater diversity in the workforce is a by-product of virtual teams, since professionals with different backgrounds, styles, and languages “work at the same table.” Leaders of virtual teams are challenged to create a smooth operation in spite of the many differences at play. Given that possibilities for misunderstanding and cultural blunders are magnified in such situations, those charged with ensuring business success would do well to expand their own tools and techniques to deal with diverse teams.

Leaders and managers must be flexible and able to adapt to this diverse workforce and global consumers. Leaders must understand differences in worldviews, communication styles, ethics, and etiquette of the people they deal with, both internally and externally. They must understand the historical, political, and economic reference points of different people. And they have to do all that while managing their own tasks and responsibilities.

Even if you are a virtual manager at a small company, you are probably interacting virtually with global audiences. The good news is that you are not alone. The bad news is that you are faced with challenges of virtual management. And that means you need to excel at multitasking in this ever-changing virtual world.

If you are responsible for a virtual team, you are responsible for the team’s results. Before you even begin, here are a few of the challenges of virtual leadership:

Relationships. How will you get to know your virtual team members? How will you build rapport? How will you develop small talk about their personal interests?

Performance. How will you assess what kind of job they are doing? How will you evaluate their leadership skills, their development, and their results? When and how will you actually observe their performance?

Communication. How will you keep your direct reports updated? So much happens in a day; how will you have time to keep all team members in the loop?

Delegation. When your team members work off-site somewhere and you don’t even have a chance to see them or observe their daily work activities, how will you know who is capable of doing what? How will you delegate assignments and track their deadlines?

Team Building. Virtual team members are dispersed. How can you build a strong team when your people have never even met each other?

E-Mail. You get hundreds of e-mails a week. How will you use e-mail effectively to manage your staff?

Conflict. With people so dispersed, how will you even know when you have a conflict with a direct report? Or when your direct reports have a conflict with each other?

Promotion. How do you evaluate when someone is ready for promotion? Conversely, how do you keep from being “snowed” by someone who’s trying to get ahead? How do you know when it’s time to eliminate a poor performer?

Teleconferencing. When will you have time for longer teleconferences? (You hate teleconferences.)

Walking the Talk. In the old days, we did management by walking around. We showed people what we wanted by our own actions and body language. How will your direct reports observe you and your management style? How can you “model” if you don’t see people?

Travel. How often are you going to have to fly around the country to meet your direct reports? If your team is spread across the globe, how much international travel will be required?

In this new business environment, the old skills of yesterday are no longer sufficient. They worked fine when business was simpler. They probably even helped you get promoted to this level. Remember when you could actually walk down the halls and “drop in” on your direct reports? You could observe how they ran meetings, watch them interact with subordinates, even sit in on difficult conversations. When completing performance evaluations, you could list examples of things you personally observed. You could look into their offices, see family photos or awards, and be prompted to ask about the kids or favorite hobbies. They also dropped by your office or had lunch together to build a relationship.

Management was hard even then, but it’s a lot more complicated now.

Welcome to your virtual reality; welcome to virtual teams!

Defining Virtual Teams

Virtual teams have many names and definitions. I interviewed more than 150 virtual team managers and members in preparation for this book, and no two interviewees defined virtual teams the same way. Virtual teams are referred to, variously, as geographically dispersed teams, global teams, internationally distributed teams, temporary cross-functional teams, dispersed project teams, knowledge worker teams, communication technology teams, technology-mediated teams, computer-supported or computer-mediated teams, offshore teams, interdependent groups across time and space, cyber network teams, and the list goes on.

Hand in hand with the concept of virtual teams is their powerful enabler: information technology. I mean the popular collaborative tools that most individuals refer to when describing how their virtual teams work. Without these communication tools (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, teleconference bridges, message boards, web conferencing, webcams) virtual teams would remain a novelty in the world of work. Yet, make no mistake. Despite the fact that technology is the lifeline of the virtual team, its essence still focuses on people and places.

Here are some of the more interesting definitions and descriptors of virtual teams, gathered from the interviews I conducted with VT managers and members from different industries:

“People who need to work together who aren’t currently in the same office. They can also be working in different departments, or different cities and countries, and still operate virtually as well.”

—VT MANAGER, HUMANITARIAN RELIEF ORGANIZATION

“Any team that doesn’t have a set office that people show up in regularly. There are really two sides to it: 1) pulling together an ad hoc team and creating a virtual team to work on a project on an ‘as needed’ basis, and 2) virtual teams working across time zones using technology.”

—VT MEMBER, TECHNOLOGY COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY

“A group of people who get together without a solid line reporting relationship to solve a problem. The key attribute is that virtual teams have some accountability to deliver results, but their players do not have a formal reporting relationship to the team leader.”

—VT LEADER, ELECTRONICS/BIOCHEMICAL COMPANY

“I see the virtual team having two definitions: 1) There are people who work only from home. They are telecommuting and never go to the office. 2) There are people who are geographically dispersed. They go to an office somewhere else and may never meet. Virtual teams work according to what needs to be done and once the project is completed, these teams are gone.”

—SCIENTIST, TELECOM COMPANY

My Definition of Virtual Teams

I have always opted for a simple definition of the term virtual team, as follows:

A virtual team—whether across the street or across the world—is a team whose members simultaneously work together to a common purpose, while physically apart.

The traditional definition of a team applies here: There is a common goal or purpose; team members have complementary skills and share interdependent performance goals for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. The difference is virtual: simultaneously working together, while physically apart.

A virtual team does not always mean that individuals work from home. Many virtual teams consist of employees who work both at home and in small groups at the office, but in different geographic locations and organizational boundaries. Even when teams are situated locally, many people refer to the “fifty-foot rule” and the probability of communication between coworkers dropping with the distance between them. After about fifty feet (fifteen meters), it doesn’t matter whether team members are on different floors of the same building or in different states. Your teammate in the office across the street may be just as virtual as the coworker in India.

Working in Virtual Teams

Virtual teams bring possibilities of recruiting talent and using resources irrespective of where they physically reside, and in the process breakthroughs are achieved faster and costs are lowered. Virtual teams do, however, come with their own pros and cons, or opportunities and challenges.

One of the more profound issues is how to get team members to bond and develop the collective energy so vital to pushing projects forward and achieving results. A great exercise that I often use with newly formed virtual teams involves asking them to review a list of opportunities and challenges (see Figure I-2) and check off the three or four most important ones. I then combine input from all team members and begin a discussion about the opportunities people are most excited about and the challenges that are their greatest concerns. This exercise can be done in person or by conference call (video or telephone) to allow team members to chart, describe, and discuss issues as a group, creating a bonding experience. It also gives the virtual manager additional information to incorporate into the team operating principles, or Rules of the Road, and help virtual teams establish ongoing mechanisms to overcome these challenges.

Figure I-2. Opportunities and challenges of virtual teams.

How Virtual Teams Differ

Virtual teams use many different communications tools as their primary sources of information exchange. These tools can be organized as same time/same place, same time/different place, same place/different time, or different time/different place.

Virtual teams can be assembled for a variety of purposes as well, as shown in the following list.

In addition to the different types of communications options and the different types of virtual teams, these arrangements also bring with them people from various organizations and departments whose cultures may differ in terms of how communication is handled, trust is built, conflicts are resolved, and work gets done. These cultures span organizational and national boundaries and are an added layer that is often overlooked. I dedicate a whole chapter to cross-cultural communications in virtual teams later in this book and provide you with guidelines and suggestions for handling geographically distributed cultures across time and space.

Success Factors of Virtual Teams

The factors that ultimately determine a virtual team’s effectiveness would seem similar to those that govern on-site teams: Clarify team goals, roles, individual responsibilities, and deadlines. Communicate frequently. Build trust among members. Agree upon ground rules for meetings and other interactions (e.g., “We will answer e-mails within twenty-four hours,” or “Ming and Jane want calls to come to their office phones, but Ida prefers us to call her cell”). But there are unique and particular issues that come up in virtual teams that are critical to their success.

One rule above all guides virtual team behavior. It is especially vital when members haven’t met in the flesh and when they cannot see each other’s facial expressions, read body language, or otherwise pick up the nonverbal signals inherent in face-to-face communication. The rule is: Assume positive intent of your teammates. It means simply giving others the benefit of the doubt.

I asked the various virtual team managers interviewed for this book this important question: “What is the secret of your virtual success?” Here are their main points, along with some observations of my own that come from my consulting experience:

Assemble your virtual team for an initial face-to-face meeting (if possible) and make sure you interact with your team at least once a year in person.

Create structure and establish standards to manage the team remotely and ensure that everyone is clear on the roles/responsibilities, approaches, and main elements: who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Focus on the vision and mission of the team at the beginning of each meeting.

Break down team goals into smaller (short-term) objectives.

Employ technology that supports state-of-the-art reliable communication and collaboration, and train team members how to use it.

Develop a way for team members to get to know one another (e.g., post bios and pictures on a team website and/or incorporate them into presentations).

Pay attention to silent members on your calls; know who contributes, who doesn’t, who stays involved, and who stays in the background.

Create inclusive discussions while also encouraging open and free (especially free of politically correct dialogue) communication.

Summarize team meetings, action items, deliverables, and decisions; distribute information to all team members, and have a backup communication plan/system in place for when members can’t attend.

Develop mechanisms for building accountability and trust on the team.

Handle conflicts and misunderstandings outside the main conference call. Follow up with individuals afterward, but do it in private. Make sure you are respecting their cultures.

Get deliverables out the door efficiently while meeting quality standards and time guidelines.

Give frequent praise for accomplishments and celebrate team success.

These and other best practices, suggestions, tips, and techniques to help you to successfully manage your virtual teams are further discussed throughout the book.