CHAPTER 41

Building Teams and Understanding Virtual Teamwork

Tammy Bjelland

Teamwork in the digital age requires intentional planning and changes to ensure the outcomes desired. Virtual teamwork requires that you clarify the characteristics of teams whose members may not be colocated, embrace the value of documentation, and be aware of challenges that virtual teamwork incurs.

It feels great to be part of a productive team, and, of course, the opposite is also true. While it may seem logical to chase that good feeling by focusing on team-building activities, sometimes more action is necessary. While team-building activities have their place, it’s important to first establish the foundations of team success with documentation, especially when teams are dispersed across distance, time, and function.

That great feeling of being part of a high-functioning team doesn’t happen by accident—it happens because the team has established a solid structure and clear expectations that allow people to thrive. You need to understand the characteristics of effective teams in an increasingly digital workplace, enable effective teamwork by building a culture of documentation, and identify solutions to common challenges. These concepts are relevant for both new and seasoned teams, as well as for teams you are part of and teams you are supporting.

However, note that overhauling an entire team’s way of being may not be realistic or feasible. If your role doesn’t have the authority to fully change your team’s ways, you can instead make an immediate impact through tiny actions you can implement within a day or a week to make an immediate impact. Get your whole team involved by asking them to commit to their own tiny actions—the collective impact of these small shifts will be more than if you were to attempt sweeping changes on your own without commitment from everyone.

Modern Teams

Modern teams are flexible, mobile, and nonpermanent. Gone are the days when you were on a single team for a long period of time—the current reality of work is that we are on many teams, with multiple purposes, and for different lengths of time. You may be on a function-based learning team, but also collaborate closely with a human resources team for certain projects or initiatives. As a talent development professional, not only are you on your own team, but you’re also likely to support other teams by providing learning experiences and programs aimed at improving collaboration skills and team dynamics. The mutable nature of modern teams means that collaboration is more complex, and with added complexity comes increased potential for challenges.

Heavy dependence on technology to allow collaboration at a distance, combined with the probability of a workforce that is 25 to 30 percent remote multiple days a week, means that you are almost guaranteed to work on a virtual team at some point in your career (Lister 2020). If you use technology to collaborate with someone who does not work in the same office as you, you are part of a virtual team. Not only that, but you will also likely experience virtual distance, which is “a measurable social and emotional disconnect (conscious or unconscious) that arises when we increasingly rely on digitally mediated communication technology” (Lojeski and Reilly 2020).

One of the best ways to prepare for working on a virtual team is to act like you already do. By following virtual team best practices even if your team is hybrid (some members virtual and some in the office), you’ll build a team that is prepared to succeed no matter the team makeup or external circumstances that threaten the continuity of its activities.

Teams can be defined by the duration of their existence, their function, and even by the geographical location or distance among team members. Defining a team in these terms helps to set expectations about purpose, people, processes, and performance (Table 41-1).

Characteristics of Effective Teams

Members of effective teams have a sense of belonging and connectedness to one another and to the team’s purpose. Effective team members take four actions to ensure a successful partnership:

•  Create a foundation of trust.

•  Commit to team documentation to ensure equal access to shared knowledge.

•  Ensure clarity for accomplishing tasks.

•  Practice balanced team communication.

In virtual or hybrid teams, establishing these characteristics is more difficult than in traditional, office-based teams. This is because teams tend to default to the methods they are used to relying on, such as in-person communication and other behaviors, to connect, build trust, and stay informed.

When office-based practices take precedence, teams risk alienating and isolating not just remote team members, but also other team members who are not able to participate in these practices on a regular basis. Make it a habit to ask yourself, and your team, whether the team’s behaviors and processes make it possible for everyone, regardless of location, to thrive.

Create a Foundation of Trust

Trust is the foundation of success in any interpersonal relationship. One way to look at trust in teams is to consider two dimensions: task-based trust and relationship-based trust. Task-based trust is how you can delegate responsibilities within in a team and believe that each person will follow through. Relationship-based trust refers to whether you’re comfortable sharing that a crisis in your personal life has had an impact on your well-being, because you know you won’t be penalized for your disclosure (Table 41-2). Modern teams need indicators of both dimensions; however, the exact mix of indicators will depend on factors like individual working preferences and culture (Meyer 2014).

Office-based work cultures often prioritize face-to-face interactions because they believe that is the only way to develop trust. However, this mentality keeps teams from developing more inclusive practices that allow remote or part-time members to develop trust on an ongoing basis. It’s important for teams to intentionally design ongoing processes and rituals that allow all team members, regardless of location, to participate.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned “tiny actions” that you can take to build your team, no matter what your team-member role. This chapter presents several tiny-action ideas you can take, starting with this check-in activity.

Commit to Team Documentation

Effective teams document everything, and that documentation is consistent, accessible, and useful. Having thorough documentation prevents miscommunication, misalignment, and unproductive conflict. Documentation of decisions, work history, processes, and tasks enables teams to work without having to rely on getting information from other people.

When we minimize our reliance on others, we can:

•  Decrease interruptions.

•  Make quicker progress on projects.

•  Onboard new people more quickly.

•  Reduce information silos.

•  Create more consistent outcomes.

•  Save time by not repeating discussions.

This also levels the playing field for all team members because they can access and use information as needed, instead of having to depend on being able to contact someone else. Everyone has the knowledge they need to perform and their performance stays visible to others.

Additionally, it is not enough just to share expectations and assume team members will interpret those expectations in the way they were intended. As a team member or leader, you need to confirm clear and accurate understanding by asking team members to state what they heard. Provide ample opportunity for feedback and clarifying questions.

The Right Amount of Documentation

There is also such a thing as too much information. If there are too many places we need to update, too much reading to do, too many meeting minutes, and too many meetings, people will just stop paying attention. Your team needs to determine the right balance of documentation so members can quickly access the information they need.

One option is to adopt a single source of truth (SSoT) approach to documentation. SSoT is a concept from information systems design, which we can reframe to represent a single place that houses all the information you need to know about a certain topic. This is helpful because, when implemented correctly, it reduces or eliminates the chance that duplicate information will exist in multiple places. It also eliminates information silos.

The SSoT is where you go when you have questions about how to perform a process, want context, or need to ask a question. Adopting an SSoT framework can help alleviate the feeling of documentation overload. However, remember that an effective SSoT relies on people setting and following clear expectations and guidelines for its use and updates.

What documents does a team need? Effective teams use team agreements, user manuals, communication charters, performance expectations, agendas, meeting notes, and so on. Team documents should be clear, accurate, and complete. They should have single-person ownership and provide links when possible. For a complete list of essential team documents, visit the handbook website at ATDHandbook3.org.

Practice Accountability

Of course, the idea of documentation is one thing—the practice of documentation is another. One reason that teams fail to document effectively is because documentation takes work, both upfront and ongoing. Team members need to be committed to documentation and accountability for reading the documentation that is developed.

Help your team practice a habit of responding to questions by also referencing where to find the answer, when possible. Or, simply point them to the SSoT to find the answer. If it has not yet been documented, use the process you developed as a team to answer the question and then include that in a findable location.

Find ways to keep team members accountable for updating and reading documentation. For example, you could:

•  Add fun to a meeting or a channel with a quiz on your team’s documentation practices.

•  Have an information location challenge where team members race to find answers to questions.

•  Add contributing to and reading documentation to individual deliverables and tasks.

•  Add documentation KPIs to performance goals.

While it may seem as if a focus on documentation would make it hard for teams to adapt quickly, the opposite is actually true, because constraints are valuable for creativity and innovation (Acar et al. 2019). When the essential components of teamwork are well documented, members are free to channel their time and energy into developing valuable connections and fostering creativity and innovation. Framing documentation this way can generate buy-in from team members to commit to more consistent practices.

Ensure Clarity for Accomplishing Tasks

Whether you are standing up a new team or developing one you already have, aligning on key definitions and expectations is crucial to getting work done. The primary elements that need to be explicitly defined are purpose, people, process, and performance.

Purpose

The first step to building an effective team is to identify its purpose. Looking backward is helpful in designing effective learning experiences as well as building effective teams—think of the desired outcomes of the team’s activities and how you determined success. These are examples of team purpose:

•  Improve data collection and analysis across a function.

•  Deliver client services.

•  Create a marketing campaign.

In addition to driving the team’s focus, clearly articulating their purpose will help team members understand how their efforts contribute to the goal. When they can see how their work directly influences a greater purpose, team members are more likely to be engaged and satisfied in their work (Pink 2011).

People

Once the purpose of the team is clearly defined, you can accurately identify the people who need to be on the team to accomplish the goal. The people on the team should have the right mix of skills and other attributes that will enable them to complete the goal.

Processes

The processes of a team determine how the work gets done. Defining workflows and rituals gives clarity to team members on how they should be completing their tasks.

Performance

Team performance refers to how successful the team is in achieving its purpose. Defining standards for performance lets team members and other stakeholders know when they have achieved their goal or missed the mark. This allows them to stop, assess, and possibly change course.

Virtual teams sometimes struggle with articulating what performance looks like because they can’t rely on the visual cues they would see in the office. When this happens, it is a signal that the team is measuring input rather than performance. Virtual teams and in-office teams alike benefit from evaluating performance based on output instead of input.

Practice Balanced Team Communication

You send a message to a team member requesting some information. Time goes by—minutes, then hours. It’s now the next day. You wonder: Did they see the message? Should I follow up? When?

Has this ever happened to you? Or, have you been in the other person’s shoes?

You receive a message requesting some information. You’re in a meeting and then you’ve blocked off time for deep work because you have to finish a deliverable by the end of the day. These are all high-priority tasks.

Miscommunication, inconsistency, and mismatched expectations when it comes to response times all wreak havoc on team dynamics. Setting clear expectations for all communication can help prevent these problems from occurring.

Teams use an average of three communication channels to communicate (Mazareanu 2020), although with the current, rapid adoption pace of tools, it’s likely you’re using many more platforms to communicate with your team. (I once worked with a team that used more than 100 tools to perform their work.) These channels all need to be updated and checked regularly. Too often, multiple communication platforms are used the same way, which creates a heavy burden on the receiver of all those messages because they then have to filter through multiple inputs before they can determine how to respond.

Instead of using multiple communication tools that do the same thing, create a practice of matching the message type to the correct communication channel. Start by categorizing types of messages or communication and the urgency of response they typically require. Use Table 41-3 as a guide for your team.

Make sure these definitions are documented in a communication charter, which is another essential team agreement. The communication charter should also describe in detail what the expectations and uses are for each communication channel. See the example communications charter for Zoom meetings in Table 41-4.

Additionally, avoid ambiguity by setting expectations. For example, set standards for how team members should:

•  Acknowledge receipt. How and when should the receiver indicate that they have received the message and will respond according to the expectations outlined in the communication charter?

•  Close the loop. How should the receiver and sender signal that the issue is resolved?

•  Follow up. How and when should the sender follow up if they have not received a response?

You can, for example, set the expectation that everyone needs to acknowledge receipt of a message within four hours. The receiver then knows that while they have to acknowledge receipt, they can continue to focus on their priorities. And neither team member has to spend extra mental energy to figure out what to do in the situation. This may seem like a small gain, but small gains add up over a day and the overall impact on the team is substantial.

Dysfunctional Teams

A dysfunctional team is one that is experiencing conflicts or situations that have a negative impact on the team’s goals or team member engagement and satisfaction. Every team will experience conflict of some kind—this does not inherently mean that the team is dysfunctional. However, it is appropriate to classify a team as dysfunctional if it fails to function and fails to meet its purpose. When conflicts are ignored or left unresolved, they become systemic, which contributes to long-term problems.

Team issues can usually be traced to problems with the purpose (the work does not align with the purpose), people (interpersonal conflict), process (workflows are not accurately defined), and performance (the team did not meet its objectives).

There are several symptoms of dysfunctional teams, and each can be addressed as discussed here.

Burnout

Burnout looks like:

•  People working more hours than they should

•  Exhaustion

•  Increased and prolonged feelings of stress

•  Tension among co-workers

•  Complaining of uneven or unfair distribution of work

•  Team members feeling like they must be always on

•  Working on the weekends or after hours

•  Responding to every message immediately

•  Spending too much time in back-to-back meetings

What causes it: Burnout occurs from overworking and failing to set and maintain boundaries.

How to address it: Teams can address burnout by establishing a boundaries agreement. Overworking can be prevented by assessing the workload and communication expectations for each team member and reallocating resources when necessary. The boundaries agreement serves multiple purposes—it is an opportunity for the team to have an open dialogue about what boundaries look like and how they should respond when their boundaries are stretched.

Spending too much time in unnecessary meetings can breed frustration and wasted time. Improve your team’s balance of synchronous and asynchronous communication to reduce meeting time, interruptions, and the need to respond immediately to all requests. Virtual teams are especially prone to burnout because remote employees tend to work longer hours and may find it more difficult to maintain healthy boundaries between their work and personal lives (DeFilippis et al. 2020).

Isolation

Isolation looks like:

•  Team members are withdrawn and disconnected.

•  Team members don’t seem engaged or like they care about their work.

•  Team members feel like they are out of the loop.

What causes it: There are two types of isolation: social isolation and information isolation. Social isolation occurs when one or more people are disconnected from a group. Information isolation is when people are disconnected or lack access to information.

Both types of isolation can be caused by distance bias, which is the tendency to assign greater value to people and events that are close to us in space or time (Lieberman et al. 2015). In virtual teams, distance bias can result in unequal distribution of recognition and opportunities, as well as people being excluded from discussions, decision making, and access to information. Social isolation can also be caused by not allocating resources to permit team members to develop meaningful connections.

How to address it: As a cognitive bias, distance bias is likely to happen more unconsciously than consciously—but just because a bias is not intentional does not mean that the impact is any less harmful. All team members should be aware of distance bias and recency bias and how they influence team dynamics. Recognizing these natural biases allows teams to build processes and systems that prevent them from affecting team dynamics.

To combat social isolation, reserve some synchronous meeting time for developing meaningful connections. If your schedule is already meeting-heavy, convert meetings that focus on information sharing or updating to asynchronous formats.

Micromanagement

Micromanagement looks like:

•  Managers expecting nonstop updates from team members

•  Team members focusing more on pleasing the boss than doing their work

•  Managers taking credit for everyone’s successes

•  Team members being afraid to speak out

What causes it: Managers that don’t trust their employees to do their work become micromanagers. This is magnified in virtual teams, because micromanagers rely on visual cues of work input (like arrival and departure times or people being at their desks) and don’t believe their employees are working if they can’t see them.

How to address it: Curing micromanagement involves a three-pronged approach:

•  Dive into wider cultural issues that foster micromanagement. Take time to create a culture canvas to align the values of your team and how those values are reflected in team behaviors. During the team’s conversation on values, discuss any gaps that are uncovered and how to address them. Use the check-in activity described earlier to take the pulse of your team on an ongoing basis.

•  Document expectations and feedback. Setting clear expectations for work products can alleviate the need to micromanage.

•  Dedicate resources to developing effective management and leadership skills. Preference for micromanagement is a product of both environmental and individual factors. Some managers, even in organizations with high levels of trust and solid documentation practices, still resort to micromanaging because it’s what they know. Provide those managers with training to help them develop the attitudes they need to trust and foster trust in their team.

Low Performance

Low performance looks like:

•  Missing deadlines

•  Making mistakes

•  Low productivity

What causes it: Low performance can be a product of other symptoms of dysfunctional teams, like burnout or isolation. It can also be caused by an issue involving one of the team foundations. For example:

•  The team no longer understands or feels connected to the mission (purpose).

•  The team does not have the right people (or the right number of people) to do the work (people).

•  The processes may not be working as intended (process).

•  The metrics for success may be out of date (performance).

How to address it: Revisit the team charter and performance expectations to see if there is a discrepancy in the team’s purpose, people, processes, or performance. If those expectations still align with the goals, refer to the solutions suggested in the sections on isolation or burnout.

Final Thoughts

Building effective teams in the digital age requires the intentional design and modification of the structures that enable the outcomes you want. These desired outcomes include measurable outcomes like productivity and performance as well as less tangible ones like diversity of thought and that good feeling of being part of a great team. By defining the characteristics of effective teams in a virtual context, committing to a culture of documentation, and recognizing the signs and solutions for common challenges, you’ll be prepared to support your team’s success in any circumstance.

About the Author

Tammy Bjelland is the founder and CEO of Workplaceless, a training company that improves remote and hybrid team effectiveness by developing the capabilities that workers, managers, and executives need to succeed in distributed environments. With her background in higher education, publishing, EdTech, e-learning, and corporate training, Tammy is committed to driving and supporting the future of work by developing people. She holds a BA and an MA from the University of Virginia and is a Certified Professional in Talent Development and Certified Master Trainer from the Association for Talent Development. She lives in Winchester, Virginia.

References

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DeFilippis, E., S. Impink, M. Singell, J. Polzer, and R. Sadun. 2020. “Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work.” National Bureau of Economic Research, July. nber.org/papers/w27612

Lieberman, M.D., D. Rock, H.G. Halvorson, and C. Cox. 2015. “Breaking Bias Updated: The Seeds Model.” NeuroLeadershipJOURNAL 6, November. scn.ucla.edu/pdf/Lieberman(2015)Neuroleadership.pdf

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Meyer, E. 2014. The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. New York: Public Affairs.

Pink, D.. 2011. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Recommended Resources

Bjelland, T. 2021. “Async vs Sync: Balancing Remote Team Communication.” Workplaceless, April 13. workplaceless.com/blog/async-vs-sync-communication.

Lencioni, P. 2016. The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.

Scheuer, K. 2021. “Async Wins: What Teams Gain by Going Async.” Workplaceless, June 1. workplaceless.com/blog/what-teams-gain-by-going-async.

Scheuer, K.D. 2020. “Remote Team Building Activities: Create Trust While Distributed.” Workplaceless, March 2. workplaceless.com/blog/remote-team-building-activities.

Workplaceless. 2020. “6 Expert Steps to Improving Your Remote Team’s Communication.” Workplaceless, July 22. workplaceless.com/blog/improving-remote-team-communication.