Effective Teamwork in Virtual Teams

Whether you lead a virtual team or simply participate on one, there are several ways to make your teamwork more effective. Given the added complexities of working in disparate locations—often across time zones and borders—it is challenging to establish strong communication, mutual trust, and overall camaraderie.

As I stated in an earlier post, a virtual team can be defined as a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries using technology. Virtual teams face unique challenges at every stage of their incarnation, but developing effective teamwork early is especially important.

Like all teams, a strong foundation for a virtual team requires a solid and agreed upon purpose (mission, goals, etc.), clarity among stakeholder expectations, a common understanding of team membership, clear roles and responsibilities, an opportunity to build rapport and relationships, and agreed communication protocols. But unlike co-located teams, virtual teams need to be more proactive, deliberate, explicit and disciplined in every aspect of working together.

Here are some tips when building an effective virtual teamwork environment:

1. Get to know each other by discovering commonalities. Without water cooler conversations or running into each other in hallways, getting to know one another needs to be more intentional than with co-located teams. Find out what you share in common by talking about things outside of the task at hand. Team building exercises can be conducted to encourage participants to open up and see each other outside of their workplace role.
2. Encourage trust among all team members. Trust is earned over time and cannot be mandated, of course. Take the time to allow for this trust to build on your virtual team. Ensure that every member of the team feels appreciated and comfortable speaking openly and honestly. Hold every person accountable for what they say they will do. Again team building exercises can help make building trust more intentional and therefore accelerate the process.
3. Ensure that team members interact with each other. Simply accomplishing individual tasks does not make for an effective team member. Each team member needs to know the group’s current priorities, they need to share knowledge, skills and experience with each other, and they need to learn from each other. Virtual team members don’t work alone, but together apart from one another. A virtual team is about a group of people working interdependently and therefore they need to interact in order to accomplish the group’s goals.
4. Create a virtual community. The duty and responsibility team members have toward each other helps create a sense of belonging, which is essential in any community. It is no different in a virtual environment. Enable and encourage communication outside of standard methods and channels. Consider virtual rooms, online bulletin boards, instant messaging and video conferencing in addition to standard conference calls. If at all possible, get individuals together in the same physical space and make time for non-work conversations, particularly at the beginning or end of a project.
5. Make it fun to be part of the group. Provide a “check-in” opportunity for everyone to speak up and be recognized at team meetings. Encourage humor and story telling among team members. Practical jokes can build camaraderie and ease tension as long as it is done in a respectful manner. And don’t forget to celebrate milestones and accomplishments both privately and publicly.

Effective teamwork may boil down to simply great communication, trust, respect and camaraderie. Implementing these five tips will go a long way in making teamwork on your virtual team more effective.

Mark Craemer                                                                            www.craemerconsulting.com

Seven Keys for Highly Effective Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are on the rise in every industry and with good reason. The ability to accomplish goals as a team without being located in the same physical location can accelerate processes, reduce costs and enable true global collaboration. However, the challenges of virtual teams are also greater than those in co-located teams.

A virtual team can be defined here as a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time and organization boundaries using technology. However, all the existing technology that connects people on virtual teams has limitations. Without the benefit of sitting next to or across a conference room table from others, much is lost in terms of clear communication, mutual trust, and overall group dynamics. Communication is especially difficult without nonverbal clues such as body language and facial expressions. And anything that can go wrong face-to-face can also go wrong with virtual teams—only faster and less gracefully.

The key requirements for highly effective teams (co-located or virtual) include:

Trust – People work together effectively because they trust one another. With trust, groups converse easily, organize tasks more quickly, and manage themselves better. Without face-to-face clues, trust is harder to attain and easier to lose.

Respect – Everyone on the team has something to contribute and everyone’s opinion needs to be welcome. Only through this mutual respect can teams expect to function well.

Cooperation – In order to function effectively as a team, it is vital to fully cooperate with one another. This means allowing for disagreements and welcoming challenges with regard to one another’s view.

Commitment – Perhaps the most important requirement for a highly effective team is the commitment we each make to the team. Only through our commitment will we persevere through difficult periods when we otherwise might lose hope.

To be highly effective, virtual teams need all of the above as well as the following key requirements:

1. Appropriate Technology – Using the right technology to enable effective collaboration and communication is vital. This technology may include email, conference calls, video-conferencing, remote presentations, text messaging, chat-rooms, bulletin boards, web-conferencing, and other tools. Encourage the use of a variety of them to deepen collaboration and broaden perspectives.

2. Outstanding Communication – Choosing the appropriate medium (video conferencing, email, telephone, etc.), depending on the message, can be as important as the content itself. You should also carefully consider your audience and the context for your message. Then ensure that the words you use will not be confused or misinterpreted.

3. Shared Vision & Goals – Establishing a clear and inspiring vision as well as team goals shared among all members is vital to optimal performance. In addition, clarity among individual roles as well as group and individual expectations are necessary for all members to be on the same page.

4. Sense of Community – Every community requires mutual trust, respect, fairness, and affiliation. These are essential on virtual teams because individuals can often feel isolated across time and space, and requires creative ways to build a sense of community among all members. This can often be accomplished through team building and team bonding exercises, but requires continual attention.

5. Strong (and Shared) Leadership – With the absence of an opportunity to “manage by walking around,” leaders should check-in with individuals spontaneously to discuss issues or opportunities that arise. Leadership on virtual teams is often shared and this should be encouraged whenever possible so bottlenecks don’t slow progress.

6. Coordination and Collaboration – Because we don’t physically see each other working on a specific task, it is essential for a greater level of tracking and coordinating on projects in virtual teams. This coordination often transcends organizational boundaries and requires the collaboration of every team member.

7. Appropriate Electronic Body Language – Our tone of voice in conference calls, word choice and sentence structure in emails, and the speed of our response can all impact how our messages are received and interpreted. Virtual teams require that we are mindful and more deliberate in how we convey our messages.

All teams require trust, respect, cooperation and commitment to be highly effective, and virtual teams require this and more. By paying particular attention to the seven key requirements, your virtual team can be highly effective as well.

Mark Craemer                                                                               http://www.craemerconsulting.com