Real groups are notoriously complicated. Anything that goes wrong face-to-face also goes wrong online, only faster and less gracefully.

Virtual Teams
Lipnack & Stamps

Consider the following:

On a recent project with DigtalEve, Toronto , a not-for-profit organization that promotes digital technology in the community, Gail Spears' team, bound together by technology, faced a major conflict.

It started innocently enough when a Russian-speaking team member received an email from a colleague that her latest web site design was awesome.

The Russian-speaking team member replied with a flaming message—she did not agree with the comments about her work, slammed the team for their poor assessment of it and slammed them a second time for their lack of respect. Different team members responded with their own nasty emails—they were insulted by her offensive message.

What followed was a round of nasty emails and hurt feelings until finally, another Russian-speaking team member was able to intervene and find out what the problem was.

The computerized Russian-English translator had translated “awesome” to “awful.”

A reasonable explanation for a very unfortunate situation. But still not a reasonable excuse for all the time wasted.¹

INTRODUCTION

Communicating clearly is just one of the challenges you will face as a member of a “virtual” team. A virtual team may be defined as:

“A group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organizational boundaries using technology.” ²

Many companies utilize teams to solve problems when working on projects, both large and small. Individual skills and talents can be combined to create solutions which would be difficult or impossible for a single person to realize. In the past, teams worked in the same area or traveled to meeting points to do their job.

Recent advances in communications technology have made possible now a different sort of team, called a virtual team , whose members may be spread out in different areas of the world, speak different languages, live in different time zones and work in any number of job categories and disciplines. Communications technology provides the unifying focus to these disparate elements.

LOCATING WORK AS A VIRTUAL TEAM MEMBER

You may encounter virtual teaming in various places and capacities. You may see an internal job listing or be asked to join a virtual team by a colleague or manager in your company or by someone you may have worked with in the past. Virtual teams in many cases also break organizational boundaries to include a company's customers and suppliers, even outside technical experts and consultants.

Online job listings can provide a good resource for those who may be interested and/or experienced in virtual teaming, as an adjunct to their primary job focus (one source estimates that 20% of jobs involve virtual teamwork ³). Searching for the term “virtual team” at the following sites yielded many hundreds of listings in all sorts of job categories:

• Hotjobs.com
• Monster.com
• Careerbuilder.com
• Craigslist.com

Though wages are not always listed, you can be sure that for competitive job listings such as these, the more skills you bring to the table the better your odds of landing the job. Interviews can sometimes be done in person but they are just as often done in a conference call, as outlined in this article from Monster.com's Hiring Center . Alternatively, your involvement with a virtual team may be only temporary—a few days or a few months—and compensation will be negotiated in a contract up front. Some tips that might be valuable:

• Negotiate for a block of time and pay whether or not the time is used.
• Negotiate by the project and contract services dependent upon assumed utilization (overages are “eaten” by the employee).
• Negotiate a “time and materials” contract.
• Include incentive packages / clauses. ⁴

VIRTUAL TEAMS ARE BECOMING MORE COMMON IN THE WORKPLACE

Why the emphasis on virtual teams? Because businesses have found that, when properly executed: “They increase speed and agility and leverage expertise and vertical integration between organizations to make resources readily available.” ⁵ In addition:

• Reduce costs by cutting travel costs and time, creating new “e-conomies” of scale, and designing better digitally enhanced processes.
• Shorten cycle time by moving from serial to parallel processes, establishing better communications, and generating more wide-spread trust.
• Increase innovation by permitting more diverse participation, stimulating product and process creativity, and encouraging new business development synergies.
• Leveraging learning by capturing knowledge in the natural course of doing work, gaining wider access to expertise, and sharing best practices. ⁶

In other words: “All of us are smarter than any of us.” ⁷ Virtual teams allow companies to tap many different skill sets and types of expertise without the need for gathering people in to one specific physical location.

Virtual teams you may come in contact with may be broken down in to several different categories:

• Networked teams—membership is frequently diffuse and fluid, with team members rotating on and off the team as their expertise is needed.
• Parallel teams—team with distinct membership which carries out special assignments, tasks or functions that the regular organization does not want or is not equipped to perform.
• Project or product development teams—team members conduct projects for users or customers for a defined, but--typically—extended, period of time.
• Work or production teams—has clearly defined membership and can be distinguished from other parts of the organization, teams usually exist in one function, such as accounting, finance, training, or research and development.
• Service teams—provide support services on a 24/7 basis.
• Management teams—collaborate on a regular basis by means of audio or video conferences about the achievement of corporate goals and objectives, never cross organizational boundaries.
• Action teams—offer immediate responses, often in emergency situations. ⁸

Another variation you may encounter is called a virtual office . The company has no central office at all, all the team members work from home offices dispersed in different geographical areas. Individuals may meet from time to time but the entire staff never meets except virtually. Part of their compensation was an expense account to buy equipment and supplies. See also this article from Monster.com on independent contractors joining together on a virtual team.

YOU'RE A VT MEMBER--HOW TO GET OFF TO A GOOD START

Start up of a virtual team is a critical time. Several steps can be taken to enhance the chances of success. Many companies feel it to be important at this point to have a face-to-face meeting with all team members in order to get the project off on the right footing. Close attention by team members can help ensure that the process stays on track.

• Identifying team sponsors, stakeholders, and champions.
• Sponsors—this person (usually a member of management) works closely with the team leader and acts on the team's behalf to cross organizational barriers, resolves conflicts of interest, obtains resources, and provides a link with upper management.
• Stakeholders—may be individuals from different functional areas, regions of the world, levels of management or partner organizations who have the greatest impact on the team's success and those who will be most affected by the team's results.
• Champions—finds resources, promotes the team's activities, removes barriers and provides advice—creates perceptions of the virtual team as successful and productive.
• Developing a team charter that includes the team's purpose, mission, and goals.
• Selecting team members—team membership usually falls in to three groups:
• Core members—the day-to-day work group.
• Extended members—experts called upon as needed.
• Ancillary members—review the team's work and deliverables.
• Contacting team members—getting the group up to speed to start work, team leaders should make sure all members understand the task, assure the appropriate amount of interaction among members and make special effort to facilitate the feeling of being part of the team.
• Conducting a team orientation session—if a face-to-face meeting is not possible, an audio or video conference is the next best choice. ⁹

The success of your team's project can be greatly enhanced with productive team meetings . Is the particular communications technology being used appropriate to the type of meeting being held? Is it working properly? Was training provided? Is everyone who needs to be there in attendance? Is everyone participating (not just one or two members)? Was the meeting scheduled fairly (taking time zone differences into account)? Is there an agenda and was it distributed in a timely fashion? Attention to these factors can help keep your meetings productive and on track.

COMMUNICATING WITH FELLOW VT MEMBERS

Interacting with your fellow team members will take place two ways: either asynchronous (different time) or synchronous (same time). Asynchronous communication technologies include things like email and bulletin boards where the sender and receiver do not have to present at the same time. Synchronous technologies include audio and video conferencing, instant messaging or groupware such as eRoom , Netmeeting , or Virtual Office (for a fuller discussion of communications technology, see this site's technical considerations section). Be sure to ask for training on any software or hardware with which you are unfamiliar. Time zone differences will be a factor here, as well. The further apart team members are, the more valuable synchronous meetings are. They will often involve inconvenient hours for one or more persons so it's important to remain aware of the time difference and minimize its effects whenever possible (or at least spread the pain).

When dealing with people from other cultures this chart can be very helpful: ¹⁰

BUILDING TRUST

Building trust is perhaps the essential ingredient for a successful virtual team. It's a difficult thing to build in a group where none of the members have met (or only briefly) in person. Trust also must often be built very quickly due to the short time line many groups are in existence. Outline below are several strategies for accomplishing this task:

• Performance and competence
• Reputation for performance and results—a positive track record builds trust.
• Follow-through—does the team member follow through on commitments? Does the team have a set of practices for follow-through?
• Obtaining resources—the ability to obtain resources also contributes to the perception of performance, promising what you cannot deliver erodes trust.
• Integrity
• Standing behind the team and all its members—disparaging other team members, the team's performance or the team's product can not only destroy the team's reputation but also signal a lack of judgment and integrity.
• Communication—ensuring that all team members receive critical information at the same time can foster integrity.
• Concern for the well-being of others
• Transitioning team members—An important aspect of trust is the belief that team leaders and members will display concern for team members who are leaving the team for other assignments.
• Impact on others—Virtual teams that are “teamcentric” and exhibit disregard for nonmembers may have difficulty in convincing potential team members and others that they are trustworthy. ¹¹

¹Prashad, Sharda. 10/23/2003 . Building trust tricky for ‘virtual' teams. Toronto Star.
²Lipnack, Jessica, and Jeffrey Stamps. 2000. Virtual Teams. John Wiley & Sons. P. 18.
³Building trust tricky for ‘virtual' teams.
⁴Human Resources and virtual teams (pdf)
⁵Duarte , Deborah, and Nancy Snyder. 1999. Mastering Virtual Teams. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass. P. 9.
⁶Virtual Teams. P. 22.
⁷Ibid. P. 162.
⁸Mastering Virtual Teams. P. 4-8.
⁹Ibid. P. 92-101.
¹⁰Ibid. P. 59.
¹¹Ibid. P. 139-143.