Virtual Teamworking

[Carole Spiers - GulfNews blog]

Virtual working has become increasingly common in recent years thanks to globalisation; growing concern for the environment and the need for organisations to cut costs. It has been enthusiastically accepted by ‘Generation Y’ employees (those born between 1975 and 2000) who have grown up in a digital world and who see working remotely as part of a way of working that fits in with their lifestyle.

 

In fact, virtual working is an accepted part of their daily lives.

However, there are the others, particularly managers, who have difficulty in accepting this modern way of working because they believe it is necessary to see team members face-to-face, every working day. They feel challenged in trying to manage the performance and productivity of people whom they rarely see, and will endeavour to remain in the physical, non-internet world of the 20th century as long as possible.

[...]

So, what are the key issues that managers have to face if they are going to maximise the potential of their remote working groups and ensure that productivity is maintained whereby it no longer matters whether there is any physical contact on a daily basis?

[JettM - Siemens Enterprise Communications blog]

When your teams are no longer working in the same office, how do you make sure you're communicating effectively?

 

If you’re anything like me, working anywhere can mean you’re at the airport, on the train, in the coffee shop or in the car – the list is endless. Because of this I seem to know more about the people I follow online than the interests of those that I work with.

 

Having worked virtually for over 5 years now, I can safely say it’s wrong to assume virtual work environments are challenge-free – instead different rules apply. I have learned many things, and want to share 5 tips that have really helped me when working in a virtual team.

[Wayne Turmel - Management Issues blog]

While I have occasionally ( and probably accurately) described as rude, it has never been intentional. Seriously. That being said, I firmly believe that being too concerned about being polite and nice has, in fact, had a negative impact on your ability to truly lead your remote or virtual team and get the most from them in virtual meetings. 

 

In particular, there are two concepts that have reached mythical status that need to be re-examined. Not overturned completely, because they arose for good reason, but looked at a little more critically.

 

The reasons are simple. If the biggest complaints about webmeetings and remote teams are 1) a lack of participation or input, and 2) a lack of accountability - when people don't participate, contribute or follow up - then we have to examine how to change those problems. In the process, especially as you try to change the culture of your team, some tension is inevitable.

[Stephan Klaschka - OrgChanger blog]

Turning back?

In times where many companies push their employees to work from home and employees request this new freedom, YAHOO’s announcement surprised putting away with it all and returning to the old 9-to-5 office hours.  (WSJ, March 5, 2013)

Senior leaders like YAHOO’s new CEO, Marissa Meyer, have doubts if remote working models work – or they struggle how to make it work effectively.

Executive paragigm: Cutting cost vs. increasing productivity

When organizations move to remote work models such as “working-from-home” or variations of it, their primary objective is either

Saving fix cost by reducing their office space footprint orIncreasing the productivity of their workforce.

They cannot have both because once hard decisions have to be made, the other side falls short – and hard decision will have to be made on the way.

If the chosen approach is to increase productivity, the implementation focuses on how to enable employees to become significantly more productive in a sustainable way, even if it incurs cost lower than the productivity gains.

[Andy Molinski - HBR blog]

The workplace has never been more global than today. But despite that, I often find the last thing on people's minds when doing international work is the global element. Instead, and often for good reason, people focus on concrete and pressing work details: finishing that PowerPoint deck, running the financials one more time, or planning the logistical elements of foreign travel. As a result, they tend to follow "gut" theories — what they assume to be true about adapting behavior across cultures.

 

The problem is that these gut instincts are often false, misleading, and difficult to apply. In studying this topic for the past decade and working with hundreds of professionals from across the globe learning to adapt behavior, I've identified three such "myths" of global adaptation:

[Suzanne Hawkes - blog post]

Last week I facilitated a short planning session by phone for a virtual team. In the brief post-meeting evaluation, I was struck with how happy the group was about such commonplace meeting format. It got me reflecting on a couple of best practices I use as a facilitator to make the most of conference calls:

[Ravi Gajendran - ScienceCodex]

For companies with employees around the globe, the challenges of distance, diversity and technology may threaten team cohesiveness among their long-distance workers. But according to a new study by a University of Illinois business professor, out of sight doesn't necessarily have to mean out of mind for virtual teams.

Ravi S. Gajendran, a professor of business administration at Illinois, says leaders of globally distributed teams can mitigate the isolation of virtual employees by taking a relationship-based approach in the form of a "leader-member exchange" in tandem with frequent communication on a predictable schedule.

[Suzanne Hawkes - blog post]

Last week I was in New York co-facilitating a training session on communications in the context of teams, partnership and collaboration.
One of our participants raised a familiar question: what do you do when your team is “virtual”?  In fact, either due to budget constraints or concern about their carbon footprint, non-profits are increasingly communicating remotely – and some tips and best practices are floating to the top. Here are just a few:

[Sebastian Bailey - Forbes blog]

In a previous post I asked the question: does working from home work? The answer from a Chinese company was a resounding yes. Home workers were 13% more productive, happier in their jobs and less likely to leave than their office-bound peers.  Virtual working saves money, is better for the environment and gives staff the flexibility they crave, so it’s no wonder that more and more organisations are encouraging it.

 

Despite these benefits Marissa Meyer has asked Yahoo employees to schlep into the office.  And if you take a close look at the evidence the challenges of virtual working threaten to outweigh the benefits. In 2000, Wayne Cascio identified five disadvantages of virtual teams, none of which have been resolved by 12 years of technological advances. Overcoming these obstacles isn’t about high-definition video conferencing; it’s about effective leadership that accounts for the nuances of the virtual environment.

[Matt Boyd - Sqwiggle blog]

Building a distributed team can be extremely difficult and incorporating a sense of culture can be even harder. It’s important to make your team feel like they’re a part of something real and tangible. When this is done right, it can have a lasting impact on their quality of work. Here are a few ways to permeate a great culture in a virtual office.

[Daryl Twitchell / Amy Radin / Kevin McDermott - Huffington Post blog]

[...]  the problem for the Daily Innovator is that the convention of a team of people working in a building together has been blown apart for some time now. There's no going back.

 

The reasons are many, including shrinking headcount, real estate costs and the pervasiveness of personal technologies. More important than any of these may be cultural pressures -- the search for work/life balance impelled by all sorts of interlocking social changes, for example, or the business need to work with talent from a global pool. These forces compel the Daily Innovator to assemble teams of people sitting in multiple places, and more and more these people may not even work for the same organization.

Daily Innovators are obliged by these facts to accommodate diverse locations and diverse schedules of the diverse people they want on their teams. The formal structures of established organizations don't always make this easy.

 

What's needed is an altered idea of "workspace." It's a tough subject to think about, with incomplete precedents. For the Daily Innovator it's a live issue, with some of its parameters already clear and others still subject to trial and error. The first question to be answered is what it's always been: How does a particular team work best?

 

[Keith Ferrazzi - HBR blog]

Why is miscommunication common in the virtual workplace? Lack of context. And it's not just that e-mails and phone conversations lack a person's visual reaction to what you've said.

Think about the information you can glean just from the seating arrangement in a physical conference room — who sits next to whom, who's at the head of the table, who has put a little extra distance between herself and her neighbor, and so on. All those cues are missing in a typical teleconference.

As a result, even the simplest of things can be misinterpreted. For instance, does the use of an exclamation mark in a text message ("I didn't know that!") indicate that the writer is excited, surprised, or angry? Before sending an important e-mail, ask someone else to read it just to make sure it won't be misconstrued. Moreover, I strongly advise that virtual communications use respect, positive affirmations, and gratitude to set the right tone and proper context. "When you have shared context and you exchange information, you'll have a shared understanding," says Karen Sobel-Lojeski, a professor at Stony Brook University. To achieve that shared understanding, I recommend the following best practices:

[Ron Ricci - Cisco blog]

I was in a brainstorm meeting about my team’s next-generation strategy last week, and we made a number of random connections that knitted together a pretty big idea — the kind of dot-connecting that only happens when people with different (and sometime conflicting) perspectives trust each other in the pursuit of an important goal.

 

Five of us worked on the idea, but only two of us were in the room physically together. Yes, I’ll say it out loud:  three people were working from home.

 

Much has been said and written recently about the value of working virtually, and I don’t think you can sub-divide mobility into “at home” and “on the road.” Social technologies, video and mobile platforms make it easy to work from just about anywhere.

 

But as leaders, we have to resist the temptation to confuse technology with change management -- despite our love affair with technology. Any time technology brings a sea-change transformation to the way humans do stuff, especially work stuff, we can’t forget that people work in organizations — and organizations are an amalgam of culture, processes and technology.

All of Cisco’s experience has taught us that technology alone does not create sustainable productivity; it is the way culture supports the behaviors needed to make the technology effective and processes that support and optimize it. Ultimately any organization needs to determine its “system” for collaborating as teams, whether those teams are in the same room all the time or working virtually anywhere in the world. No model is right or wrong; it is what works for the mission of that organization.

 

For those organizations where work is an outcome, not a place, here are some best practices from The Collaboration Imperative on making virtual work work: