Whether you’re interested in learning the skills to start your own online business from scratch, or, learning the skills to complement your existing form of employment, one thing that will help you optimise both your learning and your business delivery, is how to function as part of a virtual team.
The virtual world is here with its pros and cons and we need to understand this new world if we are to successfully navigate it.
The Virtual Team
The term virtual team describes a group of workers who are rarely if at all present in the same room at the same time.
Functioning as part of a virtual team is different to functioning as part of a traditional co-located team, so please take the time to consider how you can better function in the virtual world.
Maybe your current organisation is about to go global, maybe you are bringing in new staff who are working remotely, or it could be that you’re taking on new virtual working responsibilities to start your own online business.
Creating Situational Awareness
In some cases you may select the members of your virtual team, in other cases you may inherit or be assigned to an existing team. But whatever the case, the first thing you’ll need to do is create your own situational awareness of the environment your team are working in/from. Where your team members are located matters, and it makes a difference to how you design your management strategy. Consider how time differences, physical location, and cultural norms will impact team synergy.
Your virtual team members may be situated throughout a region, country, or throughout the world and while physical separation can be bridged by video conferencing, teams who do meet together in person will function better than those who do not. This is particularly relevant at the start of a project. Teams that meet in person at the start of a project will communicate better in a virtual setting afterwards. We’ll look at optimising team synergy in a virtual setting in a separate blog, but for now physical distance alters how you develop trust and communication.
Once you’re in a work flow, it’s so easy to get absorbed in your own bubble, but in a virtual team, it’s important to take note of local time considerations of the team members when scheduling meetings, don’t just schedule what works best for you, think about what’s best for the entire team, even if it means putting a meeting back by a few days.
If your team is global, then you need to acknowledge and accommodate the customs of the team. An email that can seem direct and professional in European culture can come across as arrogant and aggressive in the Far East for example. Likewise, the European culture of relatively long family holidays can come across as ‘lack of job commitment’ in Far Eastern cultures. So, in a multi-cultural team, resist the temptation to think your way is the only way to do things.
After you’ve created situational awareness of your team’s environment in relation to time differences, physical location and cultural aspects, you’re ready to start thinking about how to build relationships and create open communication channels.
Keep in mind the environment doesn’t determine whether or not your team will be successful, instead it alerts you to where you may need to pay extra attention to keep your team on track.
Communicating with Clarity
You may have been on a team where you and other members had varying roles which were flexible in nature to accommodate fluctuation in delivery of tasks. While this flexibility can be ideal for co-located teams, such autonomous fluidity can be a disaster for virtual teams.
When roles are undefined, reporting structures and accountability can become ambiguous and projects can derail with no sense of what went wrong. So, formalising each member’s role and responsibility is a critical step.
In a co-located team, you may be able to assign the entire task to the entire team and expect everyone to work with a common understand of what is required and by when. But in a virtual team, a responsibility that has not been assigned is easily overlooked. There’s a lot of truth in the saying; “everyone’s responsibility is no one’s responsibility”.
Once roles and responsibilities are formalised, you need to communicate this to your entire team, to avoid duplication, confusion, and to align everyone’s effort.
Don’t Assume, Seek Feedback
Make sure you ask for feedback on understanding of roles from the team. Ask members to explain back to you what they think you’ve asked them to do. You’ll be surprised how many people don’t understand their role at first and how a simple two-way conversation at the start of a project can help clarify this.
In a virtual team I would recommend you ‘over communicate’ with your members. What I mean by that is this; in a co-located setting, we pick up messages from body language and other nuances that help toward a common shared understanding. In a virtual world, we don’t have that luxury. So communicate by email / conference call with a virtual team more than you would with a co-located team to help keep the momentum of shared understanding.
Communicating with Precision
Communicating with precision is also important in virtual teams. Never assume team members have the same understanding, and in the absence of the wider messaging we pick up on from being co-located, precision is all the more important. For example, instead sending out an email to the whole team saying:
“I need that report by close of play tomorrow.”
address the email to the specific person who is supposed to deliver the report with specific details such as:
“Hi James, I need you to deliver the Google Analytics data output report as a PDF to my inbox by 17:00 GMT on 26th July. Is that possible for you?”
Remember, regular clear communication will also remind others they are not alone, but part of a team, and will help build a sense of unity, and isn’t that what being in the world is all about anyway?
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog. If you’re interested in learning more about how to navigate the virtual world from a business start up perspective then:
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