Today’s corporate world is characterised by increasing internationalisation, rapid communication channels and far-reaching flexibility in employment models. This affects how teams are compiled and how they work. Virtual teams are increasingly becoming the norm in some sectors.
They are identified by the fact that team members are spread across several cities, countries or even continents. Internal communication is achieved through Skype, video conferencing, emails or telephone. Learn how you can excel at leading a virtual team, and stay ahead of the competition.
Leading a Virtual Team – The Advantages
Virtual teams offer opportunities and advantages – for the team member themselves, for the company and for the executive in charge.
Advantages for the company
- Less travel and subsistence costs
- Less office space costs (meeting rooms, etc.)
- Inclusion of the best experts, regardless of home or work location
- International presence with less expenditure
Advantages for team members
- Less travel
- Working with international experts
- Participation in exciting projects
- Flexible working times / working from home
- Avoiding conflicts that come from individual team members’ personal sympathies and antipathies
The senior manager leading the team has the biggest advantage: He can enroll the best experts in his project without being restricted to a choice of those in the immediate area.
The Executive’s First Task: Create Confidence
However, there are also challenges to these plus points. These mainly come from the lack of informal and face-to-face communication as well as the high organisational costs. It is the senior managers challenging task to offset these disadvantages.
Studies on virtual teams have shown that trust in the reliability and competence of the others determines the success or failure of the team. As trust is built mainly through face-to-face communication, this is a critical factor in virtual teams. It is therefore advantageous to have an actual meeting of members at the start of a team project.
If this is not possible, it is the team leader’s task to build as close a personal relationship as possible between the members. This can – at the start of the project – be achieved by extensive video conferencing in which participants introduce themselves.
Here it is important to choose a medium where the individual is visible so gestures and facial expressions can be read. If a team members specific characteristic is known by the others, for example an ironic sense of humour, then there are less misunderstandings in later communication.
Deciding on Rules for Group Communication
To ensure smooth communication between team members, the senior manager should establish a single communications platform. Not every employee is familiar with Skype and similar technologies.
In this respect, it is essential to offer trainings, as well as establishing a compulsory netiquette. Conventions – such as how and in what time frame enquiries should be dealt with or who is to be copied in when – should ideally be confirmed in writing to avoid conflicts.
Motivation, Control and Mediation
A critical point with virtual teams is motivation. Through the lack of direct feedback, a high degree of self-motivation is needed which not all employees have.
A good executive can strengthen group members’ motivation and create “internal competition” by praising individual success in meetings. Senior managers can also incentivise by implementing a rewards and points system, visible online.
To make progress, the team leadership must check success–if possible regularly. This can happen either actively or by asking for performance reports to be submitted.
One of the other tasks of a virtual team leader is to identify conflicts within the group early and when necessary to intervene as an intermediary. This applies to all team leaders, but with virtual teams, tensions usually fester for longer and are more difficult to recognise from the outside.
A solution may be, for example, to routinely ask for critique or suggestions for improvement during performance monitoring.
The tasks of a virtual team’s executive manager are therefore:
- Create a culture of trust
- Ascertain technological abilities of each member
- Establish a platform for group communication
- Establish netiquette
- Praise individual member’s successes
- Regular performance monitoring
- Identify conflicts early and function as a mediator
