Virtual Teams

Mary Sue Reining
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

In today's competitive business environment, where innovation and "speed to market" are crucial, virtual teams have emerged as a new form of collaborative work. They are designed specifically to meet the many challenges associated with global and mobile team membership. Advances in communication technologies (i.e., voicemail, fax, groupware, e-mail) provide the options of flexibility and mobility needed to enhance team performance across geographic boundaries. Members of a virtual team face new challenges, both organizationally and personally, as they learn to communicate by using the multiple forms of electronic communication made available to them.

A virtual team is defined as a group of geographically and organizationally dispersed knowledge workers; they are brought together across time and space through information and communication technologies on an as-needed basis in response to specific customer needs or to complete unique projects. Virtual teams are located at different work sites, or travel frequently, and must rely upon communication technologies to share information, collaborate, and coordinate their work efforts. They appear in many companies as new offices expand around the world and the trend toward home offices and telecommuting increases.

Characteristics of Virtual Teams

In the mad rush to implement virtual teams, companies may underestimate the need to plan and design around the differences inherent in virtual teams. Assuming that employees can make the transition to a virtual work team environment without planning and design is like sending them on a collision course with disaster. Creating virtual teams is not as easy as pulling together a cross-functional team to solve a problem. Because the makeup and locations of the team can be quite heterogeneous, unprepared team members collide with mistrust, unrealistic or unequal expectations, cultural differences, coordinating work logistics, group dynamics, and leadership issues.

Cynthia Cantu, from the Center for the Study of Work Teams at the University of North Texas, has determined a number of key elements that must be planned for within virtual teams. These include:

• Trust—Employees from different locations, cultures, and technical backgrounds may mistrust how their information will be used.
• Expectations—Without the usual organizational walls to serve as general parameters, virtual teams need guidelines up front. These enable the team to set personal as well as team expectations for what they are and are not allowed to do. Managing expectations up front is necessary in a creative environment like a virtual team to offset frustration with the system and other team members.
• Cultural differences—Without addressing cultural differences, productivity and the willingness to work together in the future may be damaged.
• Work coordination—Response and collaboration are paramount to achieving superior speed to market or complex business problem solutions. Virtual teams need advanced computer and communication technology to share databases, spreadsheets, proposals, and presentations. Then they need an expedient way to discuss options and prioritize alternatives without having to spend their most productive time in expensive face-to-face meetings.
• Group dynamics—Because virtual teams often operate over the telephone or computer instead of in the same office at the same time, they have less of the face time which builds rapport. Thus, group dynamics are more difficult to manage and conversations over e-mail can be easily misconstrued.
• Leadership—Virtual team leaders are less able to keep visual tabs on their employees because of different locations. Leaders must influence employees they do not see on a daily or weekly basis and who may not report to them or even belong to their organization.

That list may seem daunting, but creating virtual teams is worth it. Extensive research on virtual teams has been conducted by David Gould, Campus Department Chair of Information Systems and Technology at the University of Phoenix. His data revealed the following characteristics about virtual teams:

• Virtual teams get the job done. Most of the teams Gould studied achieved the goals set for them. In only one instance did a team fail to attain its goals, and this failure was not connected to the fact that the team was a virtual team.
• People can be trusted. The question many managers ask is, "Can you trust people you can't see to do their work?" For the teams in Gould's study, the answer was clearly yes.
• Few virtual teams are 100 percent virtual. Virtual teams tend to have some face-to-face meetings. In the study, face-to-face contact was fairly unimportant in teams with relatively independent team members engaged in individual work projects. However, it was important in teams with interdependent members. Members expressed that once they had met, they were more compassionate and understanding towards their fellow team members.
• Virtual teams take on the same basic structure as "real" teams. The teams Gould studied showed the same dynamics that researchers have discovered in "real" teams. The early stages are characterized by a certain amount of randomness, chaos, and ad hoc decision-making. As the team matures, processes are put into place and the team becomes more efficient.

Trust in Virtual Teams

Trust develops differently in virtual teams than in traditional teams. "What drives the evolution of trust in conventional settings is direct, face-to-face interaction—the kind of interaction that does not take place in virtual teams," states Professor Sirkka Jarvenpaa of the University of Texas at Austin. "Instead of evolving slowly through stages, trust in virtual teams tends to be established-or not-right at the outset. The first interactions of the team members are crucial." In fact, the initial electronic messages appear to set the tone for how virtual team members will interrelate throughout an entire project.

According to research, teams with the highest levels of trust tended to share three traits. First, they began their interactions with a series of social messages—introducing themselves and providing some personal background before focusing on the work at hand. The researchers coined this initial period "electronic courtship". Second, the teams set clear roles for each team member. Assigning each member a particular task enabled all of them to identify with one another, forging a foundation for identification-based trust. The third hallmark of the trusting team had to do with attitude: team members consistently displayed eagerness, enthusiasm, and an intense action orientation in all of their messages.

Leading Virtual Teams

Virtual team leaders operate within a different framework than traditional team leaders. David Gould, in his research, found that some of the behaviors considered good management practices were changed, or even eliminated, because the team was physically separated. His findings included the following:

• Individual recognition was infrequent, and when it occurred, it was via e-mail or a telephone call.
• Celebrations of team accomplishments were few and far between. The team leaders rarely if ever initiated celebrations.
• Team leaders did occasionally offer support and coaching to team members.

For the manager of a virtual team, one of the factors that contribute to smooth coordination early in the existence of the team is a clear definition of responsibilities. The leader of a virtual team should provide guidelines on what and how often to communicate. This increases the predictability, and reduces the uncertainty of the team's coordination.

Another critical factor is the effective handling of conflict. One strategy is to address perceived discontent as early as it is noticed: emotions left unchecked in the virtual environment erupt into sequences of negative comments that are difficult to resolve. Another strategy in handling conflict is to address as much as possible only the concerned individual and to avoid copying the entire team on messages that are best to address with the concerned individual only.

Not all individuals are equally adept at handling the uncertainty and responsibilities inherent in virtual work. Managers need to carefully choose individuals for virtual teamwork. Such qualities as responsibility, dependability, independence, and self-sufficiency, while desirable even in face-to-face settings, are crucial to the viability of virtual teamwork.

Karen Sansone, director of alternative workplace solutions for Lucent Technologies and other managers believes that some direct contact is essential in the alternative workplace. "Performance evaluation and salary reviews must be done face to face," says Sansone. "So much of the managers' impact comes from sensitivity to individual reactions and the ability to gauge body language as well as words—reactions that simply are impossible to interpret over the phone or through e-mail."

Managers in an alternative workplace environment, particularly one in which employees work from a distance, must also pay close attention to time management. When employees are in the office only once a week or several times a month, it is critical that their time is not wasted. In a conventional office, changing the time or the day of a meeting at the last minute may be inconvenient for employees; in a virtual office, it may disrupt their work plans for the entire day.

The lack of face-to-face interaction in virtual team presents obstacles to effective coordination and communication and further impaired team effectiveness. Successful virtual teams are the ones that engage in extensive and predictable communication patterns and display high task-goal clarity, superior time management skills, and alertness to deadlines. The internal coordination and communication are of paramount importance to virtual teams. In addition, virtual teams where managerial behavior control is enforced are more effective than self-directed virtual teams, and behavior control in virtual teams stimulates higher levels of communication and coordination that contributes to an increase in team effectiveness.

Communication within Virtual Teams

Gould offers the following tips on alleviating communication problems:

• Include face-to-face time if at all possible. Have an initial meeting for the team members to get together, meet each other, and socialize. Meet face-to-face periodically throughout the life of the project. These meetings will help to establish ties and relationships among team members. It's especially important in creating an effective working environment where the team members are interdependent.
• Give team members a sense of how the overall project is going. Send team members copies of the updated project schedule or provide an electronic view of the project schedule on line using the Internet.
• Establish a code of conduct to avoid delays. The code could include a principle of acknowledging a request for information within 24 or 48 hours.
• Don't let team members vanish. Use the Internet or workgroup software to store team members' calendars.
• Augment text-only communication. Use the Internet to store charts, pictures, and core diagrams.
• Develop trust. Discover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control.

Launching a Virtual Team

Virtual teams present risks if organizations fail to anticipate the challenges of this new environment. According to Jessica Lipnack, CEO and co-founder of Virtual Teams and leading expert on virtual teams, there are seven steps to launching a virtual team. They include:

1. Create your identity by naming the team.
2. Draft your mission statement.
3. Determine key milestones.
4. Set goals that everyone agrees on.
5. Identify who needs to be involved.
6. Establish relationships among members.
7. Agree on operating protocols.

A number of best practices can be summarized from the research that has been conducted on virtual teams. They include:

1. Convene a face-to-face meeting early on. Regardless of your challenge, get the group together physically as soon as possible to confirm your performance purpose and goals, agree on a practical working approach, establish some groupware ground rules, and get to know one another.
2. Match member skills and perspectives to collective work products. Assign task and leadership roles in ways that take full advantage of the different skills, experiences, and perspectives in your group as well as others you can access through groupware.
3. Consciously shift and share leadership roles. Virtual work requires more leadership attention than co-located work.
4. Pick and practice groupware features together. Do not assume that all members of the group are equally familiar with the various aspects of groupware.
5. Agree on the team's "netiquette". Every team needs its own approach that clarifies how best to work together to meld complementary skills into collective work products and shared success. This not only contributes to the team's overall effectiveness, but also helps establish the necessary trust level among team members.

Human capital increases when more people work together in more places, meeting new challenges and acquiring new competencies. Virtual teams stretch the bounds of human capability, offering value far beyond their immediate functions: they stretch the reach of social capital far outside their immediate physical locales. Although many of their elements have ancient roots, today's virtual teams look out over vistas never before seen by human eyes. The information and research reviewed for this paper gives me an optimistic outlook for my next personal virtual team experience. Virtual teams are the wave of the future, but are here with us today.

Bibliography

Cantu, C. Virtual Teams. 1-8 Retrieved November 17, 2002 from the World Wide Web:
www.workteams.unt.edu/reports/Cantu.html

Gould, D. Leading Virtual Teams. 1-6 Retrieved November 17, 2002 from the World Wide Web:
www.leader-values.com

Jarvenpaa, S., & Leidner, D. Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams. Retrieved November 17, 2002 from the World Wide Web:
www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue4/jarvenpaa.html

Lipnack, J. (2001, Spring). Virtual Teams: The Future is Now. Line Zine, 1-6 Retrieved
November 17, 2002 from the World Wide Web:
www.virtualteams.com/company/press/LiNE%20Zine%20Spring%202001.html

Lipnack, J., & Stamps, J. (1997). Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time and Organizations with Technology. New York: John Wiley.

Mary Sue Reining is the founder and President of The Reining Leadership Group. She is an Executive Coach, Leadership Expert and Consultant with more than 20 years of senior level experience assessing, partnering and coaching executives and leaders. Visit her at www.reiningleadership.com