Virtual team

A Virtual Team — also known as a Geographically Dispersed Team (GDT) — is a group of individuals who work across time, space, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology. They have complementary skills and are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent performance goals, and share an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Geographically dispersed teams allow organizations to hire and retain the best people regardless of location.Members of virtual teams communicate electronically, so they may never meet face to face. However, most teams will meet at some point in time. A virtual team does not always mean teleworker. Teleworkers are defined as individuals who work from home. Many virtual teams in today's organizations consist of employees both working at home and small groups in the office but in different geographic locations.

Why virtual teams?

Best employees may be located anywhere in the world.
Workers demand personal flexibility.
Workers demand increasing technological sophistication.
A flexible organization is more competitive and responsive to the marketplace.
Workers tend to be more productive; i.e., they spend less time on commuting and travel
The increasing globalization of trade and corporate activity.
The global workday is 24 vs. 8 hours.
The emergence of environments which require inter-organizational cooperation as well as competition.
Changes in workers' expectations of organizational participation.
A continued shift from production to service/knowledge work environments.
Increasing horizontal organization structures characterized by structurally and geographically distributed human resources.

Benefits of virtual teams:

Since members of the virtual teams do not need to come in to workplace the company will not need to offer them office or parking space.
Reduces traveling expenses for employees.
It allows more people to be included in the labor pool.
It decrease both air pollution and congestion because there will be less commuting.
It allows workers in organizations to be more flexible.
By working in virtual teams, physical handicaps are not concern.

Problems with virtual teams:

Misunderstanding with communication is the leading compliant among members of virtual teams.
Working on a project over the virtual workspace causes lack of project visibility.
Difficulty contacting other members. (i.e. email, instant messaging, etc.)
Differences in time zones.
It difficult for team members to obtain the meanings of text based messages.

Tips to ease communication problems for team members:

Allow the team members to get to know each other by arranging occasional face to face meetings.
Allow team members to get an idea of where the overall project is going. This way each member will know how they fit into the project.
Create a code of conduct.This will avoid delays and will make sure that requests be answered in a timely fashion.
Do not allow team members to disappear. Have a calendar for each team member so that everyone's schedule is available to view.
Develop trust among the team.
Store charts, diagrams,etc. on the internet so that the whole team can see them.

Who are the members of virtual teams?

Members can either be stable or change on an ongoing basis.
Members can be same company or from various companies.
Members can live in the same community or in different countries.

Basic types of virtual teams

Networked Teams consist of individuals who collaborate to achieve a common goal or purpose; membership is frequently diffuse and fluid.
Parallel Teams work in short term to develop recommendations for an improvement in a process or system; has a distinct membership.
Project or Product-Development Teams conduct projects for users or customers for a defined period of time. Tasks are usually nonroutine, and the results are specific and measurable; team has decisionmaking authority.
Work or Production Teams perform regular and ongoing work usually in one function; clearly defined membership.
Service Teams support customers or the internal organization in typically a service/technical support role around the clock.
Management Teams work collaboratively on a daily basis within a functional division of a corporation.
Action Teams offer immediate responses activated in (typically) emergency situations.

Reasons for virtual teams in the workplace:

Allows for people in different parts of the world to come together to work on a project.
Creates alliances and mergers between organizations.
Extends the market to different geographical locations.
Reduces costs for an organization.

Critical success factors of virtual teams

The existence of availability standards.
Ample resources to buy and support state-of-the-art reliable communication and collaboration tools for all team members.
The existence of corporate memory systems such as lessons learned databases.
The existence of written goals, objectives, project specifications, and performance metrics; results orientation.
Managers and team members with a better-than-average ability to accurately estimate.
A lower-than-normal ration of pushed to pulled information.
Team communication is prioritized by the sender.
Human resource policies, reward/recognition systems as well as career development systems address the unique needs of virtual workers.
Good access to technical training and information on how to work across cultures.
Training methods accommodate continual and just-in-time learning.
There are standard and agreed-on technical and "soft" team processes.
A "high trust" culture; teamwork and collaboration are the norm.
Leaders set high performance expectations; model behaviors such as working across boundaries and using technology effectively.
Team leaders and members exhibit competence in working in virtual environments.

Team-building key for virtual workplace

Darleen DeRosa’s studies concerning the lack of team building in a virtual workplace. DeRosa earned her PhD in organizational psychology; she has invested four years of graduate school at the masters and PhD levels obtaining her degree. As part of Right Management Consultants, she conducted this study because she feels that even though organizations have invested so much time and money into virtual teams, organizations are missing the foundation for virtual workplaces; support.

DeRosa’s study included surveying and interviewing 10 different major international firms; two thirds agreed that the performance of virtual teamwork is “important or very important” to the fundamental success of their business. Of 21 virtual teams, sixty-five percent claimed that they’d had never participated in an effective team building session, thirty-six percent said they had never met their team members face to face. Teams that had been together for less than a year were more productive and performed substantially better than teams that had been together for more than a year. An overall observation is that productivity and performance decreases over time.

A recent study by the Gartner Group; an American research company, stated that by 2008, 41 million corporate employees will operate in a virtual workplace at least one day per week.

Having employees working in a virtual workplace poses some concerns and challenges, most of which would be eliminated by working in a physical office. Most of these challenges stem from the lack of face-to-face interactions among team members. According to Darleen DeRosa’s research, she discovered seven key challenges that employees are faced with when working in teams in a virtual workplace, here are the challenges that she has identified in her research:

• Companies must compensate for the lack of human contact, and find appropriate ways to support team spirit, trust and productivity.

• Leaders must be especially sensitive to interpersonal, communication and cultural factors.

• No trust, no team. Trust is a top factor in determining virtual team success. But interpersonal trust, compared to task-level trust (a faith that team members will do their job) is more difficult to achieve in a virtual environment.

• Team building pays off. Virtual teams that invest time in team building perform better than those that don't.

• Team performance tends to drop off after one year. Attention must be paid to interpersonal, communication and cultural factors to prevent a "peak-and-decline" syndrome.

• Technology makes virtual teaming possible, but isn't a perfect substitute for human interaction. Teams must be careful to use the appropriate technology for various tasks.

• While meeting in person requires time and expense, virtual teams that meet once or twice a year perform better overall than those that don't meet. To help make an easy transition from a physical office to virtual workplaces for employees, organizations have created “virtual water coolers” and chat rooms to encourage employee interaction and communication.

DeRosa has concluded that companies are not optimizing their virtual workplaces. There is an enormous potential for increased productivity and performance, however organizations have failed to build the foundation for making an easy move to virtual workplaces. People tend to be more receptive to face-to-face interactions, a virtual workplace eliminates this human contact, as a result, in order to build the foundations for a successful workplace, organization have to find a way to replace human contact with an equivalent, increased productivity and performance should be the driving forces for finding that replacement and endorsing the movement to virtual workplaces.

Aiding Software for Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are often spread all over the globe, from different offices, and cultures; so how is it that they can remain on track with objectives and come together to achieve goals to contribute to the organization. The answer is collaborative technology, in particular software that allows virtual teams to become as efficient as inter office teams. Software developed to contribute to virtual teams can be separated into 2 main categories, software that provides ease of communication and software that provides task and document organization.

Software that provides ease of communication often includes presence awareness, instant messaging and Web conferencing. These tools allow team member to be 24 hour a day accessible to their team. Members can have real time conversations and do not have to follow lengthy correspondence as dispersed teams have had to in the past which leads to heightened efficiency.

Software applications that organize a team’s tasks and documents also improve their efficiency. These programs consist of a central location were all members can access important documents to the team, post progress made, assign tasks and even provide calendars with key dates and timelines to keep all members current.

There are many providers of software for virtual teams such as; IBM’s Lotus software, Microsoft’s Net Meeting and Group Systems software and many more. Companies should look for programs that suit the size and functionality of their teams.

Reference

Business Edge. (2006). Team-building key for virtual workplace. Retrieved June 20, 2006 from the World Wide Web: http://www.businessedge.ca/article.cfm/newsID/10076.cfm

External links

A list of links and articles on virtual teams and virtual team management (StartWright)
Working in Virtual Teams: Overcoming Time and Geography? (Chris Kimble, University of York)
Effective Virtual Teams through Communities of Practice (Chris Kimble, Barlow Alexis, and Feng Li)
Virtual Teams (Robert Davison, ISWORLD)

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