Benefits Of Virtual Teams

Global organisations are increasingly forming virtual teams owing to their benefits. Virtual teams provide flexibility in terms of time and location. About three fourth of tele-workers who responded to a survey conducted by AT&T said that they preferred their working in virtual teams as it gave them more time to spend with their families than before. Some of the benefits of virtual teams are.

• It helps to spread best practices and processes across the organisation.
• Working in virtual teams helps better interaction between different functions and departments.
• Virtual teaming reduces the need for people to be present at a common location. Hence, it saves a lot of time and money that people would generally spend trying to come together for work.
• If more and more people would work from home it would naturally result in lesser pollution caused by transportation. With the baffling traffic jams and pollution working in virtual teams is becoming popular.
• The focus of virtual teams is more towards providing service than production. Service is currently the faster growing area of business.
• Virtual teams provide the physically challenged people an opportunity to contribute productively where normal working environments would not allow.
• They also reduce the need for large offices and parking spaces. This is even more important as the cost of real estate is escalating at exponential rates the world over.

Cultural Issues In Virtual Teams

Most often the members forming the virtual team are from different countries and geographic locations. Virtual teams in that sense overcomes geographic barriers. It also helps organisations to tap into the intellectual capital that is unique to each member. However, virtual teams face the challenge of cultural and language barriers.Since members belong to different cultural and regional backgrounds they face problems related to communication and other interpersonal interactions. This necessitates training and induction programmes quite different from those normally conducted.

Making Virtual Teams Work

Virtual teams work across the barriers of time and place. Hence organisations can truly get the best talent available in the world to work with it. Technology through email, video conferencing and Internet phones have made this possible. However, for the virtual team to work effectively the members are expected to posses certain qualities. They are as listed below.

• Working in a virtual team requires a lot of discipline from its members. They have to be self motivated.
• In a virtual team each member should make himself personally responsible and accountable. Time is the essence. Generally, work of team members is interdependent. If one of the members fails to deliver his part of the job in time it will affect the other team members work too. In a normal working environment it is possible to closely monitor and control the work of all team members. In virtual teams however, it will take some time before the team realises that it is falling behind schedule. This is especially so if the communication is not proper or milestones are not clearly defined.
• In normal teams, face- to- face interaction is possible both at workplace and outside. Hence, the ability of members to work as a team is enhanced due to better understanding and communication. This is not so in virtual teams. Members in virtual teams need to put in extra effort to understand and make themselves understood. Thus, team members should be able to clearly communicate to each other the role expected from each of them. Such understanding can best take place at the time of initiation of the virtual team. Before the team members can get to work together, ideally they should spend some time with each other. This does not often happen. Therefore, during such meetings the members should try to understand each other personally. Socialisation at this time is really crucial as this helps build trust. Since first impressions are lasting impressions the members should be careful about what they say and communicate during the initial interactions
  
  Once the team gets to work certain points need to be kept in mind by the team members. First, even as the members are interacting with each other on issues related to work, they may be having other pressing priorities. Hence, each member has to be flexible enough to give room for the other to respond or get back on an issue, unless the matter is urgent. Next, the members should frequently make appropriate checks to see how the working relationship is and how the work is progressing. Third, most often in virtual teams that do not interact with each other through video conferencing , the members are unable to envision their counterparts. To a certain extent this hinders effective communication. It might help to place a picture of the member in front, with whom the interaction is taking place.

• One of the most important attributes for a virtual team to be successful is trust. Team members should be able to trust each other with the work they do. Members also need to feel secure that each member will be consistent and reliable in his work. One way to build trust while working as virtual teams is indulging in a certain amount of socialising before getting on to the work aspect. For instance, it is advisable that the members share some personal information with each other in their emails. This not only builds trust but also a bond between the members. Also it helps avoid monotony.
  
  Two aspects are noticed in virtual teams where there is trust. One that team members are able to set clearcut tasks for each other without hesitation. The other is that team members display a significant amount of enthusiasm and willingness to take on more responsibility in their interactions. As a result, the whole team has a very positive orientation.

Communication A Vital Aspect Of Virtual Teams

As mentioned before, communication is vital for virtual teams. This is because communication here is a challenge. Communication in virtual team is always less effective when compared to teams whose members are able to meet physically. Therefore, the leader of the virtual team should take extra care to ensure proper communication among the members. He should lay clear guidelines about who communicates with whom, when and how often. These guidelines may have to be strictly followed and monitored to sustain communication among team members.

Generally three types of communication problems are noticed among teams that interact virtually. They are.

• Team members are not very sure about the tasks they are expected to accomplish and how it fits in the entire scheme of the project.
• Often team members find themselves sending a request or seeking a clarification from another team member but not receiving a response. This can be frustrating.
• Communication in virtual teams tends to be inadequate in contrast to face to face communication. Hence, most often communication is either incomplete or misinterpreted. For instance, a sarcastic message sent through an email may not be understood in its essence.

To solve this problem, members must be trained on maintaining proper communication within virtual teams. Members who interact over the telephone need to have good speaking skills, and should convey the message clearly. This is because they do not have the advantage of enforcing their communication through their body language. Similarly, those interacting through email should be able to put down their thoughts succinctly in words. Team members should be mutually agreed about meanings of certain terms or symbols.

It will also help if all members are constantly updated about the status of the overall project and its related aspects. This gives them an overall picture of the project and their roles. Teams can use the power of technology to clearly communicate their schedules, availabilities and work deadlines. Thereby, the entire team can clearly view the progress and appropriately follow up on the work.

The virtual team members need to be good in their interpersonal skills. They also need to be quick in adapting to their roles in the team. Failure to do so can lead to conflicts. In a virtual team it is difficult to notice a problem arising. Though team members may sense something going awry they may not be able to pinpoint the problem. Hence it takes more time to identify a problem and rectify it in a virtual team than in a normal team. Therefore, the virtual team's leader has to be alert to identify likely issues and take appropriate steps for rectification. The root cause of the problems is often not due to lack of commitment or integrity of members. It is often due to some communication-gap among members. While this aspect is true in any group of people it is amplified in a virtual team as there is no face -to -face interaction. To sort out issues members may have to resort to better means of communication in the order of videoconference, telephone, email, fax or letter. For the virtual team to succeed they have to develop and regularise communication that is deemed to be informal among normal groups.

Other Issues

Apart from communication the other issues that virtual teams face are

• Technological Inertia: Not everyone is familiar with computers and the latest developments in communication technology. Hence, there could be some amount of hesitation to work with these new tools. A conscious attempt to train them and make them feel comfortable in working with technology has to be made.
• Trust: Members of virtual teams should feel confident of certain aspects of privacy in communication being respected. The company has to develop certain policies of privacy and adhere to them.
• Overwork: Earlier, as people could not be available at ten different places at the same time. Hence their participation in various projects and teams was also limited. With technology people can work in more than one project. The aspect of personal time may thus get overlooked creating social and psychological problems.

Making Successful Virtual Teams

To encourage and leverage the power of virtual teams organisations have to pay close attention to certain important aspects like:

• Human resource policy: The HR policies of the organisation should provide just reward systems and promotions for those opting to work in virtual teams. They should be reasonable and non discriminatory.
• Training: The organisation should provide employees working in virtual teams training in communication skills and technology tools appropriate for the job.
• Culture: Organisation working with the latest communications technology and having an informal work culture can more easily adapt to working in virtual teams. Similarly an organisation that places due emphasis on communication, learning, teambuilding, and acceptance of cultural, language and background diversity among its employees is more likely to succeed in forming virtual teams.
• Skillsets: While organisations can provide some amount of training to its employees to adapt to working in virtual teams, the employees recruited need to have basic skills of spoken and written communication.
• Technological Compatibility: While implementing virtual teams, organisations should take care of making the tools used among the team members compatible. The problems identified are generally in the area of transmission and decoding.

Conclusion

Changing markets, increasing globalisation and advance in communication technologies are all paving way to a new kind of working, working in virtual teams. While virtual teams bring their share of opportunities they also bring their share of challenges. They call for a greater emphasis on communication and openness to a global community. As long as the benefits outweigh the challenges, virtual teaming enabled by technology will increasingly be the way organisations are going to work in future.