Working with virtual teams

As many modern entrepreneurs learn, the most efficient and cost-effective way to bring a company or product to market often involves leveraging a partially or entirely virtual team.

Working with virtual teams

03-27-2020

This week we dive into the future of work: virtual teams. As many modern entrepreneurs learn, the most efficient and cost-effective way to bring a company or product to market often involves leveraging a partially or entirely virtual team.

Virtual teams have countless benefits, from reduced overhead to more flexible working conditions, but this new way of working can have its challenges and drawbacks too.

We had the chance to speak with Claire Sookman, owner of Virtual Team Builders, about her insights on the nuances of building, managing and growing a successful virtual team. Claire has worked as a virtual team consultant for almost 20 years and she’s seen the culture evolve and grow significantly over these two decades.

Especially with the recent COVID-19 outbreak, virtual teams, or remote teams as they’re frequently called, are more prevalent than ever, from tech startups to NGOs to wellness groups. The nuances and challenges that virtual teams experience are often agnostic to the type of work taking place, and we hope these insights will help you lead your virtual team more effectively, whatever your team’s goals may be.

The most common issues faced by virtual teams

When you look at the virtual team landscape with a macro view, a few numbers stick out, Claire points out. While 89% of employees report working virtually at least some of the time, about 50% of virtual teams fail to meet their objectives.

Sookman chalks this low success rate up to three key factors: multi-tasking, effective leadership, and trust.

Multi-tasking during critical communications

Multi-tasking can be great when doing chores at home, but when it comes to critical thinking and collaboration at work, multi-tasking can become a huge damper on productivity. One study estimates that multitasking costs businesses $450 billion each year globally. The research shows that people who engage in multitasking actually end up wasting 40 percent of their productive time switching between tasks. They also have a higher susceptibility to distractions. According to Claire, remote meetings are an important place to enforce a single line of focus. Ensuring meeting participants remain off mute can mitigate the likelihood of multitasking and make the team feel more connected as a whole.

At Block Blox, we’ve learned firsthand how much productivity and engagement can be influenced simply by enforcing various engagement policies in meetings like “video-on” and “in-office” requirements. When an important meeting has been called to solve a problem, requiring each participant to be “video-present” has delivered great success with respect to meeting engagement and productivity.

Sometimes, when trying to match the connectivity of a face-to-face meeting, the best practice is simple: design policies that promote engagement that mimics face-to-face engagement as closely as possible.

Why is there such a big difference between voice-only meetings and video or face-to-face?

The biggest component lost in voice-only meetings, Claire says, is body language. For virtual teams communicating voice-only, this means an extra level of attention must be paid to what and how you communicate verbally. Remember that, as you do when you listen to others, your team is interpreting what you’re saying via the tone and pitch of your voice and the language you choose. Listening to your voice on meeting recordings is a good way to assess whether or not your verbal communication could use some improvement.

Another challenge that arises with voice-only communications is the mystery of silence. Without a visual, silence can be interpreted in many ways. Did someone walk away? Do they disagree? Are they deep in thought? Are they typing up notes about the discussion? Without clear communication, silence can easily be misinterpreted. If you are causing the silence, work on stating why, like “I’m taking notes, but I’m listening”. If you’re the receiver of the silence, ask why, like “I’m hearing silence, is each person still with us?” It shouldn’t take more than a few “silence call-outs” for the team to get into the habit of communicating around silence more effectively.

Effective Leadership

Multi-tasking certainly isn’t the only reason virtual teams can struggle, and Claire points out another significant factor in the success of virtual teams being leadership. “Many companies,” Claire says, “put inexperienced leaders in a virtual leadership role with inadequate training – or no training at all in how to lead them, which explains why only 15% rated themselves as very effective and just 53% as moderately effective.”

For an entrepreneur, we can see how critical the hiring, training, and monitoring of our virtual team leaders can be.

Block Blox commonly augments teams with project leaders; and we make a concerted effort to keep our project managers up to speed on the latest methodologies and tools for effectively managing our client teams during projects. Claire is an expert at training, mentoring and coaching virtual teams and team leaders.

Whether you’re looking to prepare a colleague to lead your remote team or you opt to augment and hire an external manager, find subject matter experts to mentor and guide you to ensure the people leading your team are doing it right.

Trust between team members

According to Claire, another fundamental value to high-functioning teams in any workplace is trust. Trust is especially critical for virtual teams because it takes, on average, four times as long to build trust in a remote setting than it does in a traditional face-to-face workplace. Include cultural diversity into the mix and add another 3-4 months to the trust-building period.

Building trust is simple (we didn’t say easy) and we aren’t here for an ethics lesson. If you’re concerned about the level of trust within your team, you probably already know the source of the problem but haven’t taken the initiative to address it. The problem may even be stemming from you, the leadership, owner or team leader.

What is one best practice you recommend virtual teams to adopt in order to improve cohesiveness?

Claire recommends building a Team Operations Agreement document. “A TOA is a document that is created by the team for the team and guides the team’s actions and interactions. It sets the stage for how the team will work together. It can be created at any point in a team’s life cycle.” Each team is unique, so each TOA is unique too.

The important process to follow in creating an effective TOA is identifying the problem areas or challenges the team is currently facing. This means collecting objective feedback and translating that feedback into actionable guidelines and procedures.

Developing a TOA can be a lengthy process, but it ultimately saves time in the future by providing working guidelines for the team to follow, including:

How we conduct ourselves in meetings
How we communicate
How we make decisions
How we work through conflicts

When you’re building your TOA, remember that working virtually means each and every team member must overcompensate for the remote nature of the communications. That oftentimes translates into what you may feel at first is over-communicating. Claire points out one effective trick for promoting effective communication can be using acronyms to signify certain communication guidelines, pointing out that companies such as Merck have created acronyms for their digital communications like “Four Hour Response (4HR)” and “No Need to Respond (NNTR)”.

Developing an internal set of acronyms can not only help streamline effective communication, but it can also promote engagement and connectedness by giving team members the feeling of having a common language that only your team uses to correspond. You may find creative ways to take this concept of “team language” to the next level. If you do, we’d love to hear what you’ve come up with!

This just about wraps this week’s dive into managing and leading virtual teams towards success. To conclude, a few takeaways to remember:

Eliminating multi-tasking and promoting (or requiring) attentiveness and engagement during meetings will improve your team’s cohesion and productivity.
Never forget the importance of trust within any group of people. If you sense a lack of trust or a conflict creating division, a great team leader addresses the conflict quickly and professionally.
Develop an operating agreement between team members that sets basic operating procedures and guidelines for communication. Hold your team accountable to the agreement, even if it adds an extra hour to your day. Optimize the agreement.

We hope this helps you take your virtual team to the next level, and we’d love to hear from you if you found any of the information in this article to be applicable to your team or company!

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