Virtual Teams - 6 pages - APA - 4 references - due 14 Nov

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PART

I When Should We Use Virtual Teams?

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 6 . R o u t l e d g e .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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CHAPTER

1 The Move Towards Virtual Working

Organizations across the world are constantly searching for better ways to plan and carry out their business. Although serving very different markets and with very different sets of operations, the needs expressed by companies in manufacturing, gas, oil and chemicals, transport, finance and services show marked similarities. With various priorities, and in various ways, they are constantly looking to improve on key indicators such as:

• reduced time to market • on-time delivery • flexibility • reduced costs • quality • supply chain integration • responsiveness • concurrent enterprise • efficient production of output • reduced waste • innovation and growth • retention of skilled staff.

Most of the innovations in industrial and commercial technical systems, and in organizational theories and approaches, have some or all of the above needs as their intended (and claimed) focus. Now we are seeing fast-growing interest in another way of working, which combines changes in technical and organizational systems of choice. This is virtual working and, by extension, virtual teams.

It is easy to see some of the drivers behind virtual working and virtual teams. The supply chain is critical to many modern businesses. The external supply chain, and often also the internal supply chain, will comprise people and departments who are distributed in space and time, as well as some who are co-located, and better ways have to be found for these members of the supply chain to work together with mutual methods and goals. The need to respond to customer and market needs, and in particular to reduce product life-cycle times and costs, means that ways must be found to aid rapid and frequent information-sharing and quality decision-making amongst people who may work in a number of different places.

As markets widen and customer bases become increasingly global, companies must respond by ensuring that they can extend their resources to cover all business-building opportunities and thus avoid relinquishing them to their competitors. Financial limitations constrain the extent to which companies can construct new offices around the world and fund large-scale relocation projects, thus reducing the competitiveness of certain project proposals.

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Today, many people working in Europe, North America, Australasia and South-east Asia are touched by virtual working in one form or another – relying, at the very least, on the telephone, fax or e-mail for contact with colleagues at other locations. In more sophisticated and defined set-ups they may commute electronically from a virtual office, using a suite of communication tools. This increase in remote working is primarily a consequence of the transition in the organization of the work being performed – from stable and co-located functions and teams to increasingly dynamic groups, connected electronically across the locations where the competencies reside. Few traditional, stable teams in the same fixed location can offer all the skills required to meet the diversity of demands placed upon them. The continuous improvement environment in which businesses now operate gives the impetus for forming teams within a virtual forum and the range of problems such teams can solve will expand through the application of the advanced communication technologies available.

A diversity of talents and expertise can be made available in response to every market demand, regardless of its source or focus, through the application of virtual teams. By avoiding the costly and inefficient relocation of employees in response to rapidly changing market needs, the organization can make the most effective use of its human resources, enhancing its competitive edge.

Virtual working has increasingly been identified as a financially viable and effective solution to meet the needs of globally distributed customers. Nowadays, many companies can accommodate many, if not all, of such technically demanding organizational solutions within their already advanced computer networks. However, if we can be comparatively comfortable about the availability of technical systems of communications and information handling to support virtual working, we can be less so regarding the associated human factors.

From a human resource and behavioural perspective, companies face great difficulties that require increasing attention as they begin to rely on virtual solutions. Even when human and organizational support systems have been established and are responding well to both the demands of new ways of working and new technologies, the rapid development of communications media can lead to the human and organizational accommodations to these advances lagging behind to a certain degree.

As with many other developments in information and communications technology (ICT), there is a strong push from the developers for virtual work technology. Various kinds of computer- supported cooperative work (CSCW) system, such as video conferencing, have sought to ride the larger waves of the market, moving from being the toys of the innovators and market leaders to the work tools of the early and late adopters in the mass market. However, unlike some areas of ICT, there has also been a pull of employers wanting more flexibility in how they organize work. On the one hand there are employers who wish to maximize the productive time of their employees and, as part of this, are seeking ways to allow people to work when remote from the office or factory – at home, when abroad, or on the move. On the other hand, some employers are seeking new ways of allowing employees to have more personal freedom in deciding where and when, and even how, they work.

Because some technologies such as video conferencing and telephone conferencing have been around for some time, but without large-scale adoption, it could be argued that the organizational need is, in turn, acting as a push on the technology developers. Here the requirement is for ICT to become faster, of higher quality and of greater bandwidth, and to allow larger groups to co-operate and co-ordinate more closely.

The distinction between push and pull is not merely an interesting academic exercise, nor a historical reflection on how ICT and new work practices are developed. The nature of the

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T H E M O V E T O W A R D S V I R T U A L W O R K I N G 5

application needs – the pull – will affect the type and quality of the technical systems being developed. (It is almost axiomatic that virtual working and virtual teams will require some form of networked ICT, otherwise it would be very difficult to see how they could work to the timescales and with the flexibility required.) The needs of a single peripheral worker or remote agent are different to those of a project team based in three factories and different again to those of a design group based in four countries. The requirements of a virtual team of three bankers who make daily international financial investment decisions are very different from those of a design engineer, a manufacturing engineer, a marketing manager and a client working on a new engineering design. Technical and organizational systems need to be available, and flexible enough to meet all these quite different needs.

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CHAPTER

2 What are Virtual Teams?

Fundamentally, virtual teams are groups of people who find themselves separated by distance and/or time, yet have common tasks to perform.

The interactions of virtual team members will rely on electronic communications media such as e-mail, audio and video conferencing and web-based tools. The team must deliver at least the results that would be expected of a traditional, co-located team, but from their separated locations.

Virtual team members do not necessarily originate from a single organization. In fact, virtual teams often facilitate collaboration between different organizations – suppliers and customers, for instance. The ability of virtual teams to bring together a variety of individuals from a range of locations and backgrounds can deliver the agility an organization needs to respond to fast-changing market demands without losing valuable time during which a competitor might fill the gap. The far-reaching network of the team will cross organizational, cultural and functional boundaries to deliver the combined skills and knowledge required for any job, regardless of the physical location of the participants. The outcome can be new levels of productivity and creativity provided through the increased flexibility of collaborating partners.

TYPES OF VIRTUAL TEAM

It should be clear that virtual teams will normally contain greater layers of complexity than traditional co-located teams because of the different cultures and team dynamics they will usually bring together. Consequently, they will certainly benefit if they can define the purpose of their creation more clearly. Distinguishing between the following types of virtual team may enable an organization to better define the needs for type, frequency and support of collaboration between participants.

PROJECT TEAMS

Project teams come together for a finite period of time in response to a project brief, not necessarily originating from any member of the team. Project teams comprise an intact group of members who stay together for the duration of the project, but who can draw on the skills of other members of the organization without necessarily integrating them into their unit. The team members will probably have formal meetings on a predefined basis and then work together in subgroups in the intervals between meetings to complete allocated modules of work. With project virtual teams, the nature of the project can be used to define the skill base that is required, and suitable members can be identified to deliver the objectives. Such a team will have measurable outputs, just like any co-located project team.

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SERVICE TEAMS

Service teams often exist as a resource on call – maybe across a number of locations or countries – for the resolution of problems and for advice. IT support is a typical example. The team is from a single function, and is primarily a support service. Their work and expertise is not usually tailored to the needs of a single organization or location and can be a resource for a number of departments, companies and countries. Due to time differences in working hours across locations the virtual team may need to be staffed during abnormal working hours.

Team members may not work together directly on a regular basis as their attention will be focused on problems and people outside the team itself. Each team member is required to work virtually, using the technology available to them to solve the problem they are presented with. Any work done within the group may be done face-to-face if the service team itself is co-locates for that purpose.

PROCESS TEAMS

Process teams will collaborate over an undefined period to respond to ongoing needs within a certain domain. The group is likely to have fluid membership due to the indefinite nature of the need or process, and people will be called upon depending on the challenges the team is facing at any particular time. The remit of these teams is often broad and their action plan ever-evolving. The nature of their collaboration would depend on the work to be completed.

An example of a process team in a multinational organization would be a team comprising the managing directors from each market within Europe, whose brief is to continually develop the company’s organizational effectiveness. This remit is broad and will require continuous focus for it to be developed and maintained. The team would have a constantly evolving action plan tailored to the team’s interpretation of the company’s needs at any point in time.

FLEXIBLE WORKING CONDITIONS

As has been seen above, the format and membership of the virtual team is largely defined by the tasks it has to complete. In addition, the team dynamics are made more complex by the way in which each individual chooses to work. Because the team works together virtually, the location from which they operate individually should be of no consequence.

There are many ways of providing flexible working conditions – for instance, hot desking or teleworking. Virtual working is not the same as these, but is related to them. In fact, virtual teams will often employ some of these strategies for flexibility, to support their remote working or to allow periodic visits to a central site, so some of them are discussed below.

HOT DESKING

Hot desking has come about as a result of the increased use of computers for most daily work in many sectors and the tendency for employees in some sectors to periodically work from home or while travelling. As working patterns become more flexible companies may come to believe that there is no need for all employees to have fixed workspaces and desks within the office. In any one day, a simple walk around some traditional offices may reveal that only a percentage of the desks are occupied. This can be attributed to several reasons. The employees may be:

• travelling abroad or at another office location for meetings and collaborative sessions • spending time with customers

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• working with agencies or consultancies • in all-day meetings and conferences • working from home for any number of reasons • be off sick or on holiday for a period of time.

Any of these reasons results in space – a desk and facilities that are not being used. That space is being lit, serviced with telephone and local area network (LAN) connections, cleaned and paid for in terms of floor space. This can cost between £6 100 – £19 000 ($9 000 – $29 000) per year in the UK, with London-based offices representing the higher end of the scale. Consequently, a number of companies have decided that it is wasteful to maintain a desk space every day for each employee linked to that office, and have moved to a system of hot desking for a proportion, if not all, of their workforces.

With the hot desk system the office allocates a number of desk spaces to the scheme, with telephone and LAN connections. Depending on their duties, responsibilities and daily work patterns, individuals may or may not be assigned a permanent desk. The hot deskers are furnished with a laptop, mobile phone and a pedestal drawer unit in which to store their files and other belongings. The individual may work away from the office a few days per week and therefore not require a desk for that time. When they are planning to be in the office to work or attend meetings they are allocated one of the hot desks, at which they can connect their laptop to the network and work as normal.

Depending on the sophistication of the hot desking unit and on the number of people it supports, some companies operate a hotel-like procedure. Employees have to book in advance to ensure that there will be a desk available to them. When they arrive they will be given a specific desk at which they will find their drawers, files and other resources already in place.

Figures 2.1 to 2.3 show visions, from BTexact Technologies, of future hotelling (or touchdown) desk spaces, from a minimalist concept to more complex and sophisticated ones. All are shareable and intended for short time occupancy.

Figure 2.1 A minimal workspace with less expensive display system

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W H A T A R E V I R T U A L T E A M S ? 9

Figure 2.2 A corporate touchdown workspace with touch screen and personalized docking port

Figure 2.3 A corporate touchdown workstation for short-stay working using text or voice input

Such a strategy not only has the potential to save organizations large amounts of expenditure, but can also increase their competitive advantage through spreading diversity. Traditionally, employees are located in the same place, with the same team, day in, day out. Yes, they have had the opportunity to develop significant synergies between them but these cannot develop indefinitely. The opportunity to mix with new people from day-to-day, to be exposed to new ideas and influences, allows employees to improve their networks across the organization and to build bridges where previously there have been none.

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On the downside, the social structure and support that people can find at work, at times belonging to a group which is as familiar to them as a family, are factors which provide much satisfaction and are important for good job design and work organization. Without such regular contact the attitudes of some people may change, to the detriment of their performance. Also, for some, a feeling of dislocation, of not having any roots in the workplace, may bring problems with motivation, satisfaction and happiness, or performance.

SATELLITE OFFICES

Satellite offices are created to accommodate employees who are unable to work from home or from the main office location. They are often set up to facilitate employees working at a distance from the central office location or in response to a company having a finite amount of (often costly) space that can no longer accommodate the requirements of an expanding workforce.

Physically, a satellite office is a remote location rented or bought by the parent company, and then furnished with office equipment, systems and network access to allow the employees to work in the same way as if they were at the main office site.

The people based there may use this facility for most of the week to avoid long-distance commuting, and only travel to the main office when they need to attend face-to-face meetings. The main office may offer a hot desking facility for these part-time users. The satellite office thus takes much of the strain off any space constraints experienced at the central office while allowing people to work together when situations require it. At other times, employees work virtually from their separate satellite office locations, using communications technology to collaborate with their distant colleagues.

The satellite office scenario can sometimes be extended to the idea of housing employees from more than one organization, working alongside each other. The cost savings realized from sharing accommodation can allow a small number of employees from each employer to work from locations near their homes. Clearly, however, issues of information security and finding compatible organizations need to be addressed before entering into such an arrangement.

Figure 2.4 shows a possible future satellite office or telecottage workstation.

Figure 2.4 Prototype desk suite for use in telecottage work, with ergonomic layout, cordless PDA docking,

flexible input and ‘walk-up personalization‘

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TELEWORKING/HOMEWORKING

Teleworking is the area in which virtual working has made the most significant advances in recent years. Entire books have been dedicated to this subject. Here, we try to describe not only the benefits it is said to have brought to industry, but also the pitfalls to be avoided.

Teleworking describes a flexible working condition that allows an employee to work from their home or other external environment, originally supported only by telephone, but now usually with remote LAN access software and hardware. The home becomes the employee’s permanent office location with only exceptional circumstances taking them into the company office, such as special meetings and management reviews. People may also be able to telework through connections they make while mobile (or at least while stationary in their car) and when using public shared workspaces. Figures 2.5 and 2.6 show possible workstations which can be used by virtual team workers on occasions when they need to be involved in team meetings, but cannot be present in the main office or any satellite offices.

Figure 2.5 Concept for a mobile workstation in virtual/teleworker’s car

The evolution of working patterns would appear to have travelled full circle, from cottage industries to employees working from a centralized location because of the expensive equipment they need to share, to moving back to the home environment with the use of a modem that brings all they need to them. The shift from a production-based economy to one based on service industries has created roles which emphasize information-sharing and growth of knowledge, and an employee may no longer need to be fixed at a single location to deliver the desired results.

Historically, teleworking has often been associated with field-based sales representatives who would not naturally spend a large portion of their day in any one location. However, today teleworking is being recognized as a solution to more general employee social problems and requirements – for example, to eliminate the stress of long commuting distances, to build family commitments into the working day, and to provide flexible working hours and part-time employment. Thus teleworking has grown, in concept and in practice, over the last few years, although perhaps not as quickly as was initially imagined.

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Figure 2.6 Concept for a public information exchange, with wireless LAN or Bluetooth link and employing

PDAs for interface

Teleworking, by being able to deliver flexible working conditions, can be a contributory factor to retaining talent in an organization. It allows companies that are relocating to retain employees who, for personal reasons, want to stay in their current homes. The cost to set up a teleworker in their home with all the relevant connections and equipment can be between £2000 and £4000 ($3000 to $6000) with an ongoing cost of approximately £2500 ($4000) per year for consumable office supplies and support. This is not a large investment when you consider the cost of losing that employee and recruiting and retraining their replacement.

Teleworking can also be a solution in the face of budget reductions that would normally demand the downsizing of the organization. Even if the company cannot afford to continue renting expensive premises, it may be able to sustain the cost of its employees working from home.

There is some evidence that the productivity of employees who move to teleworking can increase. This is attributed to the reduction in distractions that occur in the office environment, such as colleagues constantly interrupting work patterns for meetings and chats. In fact, even in traditional office environments, people can often be heard to say that they work from home a couple of days a month ‘just to get some work done’. Long-term productivity may also increase as a result of the employee taking less sick leave; they may be more inclined to continue working from home on a day when they may have felt too unwell to come into the office. Benefits also come in the form of a reduced requirement for supervision and clearly reduced expenses for premises and infrastructure. There are also benefits to the community as a whole in terms of decreased traffic, less pollution and less pressure on public transport, which are important arguments for any social audit.

However, as is to be expected in the face of such a large number of potential benefits, there are also several potential drawbacks for an organization looking to implement such an innovative working practice. Just as the reduction in a set of regular and stable social relationships is a potential problem for hot desking, so in teleworking these relationships might be lost completely.

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Many motivational theories express social contact as one of the most fundamental needs for employees’ satisfaction. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs outlines social contact as a ‘deficiency need’ without which employees will not be healthy, either physically and/or psychologically. Jahoda’s latent needs theory highlights the loss of visiting the workplace as depriving the employee of necessary social contact as a source of personal status and recognition. The contrast that teleworkers experience when moving from the busy work environment to just ‘you and your computer’ can be massive. For this reason it is often viewed as a socially unattractive option, which has detrimental effects on motivation and the effectiveness of continued collaborative work with colleagues. The most obvious solution to such isolation is to implement only part-time teleworking, allowing the employee to maintain their bonds with colleagues and to achieve the synergy with co-workers that enhances creative problem-solving. This solution also maintains an individual’s perceived status as recognized by others, as well as supporting the informal learning that takes place in the workplace.

Consideration must also be given to the needs of the employees who do not telework themselves, yet are expected to maintain working relationships with colleagues who are now no longer located in the same office. There can often be feelings of resentment and jealousy that can manifest themselves as a lack of trust that the colleague is actually doing their work rather than watching television at home, for example. This can be exacerbated when the teleworkers come into the office and boast about the benefits of working from home – like being able to sleep later or go for a walk or relax in front of the television for lunch. Both parties – the teleworker and their office-bound colleague – need a strong element of interpersonal awareness training to ensure that good working relationships are not damaged by the transition to virtual teamwork. There are also guidelines that the company can put in place to minimize the difference felt between the two parties – for example, ensuring that the teleworker maintains coreworking hours of, say, 10.00 to 15.00 with the ability to either start earlier or finish later. Ideally, this option should also be offered to the office-based employee to prevent accusations of preferential treatment. In addition, this policy ensures that the office-based employees are working within the same time window as the teleworkers, and so are able to continue collaborating.

A company that chooses to put a teleworking scheme into practice will find itself faced with a whole new set of requirements that it has to satisfy. Installing office equipment in its employees’ homes raises issues of security, health and safety regulations, servicing and IT support needs, as well as the need for the line manager’s trust that the employee will perform as well at home as they did while under their face-to-face supervision. Plans to introduce teleworking should not be entered into lightly, as many companies have failed in the implementation stage and burnt their bridges by downsizing their office facilities and initiating a number of redundancies and avoidable resignations. The employees’ needs must always be valued as highly as the company’s if the roll-out is to be a success.

Though estimates vary, approximately 5 per cent of the US workforce is already ‘telecommuting’, clearly making this a working practice that is on the increase and here to stay. In every instance, a move to teleworking needs significant resources dedicated to its execution if it is to deliver benefits to the organization. A failed implementation has the potential to lose the company its four most valuable assets: time, money, good people and consequently, customers.

WEB GROUPS

Far less formal and organized than the virtual workers who remotely log on to the company’s network and perform their daily routines are web groups. People who belong to these do not

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necessarily work for a single organization, yet use the Internet as a forum for discussion and information exchange. Examples of such people are researchers looking for books and papers or individuals who play the stock market. Each of these can search the Internet for a number of web groups or chatrooms that they can join, to either gather information from dialogue about current activity or contribute in the search for answers to various queries or problems.

People who work solely in this way can be at risk from isolation, especially if they are self- employed. They rely on motivating themselves; external reward and recognition may be difficult to achieve.

VIRTUAL WORKING DEVELOPS INTO VIRTUAL TEAMS

Although many of the above types of flexible working conditions are reasonably developed in industry today, and have resulted in the generation of important knowledge on virtual working, the concept of the virtual team within the teleworking or remote working environment has not yet been sufficiently addressed.

Whilst the technical tools have been put in place to allow remote workers to carry out their daily tasks, it is the challenge of this book to offer ways in which these technical scenarios can be extended so that companies can benefit from the motivation, spark and synergy that a team alone can deliver.

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CHAPTER

3 Why Virtual Teams?

If there is one thing that today’s global market demands from a company that is truly set to succeed it is flexibility. Virtual teams allow any organization to rise to this challenge in a number of different ways. Often, flexibility comes at a cost, but the converse can be true of virtual teams; if correctly implemented they have the potential to deliver significant cost savings to a company currently relying on traditional working practices. In the face of increasing interorganizational alliances and global projects, the opportunities for virtual teams can be many and varied.

GAINS FROM VIRTUAL TEAMS

DELIVERY AGAINST FAST-MOVING MARKET NEEDS

A number of arguments support the implementation of virtual teams. High on the agenda is the agility that they deliver to an organization – the ability to quickly and effectively react to fast- changing market conditions and demands. Membership of a virtual team is not restricted by location, but is instead dominated by the need for particular competences, regardless of physical location within the enterprise and position in any hierarchy. Thus, in response to a project brief, the people most suited to delivering outstanding results are selected and brought together. The electronic network is used to connect the islands of ability and knowledge that will deliver the best possible solutions – and with the most energy and motivation. More creative and innovative working can be achieved through the connection of people from diverse backgrounds, chosen for their knowledge and skills, not their accessibility. Variety in team members stimulates diverse and fresh conversation, ideal for brainstorming innovative solutions.

FINDING THE RIGHT PEOPLE FOR THE JOB

Finding the right people for the job presents an extra opportunity for organizations that have become so large that they are not sure who is expert in what. Their challenge will be to develop a process by which employees who have specific sets of expertise are made known. Intelligence should be gathered with the aim of creating a catalogue of employees and their competencies, so that teams for important projects can be developed using the best people for the job. If the required expertise does not exist within the company the virtual team can be extended to include consultants, academics and other experts outside the organization, almost as easily and effectively as if they were united under one name. The primary need is the ability to identify the expertise quickly; the flexibility of the virtual team and its dynamics should do the rest. The outcome will be the meeting of more customer requests due to the broadened pool of expertise from which the organization can choose.

The team boundary can easily be extended at any time in its life cycle to introduce fresh aptitudes, depending on the twists and turns the progress of the project takes. This includes extending to embrace consultants, customers and suppliers as and when needed. At a basic level, all that is required is that each member is able and is confident to share the team data via the

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selected communication technologies. The opportunity to belong to a virtual team enables people who have previously felt constrained to a single location and project base to broaden their horizons and career development, through their exposure to a greater number of influences, challenges and occasions to network across the organization.

EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION AND MOTIVATION

The potential improvements to the working life of an employee who is a member of a virtual team should not be overlooked. Pulling expertise into an existing project would once have meant that someone would have to travel to the project team’s principal location and spend a period of time there supplying their expertise, often feeling like an outsider. This scenario may have resulted in personal disruption to the employee who had to travel (normally outside working hours to avoid wasting valuable company time) and stay in a foreign or distant location until the work was complete. In addition, any personal reasons why they might prefer to stay at home would be ignored; they would be viewed as a mere component of the job. Although it is true that some – maybe many – people welcome the opportunity to travel and work abroad for short periods, it is surprising how quickly the excitement of hotel living pales for most of us, particularly when it is only relatively short travel in our own country.

Virtual solutions can deliver to employees the flexibility to design the way they work around other commitments and preferences they might have. This is not to say that there aren’t any circumstances in which it is appropriate for team members to travel to co-locate, merely that the process and possible outcomes often do not justify the cost and personal disruption.

SPREADING BEST PRACTICE

The need for employees to learn from their own and others’ mistakes and successes and reapply these findings elsewhere in the organization is a strong focus today. The electronic network that connects team members is an ideal means for rapidly spreading best practice and new ideas throughout a company. Each new virtual team can draw on the knowledge of other sets of employees, generating and extending corporate knowledge that can be spread more rapidly throughout the organization, as each team member becomes the ‘seed’ of new ideas at their permanent location. The very nature of virtual teams means that progress and results have to be documented, for sharing and collaboration purposes among the team, so the project’s history is also saved as knowledge for future applications. In fact, even colleagues located in fairly close physical proximity to each other will collaborate via communication technology due to the need to have documentation of their plans and agreements for future reference which, although this has its downside in terms of e-mail overload and loss of interpersonal contact, again increase the organization’s knowledge store.

POSITIVELY IMPACTING ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND CULTURE

A broader view of virtual teams sees them as flattening organizational hierarchies, by promoting communication between employees based purely on the skills they possess and irrespective of their formal position. Virtual teams have an advantage in this respect over conventional teams, as the team members may not know each other at all, meeting for the first time on the team’s creation. The team has no predetermined hierarchy deriving from previous collaboration, and status really should not be discussed to avoid the creation of ‘false leaders’ within a team whose success is predicted only on its members’ expertise in all facets of work. Flat organizations are

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increasingly benefiting greatly from the virtual team structure as it fits well with the values they have set for themselves – namely, that all people interact based purely on the expertise they possess and the need to find synergy between themselves.

EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION

As we will say many times in this book, technical systems are not all that virtual teams are about, and overconcentration on them can be unhealthy (see Chapter 5). Nonetheless, as well as being a necessary component of virtual working, ICT can deliver a number of other benefits to the company:

• The need to focus on communication requirements and processes in order to implement the most useful ICT can itself provide insight about more effective use of the team’s time and richer dialogue between its members, increasing the group’s overall productivity.

• The use of asynchronous communication media, such as e-mail, can be conducive to greater input from introverted or shy employees who do not necessarily flourish in a face-to-face, interactive environment. It also gives time for the information shared to be digested and for replies that have been suitably thought through.

• ICT can accelerate information-gathering, as a single question can be asked of several people through the click of a button using multi-addressed e-mails or a ‘notice board’ on a website.

EXTENSION TO THE WORKING DAY

Although working across continents may appear to hinder collaboration between a group of people, it does also deliver a very exploitable benefit in that working across time zones extends the effective working day. With a team split between the UK and Australia, almost 24-hour working can be achieved, so that, effectively, ‘the sun never sets on the project’. Questions can be posed or problems identified by one part of the team at the end of one working day, addressed and answered by the other part of the team while the first half sleeps and solutions be back on the questioner’s desk via e-mail by breakfast time, effectively halving the project’s work time requirements.

THE COST BENEFITS OF IMPLEMENTING A VIRTUAL TEAM

Although the co-location of team members may often be viewed as the most straightforward way of running a project, it may not be the most cost-effective solution. A company that relies solely on co-locating its employees when a project brief demands a selection of expertise to respond to customer demands may be losing more than money in the process. Such indeterminate costs, for which a monetary value may not be easy to identify and apply, are very real in their effects on an organization and its employees.

TANGIBLE AND QUANTIFIABLE COSTS OF VIRTUAL TEAMS

The tangible costs of the traditional (co-located) and virtual solutions to team working should be carefully identified and analysed. Of course, there may be overriding features that force the company into choosing one or other of the set-ups, such as the inability or refusal of employees to co-locate to the project’s ‘natural’ location (see Chapter 6 for consideration of ‘Why not virtual teams?’). But, generally, companies must carry out a rational review of the costs of each option.

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Table 3.1 lists the tangible and quantifiable cost impacts of virtual working and co-located working.

Table 3.1 The tangible and quantifiable cost impacts of virtual working and co-located working

Virtual working potential tangible costs Co-located working potential tangible costs

• Training of employees in ICT use and new • Disturbance allowances work methods • Overseas living allowances

• Upgrading IT infrastructure capital and labour • Local tax assessment costs costs • Travel costs within temporary locations, as

• Creation of IT support service labour costs well as subsistence expenses • Security infrastructure capital and maintenance • Intercontinental travel and subsistence costs

costs • Rents while on secondment • Travel costs for relationship developing meetings • Business removal expenses

• Consultant travelling and accommodation costs on top of daily charge

• Lost time costs whilst travelling

Virtual teams are especially suited to projects that require the best use and extended use of an organization’s human resources without being restricted by location. Otherwise, companies are faced with the choice of either making do with the competencies they have near the problem or project source, or else supporting an expensive travel and subsistence budget. The establishment of an infrastructure to support virtual team interactions may be a costly process if it is not already available. But, in the majority of modern nationally or globally distributed organizations, such an infrastructure already exists, offering many sophisticated tools that may not in fact be currently fully exploited. Although certain new software purchases may be necessary at the outset, after the first application of a virtual solution the ensuing projects can cost the company little or nothing as the tools will all be available; furthermore, the first generation of virtual team members will become the experts for future training.

INTANGIBLE AND LESS QUANTIFIABLE COSTS

Virtual solutions are designed to save an organization money while delivering additional benefits, but the predominant costs of implementation may not be financial. More threatening to the success of virtual teams can be shortfalls in resources – of time, people and commitment. Companies need to provide, but often may not have, sufficient resources for:

• commitment to dedicate effort to a virtual solution even when co-location is an option (however expensive and ineffective it is by comparison)

• time allowed at the outset dedicated to defining the principles and protocols by which the team members undertake to operate

• time allowed to negotiate and define the single team identity, which includes development of relationships with strategic partners

• time dedicated to training in the new ways of working and of collaborating • time dedicated to negotiate the specification of a common and acceptable security system

between co-operating partners.

Unlike the purchase of ICT hardware and software, these are not one-off costs for the organization and will have to be repeated and revisited when introducing new employees to

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virtual working. On the other hand, all these resource provisions deliver more than just a one-off team solution. They raise the employees’ ability to successfully collaborate not only in the virtual team but also in their day-to-day work, which will require virtual working on more informal levels. How many people do we all work with nowadays who we never or rarely meet? All these relationships will benefit from the training and skill development that being part of a virtual team will deliver.

The intangible and less quantifiable cost impacts of virtual working and co-located working are shown in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2 The intangible and less quantifiable cost impacts of virtual working and co-located working

Virtual working potential intangible costs Co-location potential intangible costs

• New challenges for communication between • Work can be less efficient at the start due to team members changed surroundings

• More effort required to build team spirit and • Loss of possibility for 24-hour working identity • Loss of flexibility to access all the expertise

• Potential for more misunderstanding, which required, which is only available if physically reduces efficiency accessible

• Time zones may constrain the communication • Less opportunity to introduce experts for short window periods

• Possible customer dissatisfaction – for instance, • Less focus on communications and the if there is impaired data security processes of interaction

• Possible overreliance on technology if team members ‘forget’ their interpersonal skills

Whilst, as we will see later (Chapters 4, 6 and 7), there are arguments against co-located and virtual teams – in particular circumstances of application, if not in general – and some difficulties and disadvantages to face, nonetheless there are increasingly powerful arguments for organizations to at least consider virtual teamwork for relevant employees in the future.

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CHAPTER

4 What Have Traditional Teams Taught Us? (Written in collaboration with Claire Whittington)

Few areas of research or practice are as prone to fads and the reinvention of the wheel as are the fields of business management and ICT. When these two worlds merge, or collide, as they do with the motivation and structure behind virtual teams, then we should beware. In particular, not everything about virtual teams is entirely new, nor do their implementation and support require entirely new principles and practices. We can learn much from what is known about co-located teams. Equally, although the past ten years or so have seen a real emphasis on teams in all types of organization – sometimes seeming to be the first solution looked for in response to any requirements or problems – lessons about team design and implementation have been known for a long time, although these have not always been positive ones …

We trained hard … but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up in teams we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation in life by re-organising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress whilst producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation. (CAIUS PETRONIUS, AD 65)

WHY TEAMS?

The rationale for teams has been different for different types of organization at different times. For some, teamworking has organizational advantages, such as improved production systems flow, greater labour flexibility and better quality. For others, the personnel gains of higher commitment, involvement and motivation or reduced labour turnover and absenteeism will be the goals. In recent years, some companies have utilized the delayering (literally, the removal of organizational or supervisory layers) consequences of teamworking, and the resulting flexibility of the workforce, to cut costs by reducing labour, whether or not it is dressed up as downsizing or rationalization or some other euphemism.

Of course, with so many different reasons for implementing teamworking, we will find very different types of team. To begin with, they may be a real team exhibiting all the characteristics of teamworking or they may be merely a group or collection of people; they can also be formally constituted with specifications and roles and a management system that recognizes teamwork or they can merge together, often for a specific purpose at a specific time in informal groupings. Therefore teams can be temporary or permanent (or at least operating over a considerable period of time). They can be constituted horizontally – in which case all team members have similar job grades and degrees of responsibility even if they have different functions – or they may be vertical teams – in which case there are representatives from different technical and

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supervisory grades within the team. In terms of what they do, the function of the team can be planning – often design and development – or else producing, in which case they usually have specific production or process control responsibilities. As to the style of the team, as we shall see later, teams can have little variety of responsibilities and a low degree of authority (sometimes called lean teams) or they may have a considerable degree of job authority and cover a wide variety of tasks (sometimes called European or socio-technical teams). The former may also be labelled by some of the terms from scientific management (Fordist or Taylorist) and the latter are often called self-managed or self-organized teams.

WHAT ARE TEAMS?

In principle, any grouping of more than two people can be a team. However, teams generally comprise between four and twenty people within a larger organization, with the preferred number often said to be between six and eight people. The attributes which generally describe teams are shown in the box below.

It is a significant part of the make-up of teams that they have technical, social and strategic or planning skills; in other words, they have technical goals and tasks and also a set of tasks which enable them to work together collaboratively and reliably as a team. The consequence of teams having increased responsibility and authority, and a wider range of tasks, is that they take on a number of tasks over and above those which would be allocated to individual workers in more traditional work systems. These additional tasks include:

• work allocation and planning • maintaining safety/housekeeping standards • determining work priorities, scheduling • ordering supplies and materials • selection of new team members • first-line maintenance • process improvement • target and performance measures • liaison with internal/external customers.

Beyond these technical tasks, teams have a number of tasks which they must perform and which enable them to work satisfactorily together – to show teamwork. Some of these are listed in the box overleaf.

ATTRIBUTES OF TEAMS

• 2+ (6–8) people within larger organization • Set of common valued goals, multiple tasks • Clearly defined roles and responsibilities • Wide range of tasks • Considerable responsibility and authority • Many traditional management roles * Internal interdependence and co-ordination • Mutually accountable for methods and resource use • Complementary skills • Technical, strategic and social skills

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SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

The earliest interest in the idea of teamworking within businesses, and particularly within manufacturing, grew out of the work of researchers at the Tavistock Institute in London during the 1950s. They developed a theory of sociotechnical systems and then consequent principles for (autonomous) group work design.

Behind socio-technical systems (STS) design lies the recognition that the social system in organizations will have as great an influence on success or failure as the technical and economic systems. Recognizing the interaction of these subsystems and jointly optimizing them gives an opportunity to improve both work performance and quality of work life. By extension, a further tenet of STS theory is that the work organization is a whole open system, influenced by what we would know these days as the total supply chain.

The first experiments in group work design on the basis of STS theory took place in the mining industry in the UK and afterwards spread into Australia, Canada, Norway, India and Sweden. These implementations were of (semi-) autonomous work groups, of workers with a high level of self-management, engaged in co-operative completion of whole identifiable parts of the process. They were independent of external control for long periods and could formulate goals, decide when, where and how to work, distribute tasks internally, decide membership and decide on leadership. They were given increased responsibilities, often including training, target-setting, quality and maintenance.

There was a considerable debate on variations in autonomy during the 1970s, particularly on the types and degrees of autonomy. For instance, a group could have work method autonomy (discretion regarding work methods and procedures), work schedule autonomy (the extent to which people can control when they do things) or work criteria autonomy (whether people can choose the criteria to evaluate their own performance). Also the degree of autonomy could vary on a spectrum, from the group examining alternatives and selecting in consultation with management through to the group both developing the alternatives and making a final selection amongst themselves on their own.

One important outcome of the work of the 1960s and 1970s has been the STS design principles bequeathed to later researchers and investigators. These principles are valuable not only for co-located team implementation but also for virtual teams. They are:

• Principle 1: Compatibility The design process must be compatible with its objectives. For instance, the design and introduction of a team working organization should be managed by teams of stakeholders.

COMPONENTS OF TEAMWORK

• Orientation – for example, participating in team activities • Leadership – for example, listening to concerns of members • Communication discipline – for example, acknowledging and forwarding messages • Monitoring – for example, being aware of other members’ activities • Feedback – for example, accepting suggestions by other members • Back-up behaviour – for example, filling in for a member unable to do a task • Co-ordination – for example, passing on appropriate information • Communication quality – for example, maintaining open and flexible lines of communication • Sensitivity – for example, recognizing colleagues’ workload and performance • Adaptation – for example, reforming according to changes in environment

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• Principle 2: Minimal critical specification Only the absolutely essential content of a change should be specified at the outset. This ensures some flexibility in design and implementation. On the other hand, something must be specified, to avoid drift in the project, and so we should state what has to be done, but not how to do it.

• Principle 3: Variance control Variances should be controlled as close to their source or origin as possible. This is a critical element of self management, and emerges from cybernetics and control systems theory. Translated into teamwork, this means that problems with quality of a process or maintenance of a machine are best dealt with within the process or cell and by the operational staff. This leads to approaches of total quality, and of operators carrying out their own in-process quality assurance and their own maintenance checks, diagnostics and repair.

• Principle 4: Boundary location The boundary between a team and the rest of the organization is critical. Therefore, the organization and function boundaries should be drawn with care to allow the sharing of information, knowledge and learning.

• Principle 5: Information flow The information needed to take actions and meet goals should be provided to those who require it, when they require it and in the most appropriate form.

• Principle 6: Power and authority Groups should be able to exercise the degree of power and authority that they really need in order to accept responsibility for their own performance.

• Principle 7: The multifunctional principle It is beneficial for an organization to have employees with competences in a wide range of tasks, as well as the capability to plan and solve problems in a wide variety of circumstances.

• Principle 8: Support congruence Systems of social support should reinforce the behaviours that are needed and be consistent with the work design philosophy. For instance, training for teams should take place in groups and should cover social as well as technical skills, and supervision should be facilitatory rather than directive.

• Principle 9: Transitional organization Planning and design are required for the transition from a traditional to a new organization. It doesn’t just happen, but requires careful management.

• Principle 10: Incompletion Systems design is an iterative and continuous process. A design is never really completed, but should be subject to continuous improvement.

Socio-technical systems redesign should also enable a high quality of work life for employees and team members as well as providing for the successful performance of the organization. In order

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to achieve this, jobs within the teams should be demanding and varied, provide the opportunity to learn on the job, have roles of decision-making, give a degree of social support and recognition, relate work life to social life, and give a feeling that the job leads to a desirable future.

LEADERSHIP AND LEADERS

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. (JOHN UPDIKE)

Another outcome of all the work on co-located teams over the years, which is of value to understanding virtual teams, is to do with leadership and leaders. Together with the degree of autonomy that a group has, and the interchangeability of roles (or multiskilling), the way in which a team is facilitated or led is one of the critical factors in its implementation.

In practice, many teams are likely to move at least partially along a continuum, and the role of the supervisor may gradually evolve from controller (stage 1), to team leader (stage 2), then to team co-ordinator (stage 3) and boundary manager (stage 4) and finally to team resource (stage 5). This progression is mirrored in the development of the team members who move from individuals who are told what to do, to working together as a group, assuming shared responsibility and finally running all the day-to-day operations, planning and being accountable for their own work.

Where a team will be positioned on this continuum could be determined both by planning (for example, a conscious decision by management of how much they are willing to give up in terms of control) and also by events (for example, the speed and enthusiasm with which the team acquires new skills). The rate of development of teams, and the extent to which they actually reach the different levels of maturity, will vary considerably. Some teams may only progress through a few of these stages, whereas others may begin at a fairly advanced stage.

Whatever the leadership role, whether co-ordinator or facilitator and whether as a post for one person or rotated within the team, team leadership is extremely difficult. It is far too easy to slip into being too weak or too strong, wanting to be too centrally involved or being too hands-off. Also, the leader will be expected to manage the boundary between the team and other organization functions and units in the supply chain. None of these duties is easy. With the absence of regular face-to-face meetings, the nature of leadership within virtual teams will, of necessity, be somewhat different, but the critical role of leadership, and the difficulty in fulfilling it, remains the same.

UNDERLYING STRUCTURES TO TEAMWORKING

Three other issues are worth mentioning at this point in terms of their importance for teamworking generally and, critically, for their relevance to virtual teaming. The first is to do with trust. In the context of teams this has several manifestations. There is the trust that each team member has in every other member: that they are able to do their own job and to perform in such a way that the overall performance of the team is not impaired. There is also the trust that team members need to have about the inputs that they receive from other team members – in particular, the reliability of communications or the quality of hardware and software which is passed amongst the team members. The third manifestation of trust has less to do with the

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actual work for which the team is employed and more to do with trust in the sense of having confidence in colleagues not to let us down and not to side with a higher authority against us. All these aspects of trust are difficult enough to develop, support and measure in co-located teams, and virtual teams have the additional difficulty that it is generally going to be harder to build trust without day-to-day and face-to-face contact. Trust is a vital ingredient in a successful organization, but is very fragile and is compromised at a company’s peril.

The second issue of interest from co-located teams is that of the shared or team mental model. Without going into the depths of cognitive psychology, a mental model refers to the way in which we perceive and conceive a situation, product, system or task. It is made up of our own expectations as we approach a task or a product and of what confronts us at that time. One way of thinking about mental models is as simulations that we run inside our own heads to help us with tasks or using products or dealing with other people. A team mental model, then, is an explanation of the types of belief, perception and knowledge that might be held across a whole team; they may well be variable in number and quality, and may be concerned with the form, functions, state or purpose of things or people. Extending beyond this is the concept of a shared mental model, which is the extent to which individuals in a team will have parts of a mental model in common, so that they can work with common understanding on problems or can hand over tasks or functions to each other without there being a breakdown in their performance. Such notions of team and shared mental model are of great interest when we look at teams in, for instance, air traffic control or emergency co-ordination centres.

Again, in virtual teams we have problems associated with what is, in any case, a very difficult concept, compounded by the fact that it is hard to see how a team mental model can be supported and mental models shared when people are distributed in space and time.

The third interesting aspect is that of the team boundary and its management. A team boundary is usually taken to mean the limit of functional responsibility and authority. For instance, to what extent is a co-located team responsible for process quality and how does it liaise with the quality engineers in a company? These two questions tell us where the team’s boundary is located and how the transfer of information and decision-making is managed across it. In fact there are more questions to address. First, we have to decide what lies within the boundary, which is to do with the selection of team members and determining the size of teams and their composition. Then we have to specify the boundary, deciding on the clarity with which we set roles for the team and how we allow the team to identify itself and its place within the wider organization. Boundary permeability is the extent to which the team is open to external inputs and to which the wider organization is open to contributions from the team. Boundary spanning concerns the actual interactions that take place with other groups or personnel and how these are carried out. Finally, boundary crossing is to do with how we enable members of the team to exit or leave the team, and how we allow new members to enter or join the team. All these facets of boundary management must be addressed in the way virtual teams are set up, implemented and then operated and managed.

TYPES OF TEAM COMPETENCY

A critical decision to be faced by those designing teams – co-located or virtual – is the degree of overlap of competencies, skills and knowledge that should be planned for. The three classic cases for this are exemplified in Table 4.1.

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Table 4.1 Three types of team competency

Type of team Description Examples

‘Kung Fu army’ Teams with well-known, Manufacturing production teams understood and recognized interchangeable skills; team skills may vary from relatively routine through to high level

‘Total (Dutch) football’ Team members with their own Air traffic control roles and ‘positions’ but can interchange at times

‘Guns of Navarone’ Teams contain one person of Project design teams each specialism and these are rarely interchangeable

This distinction between team competency types can be extended into a number of questions that must be asked about the make-up of co-located and virtual teams. These include:

• Do we want multiskilled staff with interchangeable functions or more specialist staff who are familiar with each other’s roles and skills but can only carry out limited and temporary task exchange?

• Do we want teams who work to procedures with few short-cuts or idiosyncrasies and little innovation, or do we want teams who use tacit communication, take non-procedural short- cuts but are very innovative?

• Should trust within the team come from the predictabilities of each other’s behaviour, although within a less bonded structure, or from each team member having realistic expectations of each other’s competence and reliability within a more tightly bonded structure?

DISADVANTAGES OF TEAMS

Whilst the potential advantages of teamworking are many and various, and we ourselves would support the use of teamworking in many situations, teams are not a panacea, nor are they free from problems in set up and management. Experience tells us that there are two sets of problems, disadvantages and pitfalls to watch out for. The first set are connected with the way in which the team structure is designed and implemented; in other words, they are problems which can be avoided, or at least minimized, if care and knowledge is applied to teamworking implementation. Listed below are the sorts of mistake or wrong strategy which can arise when implementing teams, and which would mitigate against their success or even their survival:

• implementing teams without seeking commitment, with poor communication and without real participation from the stakeholders

• inadequate resourcing, in terms of people and time, as well as money • implementing teams in the context of downsizing or industrial relations problems • implementing teamworking and concentrating on personnel issues, but without carrying out

any systematic function and job analysis or carrying out good task design • using teams to reduce staff size and so losing any redundancy in availability of labour,

particularly important for safety-critical industries

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• putting together teams with the wrong mix of skills • providing inadequate training and support for the team, in both technical and social areas • paying insufficient attention to systems of performance measurement which match well with

the teamworking concept.

These problems associated with poorly handled implementation are the second set of potential side-effects or pitfalls with teams which can occur even with the best-laid plans. However, if management and other stakeholders are aware of these, they may be able to implement policies and actions to minimize any harmful effects. Such potential difficulties include the following:

• Problems of leadership, and the very difficult role of team leader, are compounded if a facilitator or leader is too weak or too dogmatic and strong.

• Problems are caused when a good facilitator leaves the team. • At first, team members may not have enough confidence, in either their own capabilities or

in their management’s trust in them, to take on the extra responsibilities; good implementation can ease such problems.

• Where any members of teams have not yet gained the confidence or perhaps the necessary skills, company decision-making can move to an inappropriate level, with possible financial or safety implications.

• Teamworking can mean increased pressures from members of the team, or one or two individuals amongst them; people may put pressure on themselves in an effort to keep up with team norms or imagined or expected performance.

• Conflicts can occur within the team, as they might in any group of people who have to spend time together and depend on each other.

• Conflicts may also occur between teams in an organizational structure, particularly if they are competing for resources in a supply chain or for customer contact and so on.

• The implementation of teams will generally mean a reduction in numbers, or degree of responsibility, of staff in service functions (for example, maintenance, quality, planning) and in immediate supervisory roles. Quite naturally, the greatest opposition to implementation of teams often comes from people in these service and supervisory jobs and how these people are managed and their future is developed within the organization may well be critical to the team’s success.

• Boundary management is extremely difficult and critically important for teams, and many may fail if this is not handled correctly.

• There is often a reduction in promotion opportunities within the company coming with teams, because of the loss of (usually supervisory) posts which can accompany the delayering effect of implementing virtual teamworking. This may mean that highly trained people, who have been given the additional confidence and skills engendered in a team culture may leave the host organization and take these skills elsewhere.

• In safety-critical industries, teams may exhibit elements of groupthink in making decisions or diagnosing problems; this may also be found in less dramatic fashion in commercial or creative teams, whereby innovation or capacity to think the unusual is lost in the desire to conform with the norms and the actions of the group.

• Where teams have been very successful, they may tend to become almost too independent, to the extent that they think of themselves as a company within the company. In such circumstances a situation of suboptimality may set up, whereby each team may perform as

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well as it can, but the net effect of the different teams performing in this way may be harmful to the company’s performance as a whole.

• There is some evidence that, although many of us like social contact and social support, some individuals actively dislike the idea of working in teams (estimates indicate that 15–20 per cent may feel like this). Dealing with these people is not easy, especially since they may be amongst the technically most highly skilled in the company. Spreading them between teams, allowing them to work outside the team structure, giving them their own team(s) or firing them are all options, and all fraught with risk.

Some of these difficulties and problems will be revisited throughout this book. For now, it is fair to say that any or all of them are just as likely to occur in implementing virtual teams as in implementing co-located teams.

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