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

PART

II What We Need to Know When Implementing 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

5 Technology for Virtual Teams (Written in collaboration with Simon Clarke)

As with any implementation of change within business, the introduction of virtual teams should not be technology-led. Companies will gain most from implementation of new ICT and the new ways of working if projects take a human-centred or STS approach. In other words, change should reflect the joint needs of the technical, social and economic systems within a company. There is an increasing array of evidence that ICT projects fail where proper regard has not been paid to the characteristics of the primary and secondary users, where the users’ real task needs for the systems and the environment and context of use have not been understood, and where there has been inadequate consideration for the support they will require, including training. Some of the classic and well-known failures of ICT implementation in the public sector, for instance in the National Health Service and the Passport Agency in the UK, are matched – although with less publicity – by failures in the private sector.

We hope that this book has already persuaded you of the importance of human and organizational factors in ensuring the success of virtual teams. While social interaction, organizational culture and project management are critical, the selection of the right technical systems to support the work of virtual teams is also vital. Although the intended goals and structures for virtual teaming should be the driving force behind the choice of technology, and vice versa, the degree to which the selected technology is appropriate – that is, usable, functional, useful and likeable – can make or break the virtual teaming project.

Virtual teams can only work if they can communicate and collaborate with confidence, have access to the same information sources and feel trust in each other. Only then can they truly be mutually accountable for the completion of the tasks and goals assigned to them. The ICT selected is obviously critical for communication but is also an essential component in achieving such requirements as task completion and mutual trust. This means that the selection and development of ICT for virtual teaming must be carried out with a thorough knowledge of the types of technology available, their characteristics, and how they support the social and technical needs of teams.

Again, we stress the importance of the pull of the application need rather than the push of ICT availability. But, as virtual teams depend on technical systems for their operation, you should be aware of what is available and the consequences of making various choices.

CRITERIA FOR CHOOSING VIRTUAL TEAM TECHNOLOGY

Decisions about technical support for virtual teams – the type of hardware and software – must be made with great thoroughness and assessed and compared against a number of criteria. A number of attributes of ICT have been identified by leading virtual team experts and by specialists in ergonomics and human factors. By examining the various ICT systems under

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consideration against such attributes, and then reviewing the resulting profiles in the light of their own virtual team’s needs, companies can start to make rational choices.

The important attributes or criteria of ICT for virtual teams are:

• functionality • usability • social presence • information richness • archiving • project life • salience • company culture • compatibility with technical infrastructure • resources • security • costs.

FUNCTIONALITY

Functionality is the capability of the ICT system and its interfaces – in other words, what it can deliver. Functionality can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the ICT chosen must have the functionality to support the needs of the users, whether this be to create, amend, store and retrieve documents, exchange information (synchronously or asynchronously), deliver graphics, allow voice communications and so on. On the other hand, too much functionality can be unnecessary and may confuse or irritate. How many of us manage to use more than about a quarter or a half of the capabilities of a word-processing system? How irritated are you by all the extra functions and controls on cameras or washing machines, many of which you will never need but which seem to get in the way of successful and enjoyable use?

Before beginning to consider which ICT to purchase, virtual teams and their facilitators must first consider what they really need to do, both now and in the future. Then they should think about who will be doing the work, when and where, how they will be working in practical terms – for example, on the move, at home and so on – and why they will be working in this way. Only then should they consider which ICT best meets their needs.

USABILITY

Usability is at the heart of human factors concerns for new technologies, and especially for the interfaces these provide. It is important that hardware and software which display information (visual, auditory and so on) to participants and which allow participants to input information and control the system are designed to match their needs, capabilities and limitations. There is considerable advice available in the fields of ergonomics or human-computer interaction (HCI) on usability and how to design and evaluate for it. Less common are usability purchasing guides, at least at a clear and simple enough level for small companies with little time available to purchase relatively small systems.

In their considerations of how usable a new ICT system will be for virtual team members, organizations should consider the following questions:

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• How easy is the system to learn and how long will their staff need to become familiar and then competent with the ICT?

• How simple and consistent is the interface to use? • What level of online help is available – especially in terms of support in case of errors? • How will users navigate in the system, especially between different display and control modes

for more sophisticated virtual team ICT? • How understandable are the coding systems, such as colour, icons and abbreviations? • Are there any potential problems in physically installing any equipment or for the health and

safety of participants? • How user-friendly is the system and how motivated will participants be?

Good usability will mean that users can get the most out of the system’s functionality.

SOCIAL PRESENCE

Social presence describes the extent to which a technology helps people feel a personal connection with others in the team. Interactions with high social presence tend to be synchronous and have an open and friendly environment. Face-to-face meetings should have high social presence (although in practice many may not!) and, in principle, so should video conferencing. Both face-to-face meetings and video conferencing can enable spontaneity, immediate reactions and an atmosphere of real-time interaction. For some people, telephone conversations offer such attributes as well. High social interaction is generally required for first-time meetings, creative or brainstorming sessions or when the expression of emotions is valuable.

High social presence is not always a good thing. Some people in some circumstances may be unable to think rationally when faced with the reactions, emotions and gestures of others; in such cases, it may be better to use systems with lower social interaction. Reduced social presence is inherent in systems such as e-mail, which are relatively asynchronous, but this does not detract from the fact they are useful in the right circumstances. The transfer of information, as opposed to knowledge, will often benefit from low social presence. Our own experiences have included projects where members have demonstrably felt more at ease communicating with supervisors at a (temporal and physical) distance. Also, if a task is routine, such as weekly updates, there is generally no need (and it is often not possible) to have a video conference; a better option is to e-mail the team a copy of the update.

INFORMATION RICHNESS

Information richness is concerned with the degree of variety in the content and format of information that will be transferred between team members. It was identified as important well before overt consideration of virtual teamwork. An information-rich resource can reduce confusion and misunderstanding, but additional complexity may come at a price of less reliability. For example, a digital conferencing package encompassing voice/data/video facilities will give information about body gestures, tone of voice, body language and the participant’s environment. However, such communication may take up a lot of bandwidth on a network and be subject to poor transmission quality, which defeats the point of having an information-rich resource.

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ARCHIVING

Archiving refers to the technology’s capability to create a historical record of team information exchange, interactions and decision-making. An e-mail or letter between group members can be stored and retrieved more easily than an audio conference.

PROJECT LIFE

Project life refers to the influence on technology choice of the period of time for which the technology is going to be required. Limited and fast projects, or simple one-off meetings, may use teleconferencing or desktop conferencing; virtual teams that are together on a more permanent basis may benefit from richer systems such as video whiteboards or large plasma screens.

SALIENCE

Salience is the meaning of the message or interaction that may be implied by the technology – especially the user’s perceptions of this. Information can be sent via many different media and, for each, the interpretation may be different. For example, a facilitator of a virtual team may be having difficulties in ensuring that a certain individual delivers tasks on time and could communicate by e-mail or meet over a video link. The individual concerned may be more responsive to the increased human interaction made possible by a video link than to an e-mail which may be ignored or forgotten. In these days of e-mail overload surface mail may assume a greater subjective importance because it implies a certain degree of care on the part of the sender.

COMPANY CULTURE

Company culture has implications for the organizational readiness to implement different ICT to support virtual teams. New technical systems may match existing technology and ways of doing things to a greater or lesser degree. In our own university, for instance, even a simple and limited ICT such as Groupwise (shared access to electronic diaries and other resources) has floundered in the culture of individualism and individual autonomy that prevails. Senior management may often have their own preferences regarding types of technology, but it is up to employees and team members to develop their own norms based on company policy. In many young companies, e-mail is the favoured means of communication and voicemails will often be left untouched for days.

COMPATIBILITY WITH TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Compatibility with technical infrastructure is vital. Some LANs may only have a relatively small bandwidth, and a rich communications medium like video streaming will suffer quality problems – which will impair communications and give low motivation to use it. Lack of appropriate technical training and other support staff can ruin the implementation of many technologies, and the ICT required for virtual teaming is no different. It must also be remembered that virtual teams may often include people who are teleworking, usually working from home, and there must be sufficient network connection and grade of equipment for them to receive information on the same basis as their colleagues who are based within the workplace.

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RESOURCES

Resources available are a more prosaic criterion for the selection of technologies, particularly the company’s in-house ICT resource and capability. An organization will usually want, if possible, to choose ICT which matches the existing infrastructure and which can be implemented, supported and serviced by its existing staff. Another choice is to select technology that matches systems currently operated (or likely to be operated in the future) by partners in the supply chain – whether customers or suppliers – and so utilizing this support resource.

SECURITY

Security is a need with all ICT. Given the nature of virtual teams – with people working out of the office, often in relatively insecure homes, and information being transmitted over external networks – security takes on extra importance.

With the advent and growth of such things as Intranets, the World Wide Web, faxes, e-mail, computer-based groupware and video conferencing the possibilities for innovative work arrangements have multiplied. However, the ability for employees to access private networks and Intranets has been restricted by the dominance of tight security needs, even though, today, the IT infrastructure can support the access with relative ease. Information technology security will always lag behind the rapid advances in IT itself, as they are continually being developed in response to changes in IT practices and is often reactive rather than proactive to the latest virus or worm. The security experts face concerns over investing too much in their developments, simply to witness a new advance in technology that will render their solutions obsolete.

Whichever technical system is chosen to support virtual teams, measures will have to be taken to protect the company’s intellectual property from opportunists. There are many solutions available that can be quite simply implemented, including password protection, encryption and firewalls. The level of security required will dictate the level of effort that should be put into the security barriers and will be already clearly documented in companies who operate using electronic communication media.

For employees working from home, the security of the company’s knowledge is put at greater risk. The security officer of an organization must assess the additional vulnerabilities of the home environment and plan how they can be safeguarded. This may lead to the employee being refused permission to telework, as is the case in several countries for any employee working with government-classified information. A number of companies may also be forced to ask themselves whether the potential benefits of permitting teleworking outweigh the additional risks of potential hackers accessing business-critical information.

Thus, security can become the overriding factor when considering which is the right technology to invest in and even when deciding on the application of a virtual strategy at all.

COSTS

As with all investments and implementations, costs are a vital consideration. There are great differences in the cost of different virtual team technologies, from very simple and cheap adaptations of existing ICT through to the far more expensive use of visual collaborative softwares. An organization needs to have very clear ideas on what it is prepared to spend for capital and recurrent costs before embarking on its selection of ICT.

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CLASSES OF TECHNOLOGY

A great deal of research and development has been carried out for CSCW, which was the forerunner to virtual teams but had perhaps slightly less emphasis on the team aspect. To understand the types of working environment present in CSCW, and the technical needs for each, researchers used a very simple space-time matrix, in which the participants are modelled according to their geographic boundary and time boundary. Geographically they may be co- located in the same place or distributed in different places. For the time boundary the participants are either collaborating synchronously – all at the same time – or asynchronously – at different times to each other.

Therefore, at a very simple level, participants in teams can be:

• co-located and synchronous – for instance, in face-to-face meetings or working together in the same office

• distributed and synchronous – for instance, communicating by telephone, tele- or video conferencing

• co-located and asynchronous – for instance, three eight-hour shift crews working on the same process over a 24 hour period, and communicating via memos and notes left for each other

• distributed and asynchronous – for instance, a design team working in different time zones and communicating via post or by sending e-mail.

These distinctions are not hard and fast. For instance, what physical distance defines someone being co-located or distributed? What if your colleague in a virtual team is in the office next door? Some authorities have suggested that groups of people who need to work together and who are based more than 50 m apart are a virtual team. The time distinction is also often difficult to make. With e-mail, work is really asynchronous but can be almost synchronous. In fact, teams working via e-mail on the continual updating and exchange of a major document can often become confused, because conversation threads are lost and jumbled according to the times at which different documents are opened and the order in which this is done. We have seen this happen at first hand in major research proposals produced by consortia of European scientists!

Technology to support virtual teams, and the groupware used in computer-supported co-operative work generally, can be described in relation to several categorizations. Here, for the purposes of reviewing the technologies, we have split them on the time continuum of asynchronous/synchronous (or delayed/real-time) interaction, crossed with the richness of information they deliver, as illustrated in Figure 5.1.

In reading this figure and the text that follows, it should be borne in mind that good face-to-face communication appears somewhere up in the top right-hand corner, being very synchronous and information-rich. A notice left on a noticeboard is positioned in the opposite corner. In between, the positions for all the virtual team ICT are not absolute, of course; a fax could be more information-rich than a videomessage, depending on the author and purpose of each, and continual and the very fast exchange of e-mails can be close to synchronous. But the positions do reflect general use of the technologies even though a general and most usual view only has been reflected.

In the remainder of this chapter, some of the main classes of virtual teams ICT are described, and some of their advantages and disadvantages are identified. Remember that, when choosing ICT, the information here can be used to help select what is right for anyone’s particular situation.

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Afterwards, however, any specific system selected should be assessed against the criteria which appeared in the previous section, in the light of the organization’s own particular needs.

RELATIVELY ASYNCHRONOUS TECHNOLOGIES

E-MAIL AND BULLETIN BOARDS

E-mail, and the related development of bulletin boards, has probably become the most common way of communicating formally in the modern business world. The message is usually written and can be accompanied by a computer file attachment of many different types – for example, document, graphics, video or audio. However, the receiver’s system may have problems coping with bigger files, especially very long documents, complex graphics or video. Messages are transferred using Internet protocol (IP) from one computer to another, often through a number of secure servers, or across corporate intranets.

E-mail is the starting point for many collaborative and groupware tools, and e-mail programs such as Microsoft Outlook incorporate groupware software, like calendars, which can be shared with other users. For virtual teams, e-mail is easy to use, familiar and provides people with time to reflect and consider their responses. A great advantage for virtual teams is permanence. All e-mails can be stored in a folder system and searched by any member with access to the same server, so information is never lost although it may be difficult to retrieve, depending on how it is archived.

Although e-mail is well used by most companies, it may be problematic if it is relied on as the only communication medium for virtual teams. A common problem encountered at a London-based IT company was the poorer social presence experienced with e-mail systems. Users sent information

Higher

Information richnes s

Lower

More as ynchronous

More s ynchronous

Time

• E- mail• Group project management tools

• Group calendar

• Videomes s aging • Collaborative virtual environments

• Voicemail

• Noticeboard

• Bulletin board

• Work flow application

• Fax • Electronic meeting s ys tems

• Audio conferencing

• Electronic dis play tools

• Video conferencing

• Face- to- face

• E- mail with attachments • Multimedia, real- time

des k top conferencing

• Virtual environments

Figure 5.1 Comparison of technologies in terms of synchronicity and information richness

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daily to team colleagues in Germany but never saw those people or spoke to them on a personal level. When, for any reason, the person at the other end was off sick, e-mails mounted up in their inbox, leaving the UK staff assuming that the work was being dealt with when in fact it was not. This problem can be resolved by automatically putting a user (or user group) ‘out of office’, whereby they can no longer receive e-mails which are stored on the server, and an ‘auto reply’ is sent to the originator of the message explaining that the user is unavailable. However, this solution works best when an absence is planned (for example a vacation) and, even then, problems of ‘bouncing messages’ to lists and groups may arise.

Another major problem with e-mail at this particular IT company was the loss of ‘message threads.’ A message thread is the equivalent of a conversation thread, and can be lost in a very similar fashion. For example, a colleague sends mail and this is replied to by adding to it and it continues back and forth between the two people. Figure 5.2 shows an e-mail conversation between two colleagues. The normal font is the original message, while the italics show the reply to the questions. In this case, the originator is Nigel and the comments are from Jim. While responding to the original messages by adding to them, at some point the attachment is lost.

Figure 5.2 Losing a message thread in an e-mail conversation

This kind of problem has been addressed through the use of bulletin boards. Bulletin boards, often seen on websites, allow people to post up comments on a particular topic. These topics are stored on a blank page, and can be viewed by anyone. They reduce problems of lost strands because every comment is saved (often in different colours and fonts to distinguish authors) in the same central place, not on local computers. However, the threads can become very messy and repetitive.

Table 5.1 shows the advantages and disadvantages for virtual teams of e-mail and bulletin boards.

From: Nigel Hope To: Jim Grant Cc: Subject: Have you done it yet?

How is the analysis of the CDR information coming on?

I will have it finished by the close of play today.

Can you send me a final copy on the original .xls sheet?

Can you send it back over, I lost it when I replied to this mail!

Cheers……Nigel

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Table 5.1 Advantages and disadvantages of e-mail and bulletin boards

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: Shares information with several people; group can feedback responses, copying in whole group. Captures the conversation in text. Cons: Time delay in responses. Lack of rich communication. Too time-consuming for lots of debate.

Group interaction and participation Pros: The whole group can be involved and are able to think about and deliver their message. Cons: Lack of connection and social presence means it’s hard to know who is even at the office that day.

Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: Allows time to think about the response resolving conflict before sending it.

Cons: The written text is not always clear to the reader. Lacks tone of voice or body language to help interpretation. Source of many misunderstandings in business today.

Data sharing Pros: Allows the attachment of files of data, or they can be pasted straight into the document. Cons: Relies on the recipient having suitable software to open the file – not usually a problem when sending within a single organization. Some problems with very large files.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: Can share personal information, such as social dialogue, Internet links to favourite sites or jokes. Cons: Not as effective as a face-to-face meeting or even a telephone conversation for creating a connection between two people. Personal use always encouraged within working hours. Becomes a question of company culture.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: Can attach preprepared visuals and video, drawings documents and share with a group.

Cons: Users need the same technology to develop drawings or share live video. Some attachments will take up too much space in people’s mail boxes.

GROUP CALENDARS

Project management is essential to the success of any virtual team, and group calendars, properly used, will support project management and co-ordination. With group calendars an individual or any team member (indeed, anybody with authorization) can view their or another member’s appointments across the period of the calendar, and enter new appointments in any allowable slot. Additional specialist scheduling software co-ordinates shared information across several calendars – for example, in order to negotiate meetings – and provides all the documentation needed once a date has been decided on.

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An individual e-calendar is usually available on most e-mail systems. Group calendars are becoming more common and involve a small client server which stores the information centrally. For virtual teams whose members are geographically separated, the system will take into consideration the time differences between sites.

Group calendars have a number of fairly obvious drawbacks, which will become more problematic as the technology becomes used more widely. For instance, one of the authors refuses to use even a relatively simple form of group calendar because of the mess it can make of planning a working day! It is impossible to program in the knowledge that, having seen X and Y in one meeting, a recovery of energy (and two hours!) will be required before meeting Z; or else that the inviting gap of three hours one afternoon would be better used en bloc for working on a paper rather than having a meeting set for the middle hour! Also, facilitators or managers of international teams have to be constantly aware of the tendency of one group of team members to get in first and set meetings at times convenient to them but not to those in other, very different, time zones.

Shared calendars and schedulers can be very useful for helping co-ordinate a team but may be very poor at resolving conflicts.

Table 5.2 shows the advantages and disadvantages to virtual teams of group calendars.

Table 5.2 Advantages and disadvantages of group calendars

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: They can be used to efficiently and effectively set up meetings with clear agendas, and proactively used to ensure the right people are available to attend. Cons: They do not deliver a communication tool that can be used directly in promoting discussion.

Group interaction and participation Pros: The latest calendars allow people to view other people’s calendars to guarantee they are inviting them to a meeting at a convenient time ensuring maximum participation. Invitations can be sent electronically and their responses sent back to indicate attendance. Reminders can be set to alert the invitee that they are due at a meeting. Cons: Although the tools allow a proactive indication of participation through the replies to a meeting invitation, the process ends there, as the meeting will not be conducted through this program.

Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: Invitations sent across time boundaries and resolving conflict countries ensure that they are entered into the

recipient’s calendar with the correct local time, rather than leaving the time open to interpretation. Cons: Sending invitations for certain meetings and discussions can create conflict if the subject-matter included in the invitation is not clear to all people involved. The text content is open to the same misinterpretation as e-mail.

continued

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Data sharing Pros: Data files can be attached to calendar entries in the same way as to an e-mail. This means that people attending a meeting will have the data at hand without having to receive a separate mail. Cons: The system does not have the networked ability to share files on line.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: Reminders and invitations can be personalized by the sender to add variety to an otherwise routine application. Cons: This is not a communication tool that can be used directly to build the informal team network.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: Most modern systems have the capacity to video, drawings view attached files without having to launch the

application in which it was originally written. Cons: The capacity to view files without needing the base software does not extend to video and audio files.

GROUP PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Group project management tools can take many forms and will usually include group calendars but also document repositories, some means of document exchange and records of document lifecycle including changes. They have the advantages of being able to handle large files much better than e-mail, and of providing a system of document archiving that has been agreed by the whole team at the outset, rather than each member storing documents in their own structure. However, gaining such agreement and, more critically, having everyone stick to the system, can be difficult, once work starts to pile up and things have to be done in a hurry. Our experience on multi-partner, international research projects is that group project sites can begin to accumulate such a wide variety of different versions and generations of the same documents that the site becomes very difficult to navigate and use, with the result that less centrally involved members lose the motivation to use it.

Table 5.3 presents the advantages and disadvantages of group project management tools for virtual teams.

Table 5.3 Advantages and disadvantages of group project management tools

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: Some discussion threads can be monitored and saved, but this is usually limited. Cons: More useful for holding documents than as a medium to use the documents to solve problems.

Group interaction and participation Pros: Everyone can have access to, and comment on, the same documents. All the project team can feel involved through having the same level of formal knowledge. Cons: No real-time interaction and different team members may visit the site at very different frequencies, from hourly to monthly. No real participation is promoted.

continued

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Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: All relevant documents can be available to resolving conflict everyone at the same time. Good archiving systems

should mean that anyone can trace why certain evidence or material ends up with particular content. Cons: Once the project or team archive grows large, misunderstandings can arise if team members are using different generations of document. No direct communication facilitated so little potential for mutual understanding.

Data sharing Pros: Doesn’t have the potential problems of large file attachments for e-mail. A well-designed group tool will allow team members to find any item of information they need and to identify for others what information they want them to read. Cons: Problems of site (and team member) overload. Relies on active searching by people.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: Less serious informal documents and messages can be uploaded. Cons: Not really intended to build team spirit.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: Should be little difficulty in making visual video, drawings files available through the archived file list.

Cons: Video not usually possible.

WORKFLOW APPLICATIONS

Workflow applications are an increasingly common tool for managing simple procedures and processes, as long as these are of a sequential nature. First-generation applications software performed simple tasks, and often another application would need to be opened to perform a different task. Second-generation workflow applications incorporate different tasks into one program, and often run on a shared database to allow access to different users.

A good example is a specialist software tool that processes customer complaints at a telecommunications company, called here the ‘Fault Alert Request System’ (FARS). This tool processes the workflow of a customer complaint, as follows:

1 A customer rings up in the USA and complains about her inability to connect with a telephone number in the UK.

2 The number is tested in the USA, and the fault is replicated. Details are entered onto the FARS and saved.

3 When the UK team arrive into work a notifier is executed automatically, displaying the work assigned from the USA overnight.

4 When tested in the UK, the number the customer complained about in the USA is found not to be a valid number in the UK. This information is stored in the same place as the original complaint (centrally) and the customer will be called back or e-mailed by the system, and told of the outcome of the complaint.

5 If workflow is not managed effectively, warnings and additional notifications from FARS prompt action from the user.

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Figure 5.3 shows a typical screen shot of the system as available to the customer service representatives, featuring cells that update as work is carried out.

Figure 5.3 FARS screen

The advantages of such a system for a virtual team are as follows:

• The information is open to all (at least on a read-only basis). • Workflow is directed to the relevant people. • Comments and suggestions can be added. • The solution will be generated a lot quicker than by a stream of phone calls.

The telecommunications company has found that this kind of system works very well, especially for supporting the multinational structure of the business. There is very little need for social interaction within the team. Normally this could be a problem, because teams should communicate on all levels to resolve conflicts and problems. But, for customer service tasks of this sort, additional social interaction could cause confusion.

Table 5.4 shows the advantages and disadvantages of workflow applications to virtual teams.

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Table 5.4 Advantages and disadvantages of workflow applications

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: The systems are designed to capture all necessary information to make certain decisions, and have defaults that ensure all fields have been completed before certain screens can be submitted. Cons: The design of the tool is very inflexible by nature, as the need is to manage the data capture and problem resolution in a very structured way. This does not accommodate the variety that would be required for a brainstorming type discussion.

Group interaction and participation Pros: Call centre operators often use these tools, such that the relevant screens and files can be accessed from many locations through the network. This means that access can be granted to as many people as desired, and automated messages can be sent to those who need to participate in the resolution of certain issues. Cons: The system is often designed to allow just one person access at any one time to avoid errors. This means that a particular file cannot be edited simultaneously and may be locked to other users.

Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: The template layout of these applications resolving conflict may be facilitated by drop-down menus so that any

ambiguities in the questions should cause less of a problem, thus avoiding future misunderstandings. Cons: The template gives little scope for qualitative discussion or other rich information sharing. If the template is not well designed at the outset, the outcomes could be confusing, with no clear path to resolving them.

Data sharing Pros: Specifying the type of data to be entered in a field will allow intelligent searches of the database from networked locations. The system can also be designed to send information direct to individuals either when they need to take action within the system or just for information purposes. Cons: The applications are often highly customized to a particular application or company and may not be Internet-based. For this reason, the capability to extract data may be limited to certain office locations.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: The system allows some feelings of joint ownership of problems. Cons: The system is inflexible and does not lend itself to diverse or informal applications.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: The system can be designed to capture video, drawings many forms of data.

Cons: Such systems are not usually designed to capture multimedia communications. The simpler the information the faster the system will operate.

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RELATIVELY SYNCHRONOUS TECHNOLOGIES

ELECTRONIC MEETING SYSTEMS

A fairly expensive solution to the need to obtain and manage multiple contributions to decision-making is provided by electronic meeting systems (EMS). These have been used to enhance group discussions and problem-solving in face-to-face meetings for a long time – for instance, supporting very simple balloting or voting on controversial topics. Their adaptation to virtual teamworking has enabled synchronous but distributed collaboration. EMS works efficiently on common LANs or wide area networks (WANs). The software can help overcome common problems in meetings, such as tendencies to be sidetracked or to not allow everyone to have a say. They can provide anonymity for the contributors, without concerns for hurting people’s feelings or being seen as stupid or missing the point (although such anonymity can be something of a two-edged sword, of course).

EMS resembles a chat function as ideas are expressed simultaneously. The fact that comments can remain anonymous facilitates the free flow of ideas by eliminating pressures for social conformance. Ideas can be noted and allocated to different categories for discussion at a later date. Again, the anonymity means that members do not feel pressured into making decisions too early about the importance of certain ideas or tasks. Anonymous voting allows ideas to be formally rated and prioritized so that outlines of work schedules or projects can be created. Teams can split up and work in subteams on individual areas. Individuals can respond to an identified set of topics in any order, making comments and suggestions at their own pace, with the facilitator deciding on the degree of anonymity.

It is common for EMS systems to be integrated with other systems, such as audio and video, to further enhance decision-making. For example, with audio it is possible to give the reasoning behind particular decision-making processes.

Table 5.5 highlights the advantages and disadvantages of EMS.

Table 5.5 Advantages and disadvantages of electronic meeting systems

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: Can promote good generation and discussion of ideas. Cons: If anonymity is provided, contributions may become more careless or disruptive.

Group interaction and participation Pros: All team members can feel less inhibited about contributing. Less chance of some members dominating a meeting. Cons: Real interaction can be very limited and discussion threads can feel stilted or can get lost.

Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: Team members may be more reflective resolving conflict about what they will say compared to face-to-face

meetings. With anonymity, conflicts may be reduced. Cons: Limitations in information richness may sometimes breed misunderstandings. Nature of anonymous contributions may cause disharmony.

Data sharing Pros: Documents can be shared online, although the main use is for short discussions of documents that have already been read. Cons: Little real feeling of sharing. Limits to data or information handled.

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Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: May make informal conversation easier. If all members feel comfortable with the system it may be seen as a genuine shared support. Cons: May be too artificial and lacking in social presence to be a real informal team building support.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: Some limited visual data exchange may be video, drawings possible. Easier to identify where all team members

can find such data stored. Cons: Most systems are too limited for very large visuals.

ELECTRONIC DISPLAY TOOLS

Computer-based versions of whiteboards or flipcharts – common and useful communication tools in face-to-face meetings – are available in the digital world. These types of tool – often referred to as ‘electronic display tools’ – use the conceptual principles of a whiteboard or flipchart in that they visibly and openly record brainstorming and idea-generation sessions, and have additional hardware and software to deliver images on all members’ computer desktops in real time. They support dispersed meeting environments.

Such virtual conferencing tools include wall-mounted whiteboards that display spreadsheets and graphics loaded from a file, which can then be annotated manually to form a new image: the changes are simultaneously captured and displayed on the whiteboards of other team members in different locations.

Electronic display tools can build on team members’ existing skills and meeting behaviours. The sense of social presence they provide is further increased when the systems are linked up with video and audio conferencing, and chat facilities. The main disadvantage is that the tools are usually set up in special conference rooms, so gaining access to them can interrupt work. They also require a fair degree of setup time and organization.

Table 5.6 highlights the advantages and disadvantages of electronic display tools.

Table 5.6 Advantages and disadvantages of electronic display tools

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: Coupled with audio or video conferencing, these tools give greater clarity to data-based discussions and can be used to summarize outcomes as they arise, as well as capture points for further discussion. Cons: The display does not help with complex data analysis and cannot compile results or comments – it just displays what is manually written up or projected.

Group interaction and participation Pros: Writing on an electronic display tool in one meeting room and the effects being displayed in another remote room can give feelings of higher social presence and of connection. Cons: Due to the cost and size of these tools, there is usually one per meeting room rather than per person. This can emphasize negative team dynamics of face-to-face meetings, such as a dominant team member monopolizing the communication tool.

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Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: The tool can be used to clarify points by resolving conflict combining graphical representation with verbal

description. Cons: The tool does not help the team come to an agreement; it just gives another means of keeping track of the points being made.

Data sharing Pros: It is good for sketching diagrams or ideas and can also be linked electronically to a network to display charts or files. Cons: The ability to share the data relies on expensive and compatible equipment being available at all locations.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: Being able to sketch ideas that then appear in remote meeting rooms increases the social presence of the distant team member, making the meeting more interactive and fun. Cons: Concentration on ‘innovative’ formal displays may distract from real communications.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: The tool allows the sharing of freehand video, drawings visuals, normally only possible with a whiteboard or

flipchart in face-to-face meetings. This maintains the spontaneity and interactivity of the meetings. Cons: The tool would not normally be equipped with video and audio devices, but would run alongside them, thus doubling the expense.

AUDIO AND VIDEO CONFERENCING

Audio, usually telephone, conference calls have been a feature of multisite, especially international, work for many years. In principle, a large number of participants can call into a service centre number, use a code or password, and log into a discussion that can last from a few minutes to several hours. Once the call, and a defined number of participants, has been booked and paid for by the facilitator, then everyone else should just pay for access for the time they use, at the lower national rates.

In practice, once there are more than eight to twelve participants it becomes difficult either to keep track of the focus, content and direction of communication or else most people will be silent listeners as the main parties argue out a point. The obvious lack of visual cues and the single channel of communication (there cannot be side discussions as in face-to-face meetings) can make the discussions somewhat stilted and unadventurous. On the other hand, where an agenda is well known and restricted, and when relevant documents are sent out well in advance, audio conferencing can be very useful for making sure that everyone is ‘present’ to hear arguments, explanations and cases, and to participate in decisions.

If the lack of visual cues is a real problem, video conferencing could be one answer. Facial expressions, gestures and body language can all be used up to a point; participants can gain a sense of involvement in the team by knowing what their colleagues look like and how they behave physically in meetings. Unfortunately, the video images can distort, exaggerate or mask some behaviours. Once there are more than a handful of participants, the camera lens has to search for who is starting to talk, which can take a half to two seconds. At sites where several participants are sharing one facility, either they all appear in view together making it harder to see them clearly, or else seating or camera direction will have to be continually adjusted.

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The majority of video conference facilities will consist of one central room for a department or even a company, which means team members having to book time in advance and then travel (or at least change rooms) to use them.

If used wisely however – assessing in particular whether a specific meeting really will benefit from video conference and who really needs to be present – this can prove to be a supportive, if relatively expensive, tool to support some of a virtual team’s activities.

Table 5.7 summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of audio and video conferencing for virtual teams.

Table 5.7 Advantages and disadvantages of audio and video conferencing

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: Idea generation and feedback is immediate, and many new issues can be opened up. The seemingly direct contact can be more ‘creative’ than text-based systems. Cons: Needs careful prior preparation. Some participants may feel remote from the discussion. Sessions can last two or more hours and focus can slip, especially if some people are using a second language.

Group interaction and participation Pros: Can help all team members to feel involved if held at regular intervals. Everyone can contribute to ideas and decisions. Visual connection of video can increase feelings of involvement. Cons: Too easy for some to remain silent listeners and not participate. May need strong leadership to drive the discussion, decreasing participation. Do not overestimate gains of feelings of involvement for the extra cost of video.

Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: The more direct and immediate contributions resolving conflict and feedback can help avoid misunderstandings

which can arise in the more remote (text and asynchronous) media, such as e-mail. Cons: Hard to tell who is contributing (especially with audio). Can be stilted – for example, having to open all contributions with ‘This is x here and ….’.

Data sharing Cons: Not the real purpose. Little opportunity except video data presentations.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: Can help feelings of togetherness and trust, especially if people have a good telephone manner. Many people are still happier speaking than typing. Audio especially can be quite spontaneous. Cons: The ‘frozen rabbit’ syndrome for people in front of the video camera can inhibit relaxation and becoming familiar. Although having audio at one’s own desk helps, having to travel to a video conference facility can inhibit informality. Jokes may not work in audio or even in video.

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Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: Limited visuals exchange possible by putting video, drawings graphics and the like in view of video.

Cons: Not possible with audio and can only display and not download with video.

DESKTOP REAL-TIME CONFERENCING

Desktop real-time conferencing can be a good facilitator for virtual teams, with the possibility of rich synchronous interaction between team members from their individual workstations. Team members will have computer and groupware applications, which enable them to share documents, web pages, software applications and virtual whiteboards. In more advanced systems, video- and audio conferencing will be supported. One significant feature of real-time conferencing is the chat facility. The simplest data conferencing will have a chat facility, a shared whiteboard and the ability to share files on remote computers.

Chat functions, or Internet Relay Chat (IRC), provide several team members with a relatively secure way of conversing without using audio. Thoughts and comments are posted up on a shared window and only those who are in the virtual room can see them. Messages are delivered instantly and conversation threads are displayed more clearly than by the use of e-mail. Different colours and fonts can be used to represent different users, and their chat is displayed in the window.

One downside of conversing this way is if members of a team are slow at typing and miss a reply to a particular comment, thus confusing the conversation. Such problems are exacerbated if there are too many users; many people trying to react to the same comments and suggestions will badly distort the flow, causing the tool to become more of a hindrance than a help. It may also be viewed in some offices as intrusive because an immediate response is required, which can infuriate team members whether they are busy or not. IRC is often combined with virtual whiteboarding and voice and audio links to enhance a feeling of actually meeting each other.

Virtual whiteboarding, one of the electronic display tools, is a simple and potentially very effective idea-generation tool. When called upon, a new window is launched featuring a simple drawing board or whiteboard and pen. Ideas can be sketched and text added by all members, which is very useful when brainstorming team ideas.

More advanced real-time desktop conferencing provides multimedia capabilities, including full video and audio to facilitate idea generation and potentially increase the sense of social presence within the meeting. The integrated nature of desktop conferencing allows team members to share applications, walk through websites together, and discuss issues as they arise.

The main restriction on this potentially rich form of communication, apart from issues of usability and likeability, is the bandwidth available. It is common to find that multimedia conferencing systems only really run effectively over a company LAN. Despite the use of video compression technologies, sometimes only a mediocre quality is achieved through the video and audio communications.

As shown in Figures 5.4 to 5.6, a number of visions for future multimedia conferencing workstations are being developed, including handwriting recognition, video conferencing, semi-immersive information, browsing, 3D data display, touch screen, remote-controlled cameras and 3D sound.

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Figure 5.4 Personal vision station, allowing semi-immersive, browsing, video conferencing and 3D

information filtering

© BTexact Technologies

Figure 5.5 Lightweight workstation with semi-immersive browsing, video conferencing and touch screen

© BTexact Technologies

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Figure 5.6 Smartspace workstation with remote camera control, remote conferencing, 3D sound and semi-

immersive browsing

© BTexact Technologies

Desktop real-time conferencing, as currently available, does provide the virtual team with a number of fundamental synchronous applications and tools, with communications advantages and disadvantages as shown in Table 5.8.

Table 5.8 Advantages and disadvantages of desktop real-time conferencing

Work process to be supported Comments

Discussion/problem-solving Pros: Typed discussions through the online conferencing facilities attract people into the conversation who would not always feel comfortable addressing a group in a face-to-face meeting environment or even in a telephone conference, resulting in improved overall participation and ideas flow. Cons: Idea generation and discussion is a reactive process. Using this tool in its basic form (that is, no audio- or video conference) results in the loss of verbal and non-verbal cues as well as a reliance on the participants’ typing speeds.

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Group interaction and participation Pros: The system allows you to see who participated in the meeting as it keeps a record of the typed conversation. It also makes all participants equal, as it is harder for a single team member to dominate them as in a face-to-face meeting. Cons: Too many participants will slow the process of communication and can cause the streams and themes of dialogue to become muddled, as some people move on while others are typing their reply to a previous conversation.

Avoiding misunderstanding and Pros: Typing comments allows participants to resolving conflict consider what they will say before they send it.

Cons: Typed messages can be misunderstood due to the lack of verbal and non-verbal cues that a face-to-face dialogue affords.

Data sharing Pros: More advanced programs now allow users to share documents online so that the whole team can work upon them. The users cannot necessarily transfer files between users and only collaborate on them online. Cons: Some systems come with video conference facilities; however, this extra transfer of information is often jerky and slow due to inadequate bandwidth and can also be a distraction from the other communication media.

Developing informal network/team spirit Pros: Some systems automatically log the user on when they turn on their PC and allow other users to see when people are at their desk. This builds the social presence of the virtual team members. The systems also lend themselves to spontaneous ‘chat’-like facilities which are less formal than most communication technologies. Cons: The chat facilities are not appreciated by all people as they allow interruptions that can only be avoided by disconnecting from the system.

Exchange of visuals – for example, Pros: The modern systems can accommodate file video, drawings sharing, whiteboards, audio conferencing and

video conferencing. Cons: Although the software is advanced, the networks often cannot support the high levels of data transfer for them to be relied on and used effectively.

FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES: COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

The term ‘virtual’ has been applied increasingly to all manner of technologies and ways of working, not just virtual teams. Originally it was applied in the term virtual reality (VR) to describe a set of technologies that gave people a sense of being present and interacting in a space other than where they were physically situated. Within VR, a virtual environment (VE) is a computer-generated three-dimensional representation of objects and of a setting or an environment, that updates in real time through the direct interaction of a participant. Much

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of the experience of the participant is visual, through a range of display devices from a desktop computer, through holobenches and power walls, to reality theatres and rooms of six-sided displays (CAVEs – collaborative automatic virtual environments); usually there is auditory information also. VR also offers the possibility of a tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive experience – touch, feeling and bodily sensing – but this is rarer and technically more difficult.

Figures 5.7 and 5.8 illustrate a reality theatre and CAVE. By extension, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are networks of VR systems, usually displayed via a PC or wall-mounted display, in which a group of participants – distributed geographically – interact together within the same shared virtual space. Usually they will see the others (and, depending on the viewpoint, themselves) represented within the virtual environment (VE). Such representations of participants may be very unrealistic (rectangular blocks, or ‘blockies’), where only position and gross movement are represented. Other representations are avatars – human-like representations which may be capable of gestures and facial expressions, and can replicate more closely individual and team behaviours, such as handing over a document.

Figure 5.7 Virtual environment projection via reality theatre

© Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford

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Figure 5.8 Collaborative design activities within a CAVE

© Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford

In principle, CVEs may be the technical system for supporting considerable amounts of virtual working in the future. It is possible to imagine a client in Singapore, an architect in the UK and a design engineer in Germany together inhabiting the feeling of space in a virtual model of a new building foyer for example. Alternatively, engineers from a motor manufacturing company with plants in Japan, Spain, Brazil and the USA might jointly plan how an exhaust system might be assembled, by being together in a virtual model of the vehicle and its surroundings and all interacting with the model in real time.

However, limitations of bandwidth and processing resources are even more critical for this technology than for others for virtual teams, and will delay, if not prevent, widespread use of CVEs. There are also considerable issues to understand about how people will collaborate, act and make decisions in CVEs. How will they recognize each other and each other’s intentions, acknowledge contributions, combine ideas or thoughts towards a shared goal? The human factors of CVEs will be as critical as the technical and economic ones.

Once bandwidth and human factors problems become more manageable, there will be increased impact from CVEs being integrated with other virtual working support tools, such as workflow applications, electronic meeting systems, desktop conferencing and bulletin boards. Figures 5.9 to 5.11 illustrate such synergy for a system developed as part of the European Commission project, TOWER.

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Figure 5.9 TOWER world office environment, giving participants a real-time representation of their

collaboration with others

© Fraunhofer FIT

Figure 5.10 BSCW shared workspace with integrated TOWER world

© Fraunhofer FIT

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Figure 5.11 Multiple representations of collaborative activity in TOWER

© Fraunhofer FIT

SUMMARY OF VIRTUAL TEAMS’ TECHNOLOGY

This is not a book about technology, nor ICT to support virtual teams. That is why we devote only one chapter to ICT. However, our message should be clear. First you should understand what goals and tasks are required of the virtual teams, who and where the participants will be, how they will work together, and why they need ICT support. Only then, once a clear set of criteria to be met are available, should the facilitators and the team members search for the best ICT solutions. We do, though, need to understand about the ICT available in order to sensibly think about and plan for virtual working. The technical systems implemented will have a profound impact on support systems that must be in place, on the quality of collaboration and output and on the participants themselves. The key, for any company at the outset of a virtual teamworking implementation, is to be technologically aware and open, not technologically deterministic and closed.

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CHAPTER

6 Why Not Virtual Teams?

When faced with such apparently overwhelming potential benefits as were described in Chapters 1 and 3 of this book, it might seem strange that large numbers of organizations aren’t exploiting the profits of virtual working arrangements already. But, the potential drawbacks of virtual teams are well documented, and are not just related to technical bottlenecks as described in Chapter 5.

A company should think carefully before investing in and implementing a virtual team strategy, to ensure that it is able to adequately support its employees. It is important to be aware of all the potential downsides of virtual working so that the teams themselves can work proactively to avoid them and diagnose problems early.

ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGES

The implementation of a virtual working strategy requires considerable thought at the outset to consider the changes to the policies the company has in place for its human resources. Areas that will need to be reworked include:

• Reward and recognition policies. Will the company have different criteria for virtual team members than for traditional team members? How do you balance remuneration policies across different sites, countries and disciplines?

• Core working hours. As virtual teams can operate across several time zones, concessions often need to be made regarding the times that meetings are held. This may result in team members frequenting the office either excessively early or late to participate in a video- or audioconference. Does this person then benefit from additional rewards for working unsociable hours?

• Performance monitoring and evaluation. Normally performance evaluations would be carried out by line managers who work with the people they manage throughout the day. Who now becomes the best person to give feedback on a virtual team’s work if the team leader is at a different location? If the work is to be evaluated based on results, what are the criteria for success?

• Health and safety. Asking an employee to work as part of a virtual team may cause them to spend additional hours working from their home environment using ICT. Policies need to be put in place, and adhered to, that protect the employee from physical and emotional stress – for example, to prevent feelings of isolation and reduce any physical strain of excessive hours on a computer or phone, or at a computer workstation that does not meet ergonomic requirements.

Virtual teams may often be implemented in the face of reductions in workforce requirements – the dreaded downsizing. But, eliminating skills in certain locations no longer means that only a selection of projects can be completed. Instead the virtual network is used to connect the islands

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of knowledge from across other sites and countries. The drawback is that too few employees may get stretched too far, as it may appear that there is no limit to the number and type of project briefs they can respond to. Companies trying to move to a virtual team strategy as a quick fix for skill shortages in certain locations may find themselves swamped in bureaucracy if they do not spend time preparing the internal policies for such a transition.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

Embarking on a virtual working strategy means that time must be spent assessing the technology that will be used for inter- and intrateam communications. This is time (and money) that can be avoided if using purely co-located teams. The questions that need to be answered include:

• What technology will the team really require? As emphasized in Chapter 5, it is advisable to answer this question before embarking on new working processes because new technologies take time to be bedded in, in terms of installation across several locations, de-bugging, training and familiarization. Dealing with all these areas before a team relies on the technology to deliver results will remove a significant amount of frustration. However, most companies are too time- and resource-constrained to prepare successfully, resulting in the team members trying to learn as they go along.

• Are there any incompatibilities between ICT infrastructures? As virtual teams can operate not only across several office locations within a company, but also across several companies, there is a real issue of ensuring that their technology infrastructures are compatible and that they have some uniformity of software packages. As software upgrades hit the market with alarming regularity, there is not even the guarantee that all team members will be working with the same release, causing problems of incompatibility between versions of documents. This is a low-level problem with high-level irritation potential.

• What are team members proficiency levels? As virtual teams will rely on certain interactive software packages to share information and communicate, all team members must be at least at an acceptable level of technical ability. One person’s failings can slow the whole meeting, hindering the team’s progress and damaging their willingness to persevere with a virtual working scenario.

The ICT chosen may limit the scope of the projects to which a virtual team solution can be applied. Certain processes undertaken by people at work do not lend themselves well to virtual working. An example is brainstorming, which requires richness of communication and the free flow of ideas, which are often stilted by the media used. Newer ICT may be found to support brainstorming better than older-generation applications, but will probably still not match the value of face-to-face interaction.

Once a particular technology has been identified for particular needs, there is a risk that its application will be abused – consciously or more usually as an unintended consequence – by the team, due to its not being fit for the tasks. For example, when disseminating information to the team, a reliance on e-mail can quickly cause information overload. It is all too easy to copy everyone in on everything, particularly since open communications will have been a founding principle of the teamworking, but it is not so easy to identify when the information level surpasses a useful or manageable level. Today’s knowledge workers are inundated with so many tools for communication – telephone, fax, e-mail, Intranets, mail – that it is hard to know where

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to start when a specific piece of information is needed or must be sent. Information overload will reduce the team’s productivity, as they must plough through irrelevant data to find what they need. Two forms of abuse of the ICT system may be found: a lack of discipline or forethought on the part of senders of information, leading to unnecessary mailings; and a tendency for recipients to delete large numbers of e-mails unread. One solution is to use a pull system that allows information to be extracted from a central repository when required. The challenge is the design and maintenance of such a database to ensure that information is available, relevant and accessible.

TEAM CREATION CHALLENGES

Teambuilding within the virtual environment has two taxing aspects – the identification of team members and sponsors in team formation and subsequently developing the bond between those people through good team communications.

TEAM FORMATION

Co-located teams, by definition, will be formed of employees who have access to one another for face-to-face meetings and interactions. The choice of people to form the team is often clear and limited, with team leaders generally having personal knowledge of their organization’s human knowledge and skill capabilities and the people involved.

Virtual teams can be formed from an almost infinite pool within the organization and from external organizations. The challenge is knowing where the best person for the job can be found. This will limit the true potential of a virtual team strategy, as team formation may depend on who the team leader knows (or has recommended) as best for the job, resulting in a narrowing of the potentially vast choice that theory suggests they have.

It is also difficult to select team sponsors. If there are ten members in the virtual team all from different sites or locations, how do you select the one or two sponsors from these functions and locations that should champion the team throughout the rest of the organization? They are all committing resources to delivering the results, yet cannot all participate in its success or bear the burden of effort to make it really work (or be associated with any failure).

The virtual team will require considerable administration from project management, as implementation is more varied and complex than with self-regulating traditional teams. The group will need strong co-ordination and schedule management to ensure deadlines are met, as the lack of informal meetings inherent in this type of operation can result in the individuals who have a variety of functions and roles assigning a low priority to the work of the virtual team.

TEAM COMMUNICATIONS

The removal of face-to-face contact between team members immediately reduces the ease of communication. Computer-mediated conversations often result in the loss of verbal cues such as tone of voice, as well as of non-verbal cues of gesture and facial expression. These cues are the indicators we subconsciously use in everyday life when assessing how we feel about a person or what they are really trying to say. Verbal cues can be maintained through the use of audio equipment, and non-verbal cues, in part, through video conference. But, generally, distanced communication makes such cues difficult, if not impossible, to detect and interpret accurately. Thus misunderstandings and miscommunications can be expected to be found in greater abundance in virtual teams, due to the use of less natural or direct communications media.

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Computer-mediated communication, however well-prepared the individuals are, is not a natural forum for expression. Virtual team members may often experience heightened levels of frustration when the technology fails, wasting time and effort. There is the added complication that virtual teams may also have a number of other existing challenges to communication – for example, language and cultural barriers among its members – and the technology may only magnify these failings.

Virtual teams will often suffer from a lack of strong connection and bonding between team members. Virtual interaction makes it easier for team members to tune out from full team participation, as members do not have to face the rest of the team daily in the office. Equally, the distance makes it harder for the remaining team members to feel comfortable about confronting the drop-outs when their participation wanes. This problem is exacerbated by lack of familiarity between team members. The lack of socializing can lead, in the extreme, to feelings of isolation, loneliness and suspicion that will, over time, erode any team commitment that may have been generated.

The physical separation of the individuals can manifest itself in problems that hinder the team in far greater ways than any limitations in the software and hardware they use. Problems of working across organizational, cultural, time and distance boundaries can become very pronounced. Misunderstandings escalate and snowball. When desktop video conferencing becomes technically more sophisticated and as normal as e-mail is today, there may be a breakthrough on this front, although differences between individual cultures will still persist. But such tools will not completely solve problems caused by asynchronous working. Crossing time zones is a very disruptive characteristic of virtual teams. The further apart team members are, and the more time zones they inhabit, the less time there is for synchronous communication, as the overlapping periods of the team members’ working days become shorter and fewer. This can even be a problem for virtual teams in the same location if the team members are working different shifts with little or no overlap.

All the difficulties and inconveniencies of virtual teamworking can impair effectiveness and satisfaction and, taken together, may well increase the frustration levels within the team. In many cases, the problems or their consequences can be tackled and reduced through all the team members explicitly focusing on the means by which they will communicate and share information and experiences, both at the outset and regularly during the life of the team.

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7 Are Certain Jobs More Suited to Virtual Working than Others?

Virtual teams combine individuals from a variety of organizational, cultural and functional backgrounds. However, certain businesses, functions and jobs will be more appropriate and adaptable to a virtual working solution than others. This may be due to the nature of the work performed, the type of individuals doing the work, the work processes they are accustomed to and their organizational environment.

It is possible to categorize functions and businesses according to their adaptability and ease of integration into virtual teaming. In doing this it must be acknowledged that such categorization and descriptions of the different jobs and roles are fundamentally stereotypes; they are used for no other purpose than to illustrate the differences in individuals and the work they need to deliver as regards virtual teams. These differences need to be recognized when a virtual working strategy is developed, so that it can be tailored to the needs of all the team members. The change management process to deliver the success for the virtual team is then designed accordingly.

Organizational functions such as Sales, HR and Engineering all have different conventional characteristics. These come together to form the function’s culture, which in turn can be used to evaluate the individual expected responses to new working systems and conditions, such as virtual teams.

In Figure 7.1 seven generic functions of Research and Development, Engineering, Information Technology, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing and Finance are placed on scales describing the nature of work, with the aim of evaluating the generic work cultures that arise from the type of work being performed. In a multifunctional team, the team leader has the role of integrating the diverse range of cultures that are thrown together in the virtual team setting. The challenge is not so much to develop a whole new culture and instruct all the members on how to act, but more to identify all the positive cultural characteristics of the participants and weave them into the team’s agreed operating practices. The team leader or facilitator must be aware of their own cultural bias and ensure that any decisions made are agreed amongst the team to ensure they are not imposing their own interpretation of how the team should function.

HUMAN RESOURCES

Human Resources (HR), when looked at as a team support function rather than the traditional administration role, is a notoriously high-context function and is on the right-hand side of the above scales in all instances. Communication is their raison-d’être and, based on this rationale, they could experience unhappiness and frustration in trying to do their job via computer-mediated communication technology which does not readily offer a strong link

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between connecting parties. For this reason, it is common to have HR resources at all office locations to support employees rather than expecting such interactions to be sustained indirectly.

The working relationships that HR maintains are very dependent on building a bond of trust. This relies strongly on observation of, and reaction to, people’s mannerisms and expressions – something that would be lost were the interactions dependent on virtual mediation. Also, many HR-facilitated meetings need to build energy and motivation among participants, often via teambuilding games and physical contact exercises. This is sufficient to sustain electronically and would have to be constrained to the few times that the team meets face-to-face, or else very clever electronic equivalents found.

Sales HR

Marketing

R&D

ITFinance

Engineering

Sales HR

MarketingR&D

IT

Finance

Engineering

Sales

HR

MarketingR&D

IT

Finance

Engineering

Sales

HR

Marketing

R&D

IT

Finance

Engineering

Sales HR

MarketingR&D

IT

Finance

Engineering

Sales

HR

Marketing

R&DITFinance

Engineering

Low-context communicator

Data-based reasoning

Logical work methods

Detailed and analytical

Quantitative

Negotiation

High-context communicator

Instinctive reasoning

Creative work methods

Top-level and conceptual

Qualitative

Nurture

Figure 7.1 Functional cultures placed along different scales to describe working practices and communication

techniques

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LOGISTICS AND/OR ENGINEERING

These functions, due to their strong technical foundations, require their employees to be logical and ensure their decisions are always made on the basis of concrete data. Projects and plans are looked at rationally, and justification for expenditure is always mapped out in great detail.

These functions can work well in the virtual team environment, primarily because they are comfortable using ICTs for everyday communications. The large amounts of data that support their work are primarily stored electronically, which makes it a natural next step to share them electronically.

Across markets serviced by a single organization there is usually a strong focus on exploiting synergies in logistics and engineering (for example, shared distribution centres, global production facilities and so on), so strong links across the organization within the function are likely to already be in operation. Due to time and money constraints engineers and logisticians will already be operating virtually via audio or video conferences, although because they have a more logical than creative bias, the methods by which they interact may not be very varied, with the focus being on finding the solution rather than on the process.

Dialogues between members of this function are often very structured, constrained and data-based. For this reason, they are well-suited to asynchronous communication which allows for data to be digested and a response clearly worded, avoiding ambiguity. Such communications are often performed via e-mail, which is in fact an extremely ambiguous communication medium, especially when the language used is not the communicator’s first. This means that messages must often be followed up by telephone calls or further questions in order to obtain clarity. Clearly these functions could benefit greatly from access to a wider selection of communication media that they could tailor to the requirements of their goals and tasks.

MARKETING

Marketing is populated with creative and resourceful individuals (or at least people who think they are!). Their task is to identify both problems and the solutions – why is product A not selling more, and how can the situation be improved, and why is product B selling well, and how can this be built on? They are not hired to become involved in the real detail of how new projects will be executed but rather to manage projects at a high level and delegate ownership of certain areas to the relevant functions. For this reason they are often found to be team leaders and direction setters.

Like HR people they are high-context communicators. Work practices such as brainstorming drive their creative solutions. This is a notoriously hard type of collaboration to deliver effectively via computer-mediated communication. It relies heavily on the energy that a group of people can build in a room, the relationships built between people that allow no idea to be seen as foolish, and the interaction that allows them to constructively bounce ideas off one another, reacting to the stimuli of body language and enthusiasm.

A large part of a marketing manager’s job also concerns building relationships with strategic partners and agencies. This is often cemented over a meal – with the intention of developing the informal connection between the parties that support their future connection when looking for synergies in their thinking. Clearly, these types of relationship could neither be instigated nor sustained in any other way except through face-to-face interactions.

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RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Research and Development (R&D) is a function that often works with relative autonomy from the rest of the business team, and this has resulted in a very strong cultural divide. R&D which emphasizes development, rather than ‘blue skies’ research, is generally characterized by individuals who seek structure in all that they do. There are very strong processes within the function for research and reporting that are drummed into its members. The projects to which they contribute are often very long and resource-intensive, which detaches them from the short- term demands of the business. The sense of urgency with which many other functions operate may not be found here.

Due to the complex nature of project results from R&D it is important that they are shared via rich communications media that will ensure good understanding and high clarity. This would mean video conferencing, or at the very least audio conferencing, combined with groupware to share documents at the same time. The alternative is to circulate reports which are often targeted at particular audiences, but which may be too detailed or not detailed enough for substantial proportions of their potential audience.

However, new findings and proposals are written up in detail, which is where communication technologies have advantages. Many companies have recommended report layouts that can be saved online and applied by employees in all locations. This ensures ease of data sharing and understanding and also lends itself to the creation of a central knowledge database where all communal information could be stored and accessed, thus promoting the sharing of best practice. This is not a virtual team scenario, although it does make use of virtual working to further the efficiency of operation within the function.

Although R&D employees are often from scientific backgrounds, this does not always equate to technical expertise. Their daily tasks may not involve the use of many communications technologies and this should be taken into consideration when forming a virtual team.

SALES

Of all the functions, the physical set-up of the field-based account manager is most suited to virtual working. Sales managers are expected to work away from their desk for a large percentage of their time and are normally equipped with laptops with remote LAN access and mobile phones. They are good communicators and rely on this skill to carry out their job.

Although they work in relative autonomy from each other they will not experience feelings of isolation, as theirs is a career that relies on the development of interpersonal relationships with their buyers and customers. Arguably, these relationships could not be built solely via ICT, although the feedback of results and requirements to the business is often sustained virtually.

Culturally the Sales function is characterized by strong personalities who are well trained in negotiation. When such an individual is required to work in a team environment, this is a formidable combination and it is important that the team leader manages their interactions with other members of the team who are not normally exposed to such results-oriented functions.

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FINANCE

The Finance function is extremely organized with regards to the information it handles, with strong structure and process demonstrated in the work it does. Although finance managers may not come from a technical background, today’s business environment demands that they have more than a rudimentary knowledge of many software packages.

This function looks at each project solution wearing an accountant’s hat – will it or will it not pay out? The more creative functions can often find it frustrating when they have to operate in a team with finance specialists; these people may prefer to brainstorm all possibilities first and then evaluate their financial viability later. These different philosophies and approaches may mean that any negotiation over a proposal is best done face-to-face. However, in many cases, the Finance input to a situation can be done as effectively via e-mail as face-to-face, as it often requires the sharing of data in combination with a rationale – a recipe that is often best digested before discussion.

For these reasons, Finance can clearly make use of virtual working tools in sharing their insights, but there is less value at the discussion and brainstorming stage, which in any case lends itself less well to the virtual environment for any function.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

It is regularly and blithely assumed that individuals originating from an IT background are ideally suited to operating within a virtual team, due to their technical prowess. This can be a false assumption, as it is the ability to communicate effectively, rather than operate the technology, that makes a successful virtual team member. In fact, a number of software engineers work in isolation much of the time and have difficulty in sharing and expressing their ideas with others who are not as technically minded as themselves, whether in co-located or virtual teams. This typifies the low-context communication patterns of IT.

The IT function sustains a mix of creativity and logic. Innovative solutions are often more cost-effective than reapplying a solution that does not fit the new problem. However, the conceptual creativity that is displayed by Marketing and HR may prove frustrating to IT, due to an apparent lack of logic being applied in the means to arrive at the solution.

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8 Virtual Team Complexity

If we think about the effort required to select team members from all over the globe, sourced from any organization, and then to link people via communication technology, operating from any location, it is very clear that the choice to function as a virtual team can be a daunting one.

It is true that the greater number of administration systems and operating guidelines required for virtual teaming is extra effort that has to be managed at a virtual team’s creation. But the rewards and benefits that can be realized from a successful implementation should outweigh the effort.

It is worth bearing in mind that exposing a number of individuals to a virtual team scenario can be a very steep learning curve and any dissatisfaction can quickly spread throughout an organization. The approach could be to start small and limit the complexity until certain skills have been obtained. The team sponsors should also promote the early cases when virtual working is selected as a strategic direction for the company, and ensure that any pilot projects are given a high profile and suitable recognition by senior management. This can mean that management at all levels should have strong buy-in to the strategy and dedicate time to guaranteeing its success.

Experience demonstrates that a lack of internal case studies or benchmarks for success in virtual working makes it difficult to promote such implementations in the larger, high-risk projects. However, no such internal case studies will exist until some action is taken, and so a first project should be carefully chosen both for its potential to act as a first exemplar case as well as for its chances of success in itself. The use of a ‘quick win’ strategy when identifying future virtual teaming projects will promote faster development of knowledge and experience and will also allow the strategy to be taken up for more complex projects, where the gains will be greater.

Table 8.1 lists factors that can be used to examine the appropriate degree of complexity of a virtual team set-up; this is linked to the difficulties they may experience in maintaining their collaboration processes. Each factor is accompanied by recommendations for the level of complexity advised to be able to maintain any semblance of control – at a lower level for a company whose employees are new to virtual working and at a higher level for virtual teams in general, especially as they become more experienced.

When an organization embarks on the steep learning curve of virtual teamworking it is advisable that the immediate focus be turned to the attainable goals and feasible structures. The following characteristics should be looked for in the initial projects selected for piloting virtual teams within the organization:

• team members distributed within a single country/continent to minimize the crossing of time zones • small number of team members • low security demands imposed by the customer (even in defence and larger projects with

strong customer control) and the company itself • internal projects not involving significant third-party (customers, suppliers) contribution • operation between locations that already have a robust electronic communication

connection, and local support.

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Table 8.1 The different factors that contribute to the complexity of virtual teamworking

Complexity factors Newly formed virtual teams Virtual teams in general

Number of team Less than eight. This ensures that the whole Maximum of 20. Any more and the members team will be able to meet more often and co-ordination task becomes as onerous as

that each person’s voice can be heard. It is the work of the project on which they are important for virtual team novices that each focused. feels that they are participating and are being heard.

Number of different Ensure that all team members are proficient For experienced virtual team members it is still languages spoken in in the elected team’s language. This important to have a single operating language the team ensures that the team is able to focus that everyone understands. However, team

100 per cent on improving its members who are comfortable with their communication processes rather than methods of collaboration and communication understanding the dialogue being can concentrate more on facilitating the exchanged. dialogue between team members, and may be

able to cope with use of different languages. Such experienced teams will apply the same rules as for co-located teams when selecting their team members as they have overcome the obstacles of learning to communicate via the technology.

Number of New virtual teams should be created within Employees comfortable with operating in a organizations a single organization. This ensures that the virtual environment should seek to spread the represented in the team members all have access to the same network of the virtual team across a number team communication technology solutions and of organizations (including suppliers,

that they have all been exposed to the same customers and consultants). This ensures that working methods required by the company the team has the best resources to respond to culture. As a result, they will be faced with challenges. Integrating one or more individuals fewer frustrations during the team set-up from outside the organization will involve phase and can begin communicating dedicating time to bringing the group earlier, feeling that they share a common together as a team and building a sense of agenda and goals. shared direction and purpose. However, the

extra effort will be rewarded by benefits in diversity of thinking. Culture divide can be minimized by selecting people from similar working backgrounds and functions.

Number of time New teams should limit their virtual Experienced virtual team members will have zones crossed working to the same time zone – or at most greater confidence in themselves and trust in within the group within two hours of each other. Extending each other and thus will be able to manage

this time divide will result in fewer periods boundaries of time more effectively; the time of synchronous working time – which spent communicating will be more efficient is a necessity for inexperienced virtual and focused on the problems. They will even workers so that they can explore their be able to make good use of being on other new working arrangements. sides of the globe, effectively delivering a

24-hour working day where the work on the project never rests. Team members will be proficient in using asynchronous communication technologies to clearly deliver their messages.

Technical systems New teams should try, as far as possible, Veteran virtual workers are advised to ensure implemented to implement communication technology they have access to a wide range of

solutions that they are familiar with and communication technologies. They should be already have access to. If this is not possible able to draw on the most appropriate solution they should collectively attend a training as and when necessary. This should not course that ensures they are comfortable require considerable extra training or set-up using this medium to communicate with time, but should provide new and varied ways the other team members. It is important of expressing themselves to best deliver the that the team have a variety of message. It is advisable that all means of technologies to use, as limiting work to a communication are decided at the outset of single channel will inhibit the free flow team formation, basing selection on their past of dialogue and limit their progress. experience. This ensures that all participants

have time to gain access to the technology; more radical selection of technology might attract true higher risk – at lease in terms of cost and set-up time.

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9 Managing Virtual Workers

Virtual leaders are more likely to be chosen on their knowledge/expertise on the problem/project/issue at hand – not by corporate hierarchy. They are not selected solely from the management ranks. Different behaviours are needed: teamwork, personal accountability, individual empowerment and trust. (RAYMOND W. SMITH, CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF BELL ATLANTIC)

One great difficulty for companies to come to terms with when implementing virtual working is loosening management’s control over their employees. Due to rapid technological advances, new work arrangements are appearing faster than management science can accommodate them – let alone make good use of them to maximize the company’s competitive advantage.

It is important to understand that virtual working simply alters the methods and sequencing by which work is done, rather than the goals, the job content itself or even the work organization within which it should be managed. Managers should focus not on defensive monitoring of the virtual worker, as this is often almost impossible anyway due to split locations, but more on creating an environment that, through interest, involvement, incentives and rewards, encourages virtual workers to perform. The role of a manager is clearly that of an enabler or facilitator rather than a direct supervisor. Any assessment that is made should be based on the measurement of results – that is, what employees achieve rather than monitoring how and when they do it.

MANAGING A VIRTUAL TEAM – SHARING, CARING AND DARING!

Managing a co-located team requires an in-depth understanding of the human and social processes of group dynamics. Making the collaboration virtual creates additional difficulties for management. The interactions between team members become less visible and the team spirit harder to maintain and nurture.

As illustrated in Figure 9.1, the virtual teamworking process can be looked at in terms of a cycle of actions, each bringing with it emotions that should be questioned, understood and developed. This cycle is one that team members should follow and team leaders or facilitators are challenged to support. For co-located teams, taking action can often be the most important focus, as the team members do not feel the need to overtly spend time developing and sustaining their methods of communication.

For a virtual team the focus needs to shift from action to how the decisions on action will be taken, as the communication process cannot be taken for granted when working in different geographical locations and potentially across time zones. An explicit focus on each of the three key areas shown in Figure 9.1 will better support the smooth management of a virtual team.

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Figure 9.1 Managing the virtual team cycle of actions

SHARING – OF INFORMATION, EXPERIENCES AND SUCCESSES

This is where the journey starts for virtual team members. They must define how they will communicate during the life of the project through their interpersonal interactions and also the technicalities of sharing documents and team progress. This must cover not only formal interaction but also the means by which they will sustain social exchanges that create a parallel network to the electronic one they rely on – one that is made up of relationships of trust and empathy. Importantly, this will include celebration of success and sharing of experiences, as solutions for sharing the documents and files that they develop are already easily available. Thus the focus here will be on process rather than on hardware or software. The communication tools they have available will be standard; it is the methods by which they use them to create a network that will help sustain the team dialogue that is critical.

CARING – CREATING TRUST, TEAM IDENTITY AND OPEN COMMUNICATION

A virtual team faces greater challenges than a traditional team in developing and maintaining a bond of trust and familiarity between its members. This is primarily due to the team not being co-located, and therefore finding it less easy to participate in each other’s lives outside of the project or function scope. Within the guidelines that the team develops for their methods of interaction, time must be allocated to include teambuilding tasks that replicate the informality of face-to-face interactions. Also important is the ability to notice when team morale is waning and having processes in place that will help identify and address the root causes of conflicts within

Managing a Virtual

Team

Sharing – information/ experiences/

success

Caring – creating trust,

team identity and open communication

Daring – taking action, breaking

boundaries and being different

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the team. The development of team operating practices will help the members begin to build a framework for their team culture. Team protocols will avoid unnecessary misunderstanding and frustrations arising from conflicting ideals on how people interact and work.

DARING – TAKING ACTION, BREAKING BOUNDARIES AND BEING DIFFERENT

Once the infrastructure that supports the team’s interactions has been developed, and the team spirit is more securely in place, the team can now begin responding to the project brief. The pioneering working conditions give scope for the team to think outside the normal constraints and parameters, and take actions that transcend the normally expected problems presented by boundaries of culture and organization. The team members should be less hindered by status debates and any feelings of inequality, as these criteria are not considered in their reasons for being part of the network or in their working arrangements. Having been selected for their expertise alone, the team will be in a position to produce the most innovative and effective solutions within a team environment that they themselves have created to meet their specific needs. The cycle continues as the team takes action. Experiences should be shared and feedback given to sustain the bond between the scattered team members.

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM LEADER

There are a number of apparently fragmented roles that a team leader must fulfil for virtual team facilitation. However, there is one common theme that is supported through each role the team leader takes – namely, to bring the team closer together and build the interpersonal relationships that they need to succeed.

The team leader is the person that is managing the boundary, feeding back the team’s achievements to the organization and to the individuals’ function or line managers. They should make it clear that they are keeping abreast of the team’s operation and actions so that the members do not feel that they have to constantly inform the leader of their accomplishments for recognition. Lack of recognition can make an individual feel isolated and cause them to believe that they have to share all results to ensure that the team leader is aware of their efforts – possibly resulting in information overload for the leader. Better recognition can be achieved through continual feedback and solicitation of the team’s opinions. The team leader should also keep the team informed of management feedback about their work and of any other corporate news or events, to prevent the team from feeling cut off from the rest of the organization.

As a facilitator, the team leader is able to encourage and help the team to explore how they interact, and to improve any ineffective processes they currently use. They will help the team select the communication media that they use and also diagnose any communications problems that the team are having, as they may be too embroiled in the problem to see it.

Another role almost as important as managing the interaction of the team members on a professional level is to encourage and facilitate activities that make up the informal communication network. Without this, interaction will be strained and ineffective; trust that a successful team requires will erode over time without more relaxed socialization.

One of the hardest challenges the team leader faces is how to ensure that everyone participates to the best of their ability. This is sometimes described as moving all the ‘virtual chairs’ into a circle. The team leader will need to use information gathered from the team’s unique characteristics and help the team translate their individual characteristics and ways of operating into new procedures that result in a synergistic unit in which each person feels part of

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the network at all times. Being in different locations, the team will not have the same readiness to share experiences and interactions that would come from shared time together. Thus alternative strategies must be developed to prevent the team feeling fragmented cognitively and emotionally, on top of being separated physically. Methods to help with this may include prompting mental images of the team as a group via the use of a team photograph, or at least a collage picture of each team member sitting at a seat around a single table.

Virtual team initiatives often fail due to the manager’s inability to adapt to the new demands while faced with a team they rarely see. Success will not come from tight managerial control, as this inhibits the extent of the interactions within the network. Virtual team leaders are viewed more as generators of a culture that facilitates the team to become self-managed and not to rely on external supervision and control. Leadership should come from within the team by generating a sense of common purpose and a clear and concise mission.

Once the team can identify together as a unit, the next step is to harness the energy that the team members bring to the group. Operating as a co-located group is often associated with the buzz of a brainstorming session or a discussion group who are shut in a room, bouncing ideas off each other in search of a solution. The room acts to concentrate the team’s energy. The virtual team lacks this feeling of connection and, for this reason, finds it difficult to re-create that buzz. Team members and leaders must spend time considering how they will draw attention to exciting news and sustain energy and enthusiasm.

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10 Success Strategies

Virtual team success, as for traditional teams, relies on effective communication and collaboration mixed with the correct expertise to complete work tasks and achieve performance goals.

Virtual team success will come from:

• generating clear and concise goals and objectives • enabling the free flow of communication • diagnosing problems early and acting on them • developing the team’s own culture.

GENERATING CLEAR AND CONCISE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Although at odds with the concept of a purely virtual operation, the best thing a manager can do for a newly established virtual team is to facilitate a physical gathering of the members at the outset. Meeting face-to-face sows the seeds from which team bonds and trust can grow. It is much harder to feel comfortable with people with whom you have only communicated, at best, on the telephone.

The detailed planning of team actions is critical to the success of a virtual team. Because of the lack of regular direct contact, team members must be able to continue in a direction of work that they know to be in line with the team’s goals. To do this, the team must have a clear purpose and set of objectives. These should be generated by the team at the outset, in response to the requirements of the team sponsors and customers. These objectives can then be translated into detailed action plans, complete with related success criteria and measures that the team can track to make sure that they are delivering the required business results. Time should be taken not only to specify the action steps to be accomplished, but also to map out the means by which they will be achieved in terms of setting up the procedures and mechanisms for meetings and communication channels. Formal operating agreements, whilst they might initially appear cumbersome and restrictive, often enhance the smooth flow of the team’s actions and help build a relationship of trust among the team members.

ENABLING THE FREE FLOW OF COMMUNICATION

Having provided the tools for communication and the action steps to achieve certain milestones, the team’s manager or facilitator must also adopt the role of coach. Each team member must be fluent in the use of each technical and organizational tool, ensuring that communication can take place as fluidly as possible, unhindered by the technology the team use in lieu of face-to-face dialogue. In addition to the technicalities of the communication technologies, training in problem-solving, conflict resolution, project planning and communication are as essential to a virtual team as to a co-located group, if not more so. It is the team leader’s responsibility to identify any skill development opportunities among the team members and act upon them.

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In the midst of all this technology, as we have stressed throughout this book, the team leader must not forget the human side of the interactions. To guarantee the continued free flow of communication the team members need time to get to know each other. Often this can be acknowledged at the outset of a virtual team’s creation, and resources dedicated to an initial teambuilding session. But without continual ‘top-ups’ of the informal network of connections, the collaboration is liable to deteriorate in quality and become more of a chore.

Avoiding communication gaps is very important. It is during the ‘offline’ periods when people are out of touch that the team’s relational links, which they have strived so hard to develop, will wane. Meeting schedules that are predefined for the duration of the project will ensure that the team members connect on a regular basis. The time set aside for whole team meetings should be used as much for informal discussion and for teambuilding purposes as for subjects critical to the operations and business side of their activity.

DIAGNOSING PROBLEMS EARLY AND ACTING ON THEM

Most virtual working problems will manifest themselves in frustration and, ultimately, team fragmentation if not tackled early. The confrontation of problems is more critical than in a co- located situation as the potential to do hidden damage to the team’s morale and effectiveness is far greater than in traditional teams, who can wind down over lunch or can forget the morning’s arguments in the rush to complete tasks in the afternoon. Problems between people who meet infrequently, if ever, have the potential to fester.

The team manager may appear to be the best person to identify the symptoms of problems, as they are often removed from the day-to-day workings of the team and therefore dispassionate. However, establishing the root causes of the issues is better done by the team members themselves, as not only do they have a better understanding of their interactions, but also the process of analysing their problems will lead to a more open environment in which problems are faced rather than relying on fire-fighting.

Table 10.1 is a detailed breakdown of the different symptoms of difficulties that may be observed within a virtual team. When spotted, they can be used as an early warning system for more fundamental underlying problems or root causes. The team should diagnose the root causes of the problem to avoid it snowballing out of control.

Table 10.1 Issues, possible outcomes and underlying causes faced by virtual teams

Issue Possible outcome Possible underlying causes

The team must work Reduction in the amount of informal Lack of shared team space. apart more than communication. together. Communication is only stimulated by

project-related issues.

The team is expected Inappropriate and unproductive actions Lack of understanding of the full to carry on working as and operations. implications of changing to virtual a traditional team. working.

Insufficient team Decisions being made without sufficient Not feeling comfortable with the interaction to make information, and ownership lying only communication media. The team joint decisions. with part of the team. members are unable to use them

Rifts developing between team properly to negotiate solutions for members. problems.

continued

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Issue Possible outcome Possible underlying causes

Members don’t feel Team fragmentation and a less than The team is working in subgroups and mutually accountable open working environment. not making an effort to involve all for their actions. team members when actions have

consequences for the whole team.

Team fragmentation Inefficient communication and lack of Too many members whose tasks are into unplanned and whole team buy-in to decisions made not all interrelated making one single, disorganized by ‘independent’ subgroups. unstructured team that will break off subteams. into workable group sizes, though not

necessarily with the best mix of members for each subgroup.

Customer’s desire for a Reversion to expensive travelling Lack of customer buy-in and company to bring the costs, which defeats the purpose involvement in the virtual working experts to the project of virtual working. strategy. Consider training the location rather than customer as well as the team members the expertise. in the benefits of the virtual solution.

Inability to recruit into Using only the personnel who have Lack of flexible and robust technology the virtual team from access to the required secure that can be easily extended to other any location that holds technology. This limits the flexibility locations. the expertise. and leverage delivered by the virtual Lack of uniform technology

working strategy. throughout the organization.

Lack of the feeling of A team that does not feel united to a Dispersed teams not being given ‘belonging’. single cause and has no image of the chance to build their informal, as

themselves as belonging to a whole. well as formal, relationships. The members come from different locations and maybe even organizations.

Team members feel Team fragmentation and lack of A number of the team members are excluded from the feeling of responsibility to one other. already acquainted and neglect the loop. need to build equally strong

relationships with the other team members. Some members work full-time on the project and some only part-time. This means that not all will be completely up-to-date at all times, resulting in lack of confidence. The pace of communication is not regulated between all members so that some may feel left behind. Part of the team is co-located and other members are distributed from the main location, thus amplifying the feeling of exclusion.

Insufficient Knowledge and best practice may be Knowledge management may not be communication captured effectively within the team, a highlighted issue for the company. channels between the but never disseminated for use within Reasons for, and processes of, team and the rest of the rest of the company. knowledge management must be the organization. made explicit to all team members.

continued

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Issue Possible outcome Possible underlying causes

Organizational barriers An inhibited communication Barriers between team members are hindering environment among the team because status in the overall communication. members. organizational hierarchy has been

made an issue. Everyone must feel free to communicate problems and suggestions for solutions to problems, and not be tempted to keep them local.

Cultural barriers are Frustration and ineffective Working with a variety of people from hindering communications. various organizations and locations communication. has become a problem because the

issues are not being made explicit, and protocols are not being generated to overcome them.

Time barriers are Frustration and slow generation Not using asynchronous hindering of results. communication to its full potential communication. thus causing time to be a problem.

Not having the required training in how to communicate efficiently in short spaces of time, prioritizing issues and so on, will make the time barrier even more noticeable.

Generation of Team fragmentation and competition Inability to read people’s virtual misunderstandings between team members rather than ‘gestures and voice tones’. Not between team the team working to a common developing ways to express emotions members. agenda. and training in virtual etiquette will

make misunderstandings more likely.

Propagation of Team collapses. Misuse of communication media. misunderstandings. Lack of conflict resolution processes.

Lack of trust between Not relying on team members for Not ‘getting to know each other’ team members. help and not wanting to ask for help face-to-face and not sharing informal

in the first place. The group will fail time that will help the team members to work as a high-performance team. understand that they are all working

to a common agenda.

Erosion of team spirit Reduction in the efficiency of The team spirit relying solely on and trust over time. teamwork, resulting in a face-to-face meetings for trust-building

lower-performance team. interaction. Time apart will promote the erosion. Between these meetings the informality has to be topped up for the members to remain comfortable and confident in their communications.

Individual feelings Overworking, stress, depression, Not making distributed team of isolation. and potentially, dropping out from members feel part of the whole.

the team. Not involving them in the team’s actions and decisions. Ignoring the need for ’family’ space.

continued

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Issue Possible outcome Possible underlying causes

Lack of rich Meaningless communication that bores Team members becoming bored with communication. the team members. communication media and topics due

Loss of motivation and energy. to the lack of external stimulation. Missing important issues through the Communication becoming restricted lack of energetic interactions. to admin and logistical issues about

the project.

Unprofessional Misunderstandings and team Lack of commitment to the team, presentation of dissatisfaction. lack of respect and mutual communications responsibility between team members between team and inappropriate communications members. protocol.

Information overload. Frustration, stress, and ineffective Lack of protocols on how, when and communication. what to communicate to whom.

Missing deadlines. Team disillusionment. Problems with asynchronous working and the technology infrastructure, which doesn’t support fast and efficient communication. Lack of team identity, commitment and motivation.

Lack of celebration Disillusionment of team and loss of Unfamiliar communication media, and of success. energy and motivation. no priority given to developing a

method for celebrating virtually. Cynicism.

DEVELOPING THE TEAM’S OWN CULTURE

Team culture can be described as the shared principles and behaviours of the members. Culture impacts every interaction and every assumption made, and for this reason deserves considerable attention as it has the power to make or break a team’s collaborative success.

Each individual will bring with them specific expectations about how the team will operate, communicate, be managed and behave. This is unlikely to be the same for each person – although previously working at the same location as someone else often affects these expectations in the same way, thus closing the cultural gap. Although this cultural divide can be very wide between people coming from different functions and locations, managing it successfully can deliver many more innovative results than those to be gained from a group of very like-minded individuals.

The team will benefit most from acknowledging the fact that they are all individuals, and then drawing on their individual strengths to create a microcosm within the wider organization that embodies shared culture and operating principles that they believe will enable them to deliver the best results as a team. Such operating principles will allow the group to begin identifying themselves as a team, and accelerate the trust-building process that is vital to their success.

This awareness of ‘culture’ among the team members will also help them be more tolerant of the fact that they are working within a diverse group and will make them stop and think before making assumptions about other people’s actions.

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11 Communication Strategies

Good communication is one solution to nearly all of a virtual team’s problems, yet at the same time it is the biggest obstacle the members face. In the virtual team environment words must facilitate almost everything due to the lack of the physical proximity of the team members. This means that the facilitation of communication within a virtual team involves supporting not only the means for the formal interchange of ideas, but also the mechanisms for informality so that members can get to know each other and form a bond of trust. This is described as ‘virtual socializing’. There are a number of social etiquette and guidance suggestions that virtual teams are advised to adopt to encourage the development of a team identity and an open working environment. These include:

• Let the team get to know each other a little personally before formal interactions are required, to provide a foundation for their future collaboration.

• Try not to make the atmosphere too businesslike; make it fun. Celebrate success as a team. • Encourage the team to communicate with each other as soon as possible, using the media

which the group will rely on to perform, in order to become comfortable with the technology before it has to be used to support complex decision-making processes.

• Make it a rule to always use team members’ names in discussion; this avoids confusion about to whom questions are being directed in non-visual media or even in video or teleconferences.

• Encourage the team to try to respond to communications from each other within the same working day, or at the least give details of schedule constraints.

• Avoid the discussion of certain topics such as status and salary as this undermines any feelings of equality.

Key to ongoing, stimulating communication that will sustain a creative working environment is the development of trust between team members. This means that, wherever possible, the team members should co-locate for a period of time at the very start of the project to develop the bond between them. This bond should also be ‘topped up’ during the course of the project where possible, as such relationships are likely to weaken or disintegrate over time.

SHARING INFORMATION

The increased availability of advanced, electronic communication media, and better understanding of organizational and human factors needs of teams, has made the application of virtual teams possible for almost any size of organization. Clearly, having a sufficient budget for ICT and service-supporting tools is important in determining how effective the team will be. However, it is also important that organizations, large and small alike, realize the dangers of trying to apply the wrong types of communication media to a situation, simply because they are available. Merely spending large amounts of money on sophisticated ICT does not guarantee success, and may even

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prove to be a handicap if it is too complex for people to use properly or feel comfortable with. This has been stressed over and over again in the early chapters of this book.

The communication technologies chosen should be the tools that are really required by a new way of working, and the methods by which the team can optimize their effectiveness should dictate the media to best support them. For example, if a large amount of brainstorming and debate is required at the early stages of a project, e-mail or even electronic conferencing would not be a suitable tool because of its laboriousness. So, do not purchase the technology and then look for a problem to apply it to! The starting point is to change the culture and the way of working and sharing information, and then select, configure and use the technology to support that change.

The team’s communication strategy should also involve the development of the process by which the team members access their information. The mechanism should be such that the team members are able to reach out to each other, across distance and time, to pull information from their teammates with ease and confidence.

A start in the development of the sharing process is to identify the type of work the team will be performing and what form of communication will be required to support and sustain the interactions. Communication can be typified by its volume (or amount), frequency and degree of interaction. Understanding needs within each of these characteristics can then be used to define the media required for the long-distance collaboration, and also the pace at which the team will operate.

Defining the regularity of communication is critical in ensuring all team members remain in the loop. If half the team tunes in to the team’s operations once a week but the rest every day, then half the group may feel overworked and the other half left behind. Decide on a balance that suits all team members and is conducive to achieving the targets.

If someone is absent from the interactions of the team for a period, for one reason or another, there should be a process in place by which they can backtrack over the interactions of the team to catchup; this may be through minuting any virtual meetings or through a catch-up briefing from the team members. Mechanisms such as these, if not encouraged or even enforced, will lapse and the team will slowly break back down into its constituent parts, as commitment and feelings of comfort with other team members erode.

SHARING SUCCESS

So far, the virtual team may sound like a quagmire of potential difficulties and barriers. However, if potential problems are openly identified and addressed, the team will learn and succeed in many areas. Such successes should be celebrated and shared. Other virtual teams will be able to glean useful knowledge from the experiences and use them to avoid reinventing the wheel in their quest for success. Employees outside the virtual team should also be made aware of the achievements; virtual team members, like everyone else – and perhaps more so due to the potential lack of social contact – will thrive on recognition and praise.

How the virtual team celebrate their success will be for themselves and their manager to decide. Both small successes and major milestones should be recognized both internally and externally to build motivation and team spirit. Management may reward larger successes externally, perhaps by financing a social get-together of the team members.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Virtual teams, by their nature, connect islands of knowledge that may be distributed globally. The people participating in the team are chosen for their expertise. As a result, the team will generate a lot of new knowledge that should be shared with the whole company. This is not only

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knowledge in the form of technical learning from achieving the goals of the project, but also learning from the experiences of the team. Virtual teamworking is still in its infancy, so each application and re-application of this organizational structure will bring with it lessons about new and more effective ways of co-operating from distant locations.

Virtual teams are often used to develop partnerships between people both inside and outside an organization. These relationships are becoming increasingly important as they are primarily set up for the sharing of knowledge between the organization and their customers, suppliers and other companies in response to market demands.

Even sharing information within a virtual team environment can be a sufficient challenge in itself, however. Supporting the spread of knowledge elsewhere can be much more difficult. It is the team manager’s tricky responsibility to ensure that there is also a channel open between the team and the rest of the organization and supply chain. Information should flow in both directions along this conduit to ensure that the virtual team continues to feel involved with the activities and products of colleagues with whom they may no longer have regular contact.

Success in this management of knowledge will include the ability of the team members to listen to what is going on around them (albeit sometimes many thousands of kilometres away where their virtual team colleagues are located) and to learn from their findings in order to be ready and able to act upon the knowledge they gather.

The use of electronic communication tools has fuelled interest in finding a way of storing and then re-using the knowledge that virtual teams are generating. This not only means documenting the results they achieve, but more importantly the process by which they achieve them. This raises the difficult problem of identifying and capturing the tacit knowledge that the employees have developed from their experiences. This knowledge is often lost to a company when the individual leaves, and may anyway be inaccessible unless particular employees with knowledge can be identified, and are then willing and able to articulate and store such knowledge. The ability to store and re-use such knowledge would allow learning from similar projects to improve the process next time around. New recruits would then be able to speed up their knowledge absorption rather than relying on the time-consuming process of going through all the same experiences, just to be lost to the company again when they move on.

As yet, there is no good solution to the knowledge management process of capturing, organizing and storing, sharing and leveraging information and learning. Electronic communication tools do offer an opportunity to begin to solve some of the problems: for instance, computer conferencing allows team members to collaborate in real time by typing conversations, resulting in a thought process, in dialogue format, that is stored and is shareable. Technological advances enable such documents to be referenced and searched by future users. To a limited and somewhat flexible extent, intelligent agents (elements within the software) can learn from what team members record or use, and offer guidance in subsequent tasks. Advanced databases also facilitate the storage and re-use of team documents, although the team members themselves are ultimately responsible for generating the data and deciding what is worth sharing.

Organizational memory is most obviously missing in industries such as aerospace, where a large number of people from varying competency backgrounds come together to participate in the design and construction of a large, customized solution which typically takes several years to complete. These industries find it hard, if not impossible, to identify parallels between the projects they undertake. However, the complexity and management of such a project will provide learning that is worth capturing. Other industries with organizational knowledge problems are those that involve continuous or semi-continuous processing, such as steel

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production. Here, the rapid rate of technical change, automation of some processes, the collapse of an apprentice system and time pressures mean that when older employees with detailed process knowledge leave, their replacements haven’t got the time or industry background to begin to pick up the informal skills, tricks of the trade and process knowledge of their predecessors.

Successful knowledge management is not just a matter of implementing complex and clever computer systems. Why should people give what is, along with their time, their most precious resource – their knowledge – to the company? Very good management and understanding of the underlying motivational processes will be required for people to give away what appears to them to be their marketability. All this assumes, of course, that people’s knowledge is in fact available for them to consciously record and share; we know from eliciting knowledge from experts that expertise is difficult for them to represent and communicate to others.

SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE

The physical separation of the team members demands an extra effort to communicate and to check in with colleagues on project progress as well as on personal issues. A regular meeting slot will build overall project status visibility across the wider team. Seeing the bigger picture in this way will help subgroups to stay focused on the overall team objectives, which will enhance their individual communication and collaboration. It will also generate greater understanding of each other’s pressures and time availability.

It is important to agree upon communication protocols that describe how the team feels they should work together. Such protocols will help alleviate some of the frustration felt among team members and more quickly resolve misunderstandings as each individual’s expectations will be more in line with the full team’s agreements. This will go a long way towards avoiding unnecessary communication gaps and downtime between team members. An example of such agreed protocols is the discipline of responding to communications within 24-hours, even if the reply is only to supply a reason why it is difficult to answer the query in full at that time and to say when it is likely that time can be allocated and an answer provided. Lack of response can lead to the sender drawing their own conclusions – possibly that the recipient is unhappy with them or is confused by the request. Such a reply protocol demonstrates a respect for the other team members’ needs that will go a long way to building team rapport and trust.

Management can help by making clear their awareness of the activities of all the team members. This avoids team members feeling obliged to keep pushing details of their achievements and activities to the manager for recognition and creating information overload. Electronic media, such as e-mail, have made it too easy to send, copy and forward information to many points of contact at the press of a button. Such pushing of information should be avoided and replaced by a central knowledge repository detailing each member’s activities, their activity status and their findings so that other people are able to draw on this information as and when they require it. Ongoing feedback from, and interaction with, the team leader or facilitator will increase the team’s awareness that their work is being followed and understood.

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12 Supporting the Virtual Team

The idea of being part of a virtual team for the first time can be quite a daunting one. It appears to be a very transitory role, where a collection of employees are selected for their skill sets and brought together for a finite or indefinite period. In this space of time the group will get to know each other, define how they will work together and deliver the results they were chosen to produce and then disband, maybe never to work together again.

This is not an easy concept for all to grasp and, for this reason, there is a large question of how the personnel will be supported through the transition. In this chapter we identify anxieties that the team members may either identify early on or may encounter later in the team’s life cycle. Before creating its first virtual team, the organization should make adequate provision to ensure that all areas of concern have been anticipated and addressed.

TECHNICAL SUPPORT

Technophobia may be found amongst people anywhere and so may be present in some virtual team members. It can be triggered by the rapid increase in the reliance on ICT, by fears of being replaced by a computer or a machine, and by the very real inadequacy of the interfaces that allow (or do not allow!) people to interact with the technology. Technophobia has been especially noted in people who have taken time out of work only to return lacking confidence in their ability to apply all the new software and hardware solutions around them, in older workers, and in people who have been highly regarded for their other, non-ICT, skills.

Being selected for virtual teamwork and being faced with the prospect of operating solely via communication technologies – and, indeed, a whole variety of them – may often be enough to turn anyone into a technophobe or to exaggerate existing fears and antipathies.

An organization can work proactively to make sure that its employees are comfortable with the communication technology that surrounds them. Training courses should be made available at regular intervals so that any employee can attend and improve their IT skills. In this fashion, the company is building IT expertise into its culture and future by keeping all employees trained and confident. Moreover, such a strategy will also improve its competitive advantage by not only increasing employees’ daily productivity, but also enabling virtual teams to be created even faster in response to a customer request or change in market conditions. As soon as the project goals have been set, and the required skills and functions have been identified, the employees can be mobilized to begin the creation of the new virtual team.

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EMOTIONAL SUPPORT

STRESS MANAGEMENT

Changing job has been identified as one of the top five most stressful things that people have to do in their lifetime. Moving to a virtual working set-up may not involve changing organization, but it will involve new working conditions, new working practices, working with new people that you have not met (and, indeed, may never meet), and developing a whole new set of skills. This can be a stressful transition for individuals who have never before been exposed to such flexible and undefined working conditions.

Not only is there the stress of the new job, but there are also a number of unanswered questions that can prey on the mind of a new virtual team member. What are my career prospects? How will I be managed and how will my performance be evaluated from a distance? Will I be a part of a virtual team from now on or is it a transitory structure?

An organization that is new to a virtual team strategy would do well to formulate its own answers to all the questions that its employees can ask. In large part the questions will stem from the changes in working conditions that virtual working will require. We recommend that focus groups are held with any prospective virtual team members to allow them to ask questions. It may also be wise to share with them case studies from past virtual teams – that is, any that have already existed within the organization or in partner organizations or are publicly available through government, universities or advisory bodies.

It is a mistake to implement a virtual solution under the assumption that, because employees use technology to communicate every day, they should rapidly adjust to a purely virtual solution. Virtual teams are set up in response to significant business or project needs, and such teams need to be given clear purpose, objectives and guidance on how they will operate on an ongoing basis. Leaving it to chance will result in a team that fragments or reverts back to expensive face-to-face meetings that waste a lot of valuable time.

BUILDING TRUST

Isolation is not such a great threat for members of virtual teams who also operate day-to-day out of an office location. Challenges can arise when virtual workers are operating from home or from hot-desking situations. Managers of virtual workers must prevent them from feeling isolated, both from their colleagues with whom they once worked closely and from the office news grapevine that they were once part of.

Building on the relational links between the virtual team members will reduce the possible feelings of isolation. If this is done well, it will support the need for informal conversation and the team members will get to know each other on more than a professional level. To facilitate this, a bond of trust must be built between the participants, which is achieved most quickly through co-operation and interdependence between the team members.

This network of familiarity can be strengthened by teambuilding exercises or face-to-face meetings where the technology barrier no longer exists. However, this is a time-consuming and costly exercise that not all virtual team life cycles can sustain. The alternative is to find communication solutions that enable the team to feel closer together. As an example of this, Instant Messaging services allow immediate and informal contact between the team members. This is ideal for sharing thoughts, having a quick chat after lunch or informally asking for advice.

The team leader should also be responsible for conveying relevant or interesting news from the rest of the company to their team. This can be done through ensuring any bulletins shared

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at work are extended to virtual workers and allocating time to the discussion of how the virtual team work is fitting in with the overall company direction.

TRAINING SUPPORT

As with any new experience, the more time that can be given to preparing for virtual working, the less of an ordeal the transition becomes. This preparation should be in the form of training from experts who have already experienced being part of a virtual team, or who have closely observed and really understood virtual teamwork.

Companies that are serious about their employees’ welfare have been known to make a mock-up office location furnished with the new communication technologies that will become the connection between the virtual team members. They then allow the employees to spend time within the new environment to acclimatize themselves to the new technologies and the feeling of working remotely from other team members.

This test environment gives the employees time and space to begin developing the new skills required from a technological and organizational perspective. It also accelerates the company’s overall learning curve by stimulating the questions and concerns that the employees would have had when they began the virtual working for real. These can then be addressed in advance of the change and possibly used to adjust the design of the virtual team interactions and infrastructure.

The training should not be an isolated or token effort and targeted only at the launch of the virtual team. As the team members evolve and new participants come and go, further training will be needed to keep the competency levels high and also to address the skills gaps that the team will discover as it progresses. The team training sessions are also a means of delivering shared experiences and interactions that are the basis for building trust among the team members.

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13 Implementing Change

As with any change in technical or organizational systems, the key to virtual teams’ success or failure lies largely in how they are implemented. Part IV of this book provides a considerable amount of advice and guidelines for the planning, design, introduction, maintenance and support of virtual teams. This chapter lays the groundwork by considering the implementation of change generally.

We first have to recognize that change is as much, or more, about process as it is about content. Indeed, the content of a change can often be altered within the process, unless the organization is too deeply locked into financial or logistical investment. However, the process itself often cannot be changed once it is set in motion – at least, it is hard to undo any poor groundwork, poor communication or lack of participation once the process is underway.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that, even where the change agent has the best of intentions and follows the best of practice, and the change itself is likely to benefit all the stakeholders, there still may be resistance from amongst those affected, or even from others who are not directly involved in the change.

It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state’s constitution. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. (MACHIAVELLI 1513)

One of the key points for implementing change is to secure the support, at the outset, from all the stakeholders – that is, all those who might be affected by the change and also those whose actions or behaviour might affect the outcomes of the change. Stakeholders are not just operational staff whose job or technical system might be altered, but also their supervisors and managers as well as the senior management responsible for business performance. Therefore, we are looking for a change manager who can communicate and collaborate with staff at all levels in a company. This obviously admirable strategy is very easy to say, but not so easy to do. Nonetheless, without the support of those most affected and those who can affect the resource given to the project, there is little chance of success.

No matter how beneficial the change, there will almost certainly be at least some resistance. In some cases, this resistance is highly functional; those resisting have recognized that the proposed change will not be a good one. People resist change because of fear of specific consequences; the change might affect their job or status or disrupt their personal and social life. In the case of virtual teamworking, possible causes of resistance might be the disruption caused to life at home if they are doing more work there, a fear of being isolated, or perhaps a reluctance to give up some of the business travel that they used to undertake.

We also have to recognize that, to some extent, it is a human trait to be somewhat conservative and to resist changes. This is probably soundly based as a well-learnt protection

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mechanism for the human race. However, such non-specific reactions to proposed change can be minimized by careful implementation. It would certainly help for the change agent and managers to take an empathetic perspective, to see the viewpoints of all involved and put themselves in the place of those who are opposed to any change.

If support has been obtained from all stakeholders, then this is an important step towards perhaps the most important part of implementing change – setting up a participative structure and process. A number of studies have shown that, whilst it is difficult to identify the factors which cause change projects to succeed or fail, the one factor common to many successful projects is participation. This means genuinely involving people, as far as possible, in the generation of information and ideas, and in the testing and further development of any changes. Participation however, if it is not to be mere consultation or a public relations exercise, must involve giving people resources, knowledge and power to influence outcomes.

There needs to be a support structure for change at the outset. Often the requirement for participation (and also the need for compatibility in the socio-technical systems discussed in Chapter 4) mean that steering or change groups will be formed. These must have sufficient resources (in terms of time as much as money and people) and lines of communication to make a real difference. The steering groups or task forces should be produced on the basis of a change model and should be imbued with a vision for the new work practices and procedures that includes the recognifition of any major cultural barriers, particularly those connected with work and industrial political cultures. More pragmatically, early groundwork needs to be carried out in the form of function and task analyses. These will determine exactly what functions are to be carried out and by who in the teams, the constraints and requirements, as well as the consequences for the organization as a whole and for the individuals in the relevant jobs.

The key to the support structure is the person who is really driving the change, sometimes called the change owner, the change agent or the facilitator. There are a number of elements which define the competencies of change agents. Some of these are the obvious ones, such as interpersonal and communications skills, the ability not only to be enthusiastic oneself but also to develop such enthusiasm in others, and to be both a good negotiator and a good salesperson. They also need to be flexible and to be able to deal with flexibility in others, whilst being very clear on project goals; they should be sensitive to the perceptions of others and also have a strong political awareness within the organization. Furthermore, their social skills should give them good ability at building teams, delegating, networking and taking an overall and longer-term view as well as addressing short-term goals.

Of course, the chance of finding somebody with all these skills is very slim, but the list of competencies does give an idea of what should be looked for in a facilitator!

In addition to being vital at the start of implementation and in setting up the structure for the change process, support is also required throughout the change, particularly for those stakeholders whose work is most affected. This means that resources should be provided which will help people change their way of working and develop new skills, as well as maintain their existing social support and interaction networks. Appropriate training is therefore required, both to give early and continuing support in the required technical skills and also in any personnel development requirements, including social skills. Reporting and information systems should be set up that allow two-way communication and, particularly, feedback on actions taken as a result of communication.

Since the change process is seen as more important even than the content, it stands to reason that timing is critical. Implementation strategies may range from revolution to evolution, from a big bang to change which happens almost without an organization realizing it, through

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incremental evolution. Somewhere in between there are various forms of phased introduction of change, often with the original systems running alongside the new system for a while – parallel running. When we consider what should be the optimum speed of change, the somewhat glib answer – which is true nonetheless – is not too fast and not too slow! If change is introduced too quickly, there are likely to be problems of resistance and a lack of support mechanisms, which will reduce the chances of success. On the other hand, we have seen cases where the company – anxious to put in place lines of communication and ensure participation – has prepared its workforce for change long before anything would actually be seen in practice. Sometimes, in the worst cases, this might happen on several occasions – for instance when the technology or process is found wanting at a pilot stage and consequently abandoned, so that nothing is seen in practice by the workforce. In such cases, it is easy to bring that particular change, or change in the company as a whole, into disrepute, such that a company and its managers appear like the little boy who cried wolf. Future announcements are then often greeted with cynicism and disbelief.

Change, in fact, should be a continual and gradual process, with the content being flexible and iterative. In the words of an old film, ‘things change’; the internal and external environment for any organization does not remain static and adaptation to this requires change in any case, so there is no point in worrying about getting it all exactly right in the first place. It is better to put in place a robust but flexible process, with some early ideas on which to build, but with the flexibility to change course as necessary. This is what lies behind the socio-technical principle of minimum critical specification.

A systemic view must also be taken. Change may initially only affect certain parts of the organization, but, through a series of ripples and storms, other effects will be felt elsewhere, often in subtle ways. It is easy to see that the formation of teams with degrees of autonomy in one part of the organization may affect the work and roles of support groups or supervisory staff in their area or in another. But more subtle systemic effects may also be experienced. One of the most interesting is that, when a company, for good reasons, wishes to test out a new way of working in one part of its organization, and it actually appears to be successful, resentment may be felt in other parts of the organization that have not been included. Although this, and other problems, may often be seen by companies as being ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’, they are merely a part of the change process and must be managed in the same way as all the other potential problems.

Finally, there is the potential problem of the law of diminishing returns. Even where a change has been well thought out and the implementation process has been successful, and even where the change is universally welcomed by the relevant stakeholders, there will often then be a sense of ‘What next?’. In other words, things have been improved to a certain extent so what will the company do next to help the stakeholders? Often it may be difficult to think of future developments, and so a sense of disenchantment and even boredom may set in. It is in part to prevent this happening that, following a first major change, long-term plans for incremental changes and continual improvement are put in place.

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CHAPTER

14 Survey of Virtual Teams in UK Industry (Written in collaboration with David Bourner)

In 2002 we carried out two postal surveys of UK industry to find out how extensively virtual teams are used and to solicit opinions about their implementation. The first survey (A) concerned the extent of use of virtual teamworking, and a questionnaire was sent out to a random sample of 300 companies in the top 500 in the manufacturing, finance, retail and technology sectors of the FAME (Financial Analysis Made Easy) database. The second survey (B) dealt with the potential utilization and benefits of virtual team working, and a different questionnaire was sent to a random sample of 300 companies drawn from the top 500 in the IT/Computing and Telecommunications sector of the FAME database. All questionnaires were addressed to the human resources manager.

The rationale behind the sampling strategy was based on case study and professional journal evidence. This shows that virtual team penetration is much greater amongst ICT companies, and is also much greater in larger companies within any sector.

The response rate was 11 per cent (34 out of 300) for survey A on extent of use and 9 per cent (28 out of 300) for survey B on utilization and benefits. These figures are in line with expectations for a ‘cold’ postal survey of this sort. The small numbers do mean, however, that results cannot be necessarily regarded as typical of the UK as a whole as there may be a bias in the sample due to their self-selection (that is, their willingness to respond). However, a cursory examination did not reveal the 62 returned survey companies as being markedly different to the 600 company survey base, other than in their willingness or interest to contribute.

RESULTS FROM QUESTIONNAIRE A: EXTENT OF USE OF VIRTUAL TEAM WORKING

As previously stated, the sample group comprised companies selected from the top 500 manufacturing, financial, retail and technology companies on the FAME database.

TEAM WORKING

Respondents were asked about the type of working (including teamworking) they used and their opinions of these methods (Tables 14.1–14.3).

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Table 14.1 Extent to which the respondents used the different types of working

Not at all To some extent To a large extent (%) (%) (%)

Independent working 12 63 25 Co-located teamworking – 21 79 Virtual team 17 58 25 Task force 25 50 25

Co-located team working was the most popular method of working with all companies using it at least to some extent. Virtual teamworking was used by this non-ICT sector to approximately the same extent as independent working. Task forces, by their nature, were the least used – as a rule, only in exceptional circumstances or projects.

Table 14.2 How the respondents rated their experiences of different working structures

Independent Co-located Virtual Task working working teams force

(%) (%) (%) (%)

Poor 4 – 8 4 Acceptable 8 – 17 12 Moderate 42 8 25 12 Good 33 67 25 42 Excellent 8 25 17 13 Not applicable 5 – 8 17

Co-located working was rated best in terms of effectiveness, with 92 per cent of respondents saying that it was good or excellent. Somewhat less than half of respondents rated virtual team effectiveness as good or excellent.

Table 14.3 Proportion of companies surveyed that operated different types of teamwork structures

Defined teams Formalized team Apply to virtual (%) structure (%) teams? (%)

Yes 100 75 29 No – 25 46 Not applicable – – 25

Every organization surveyed had defined teams, with 75 per cent of these teams operating within a formalized working structure. A minority of virtual teams (39 per cent – 29 per cent of 75 per cent) operated within a defined, formalized structure. For the ones that did, the following comments were received:

We operate a matrix management model, addressing specific accounts and third party channels. As these grow or diminish teams are flexed. (COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY)

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