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"Definition
of a team: A small number of people with complementary skills, who
are committed to a common purpose, common performance goals and a
common approach, for which they hold themselves mutually
accountable."
-
Katzenbach and Smith; The Wisdom of Teams, 1994
FOOD
FOR
THOUGHT: What
is a "virtual team"?
The term “virtual team” is
used to describe a set of people who are:
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a team, rather
than a group; |
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not co-located
within 30 meters of each other; and |
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predominantly using
collaboration tools to interact with each other, rather
than traveling. |
Some insist that a virtual
team's members must also represent different
job functions,
departments
or organizations
or even national cultures.
Although organizational and cultural diversity is very common,
especially because team members are physically dispersed, it is not
necessarily considered to be a defining property.
The 'virtual' in virtual
team refers not only to its operation
being enabled by computing and networking,
but also that its members operate as a team without being, as one
would expect of a team, physically together.
A virtual team differs from
a dispersed team because it has
acquired the skills and competencies to act as a team,
even though members are apart from one another. So a virtual team is a
more successful, effective and personally-satisfying development of a
dispersed team.
Global Virtual Team
A term
used by some to describe a virtual team that
exists across more than one country, thus emphasizing the
likelihood that its members are crossing organizational and cultural
boundaries in their work. This can also be true of virtual teams
working within one country.
Virtual work teams that are not
co-located but are wired together in such a way as to allow for
successful virtual collaboration.
Most of
us have had too little experience
interacting via computer and communication technologies in virtual
meeting environments to know how to manage the communication channels
before us. Further, many virtual meeting
technologies exist but some are still in their infancy and
may produce inefficient or non-intuitive messages with noise and
distortion. Our human filtering mechanisms are not very effective at
making sense of all of this...yet.
Consequently, distributed meeting participants may experience problems
of either too little or too much communication information to
effectively follow the meeting.
Research has identified nine common
challenges of meeting in the virtual world:
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It is harder to follow
a meeting process from a distance.
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People don't get feedback
when working over a distance.
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People forget who is at
a distributed meeting.
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It is harder to build a
team over a distance.
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Network connections are
unpredictable.
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It is tough to sort out
multiple communication channels.
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There is an art to using
audio and video channels in a distributed meeting.
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It is harder to converge
over a distance.
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Different time
virtual meetings are different than same time virtual meetings.
If you
are experiencing any of these challenges in your virtual team - you're
in luck. Researchers have identified a multitude of "best
practices" that can help to resolve each of these!
FINAL THOUGHT - The Benefits of Virtual Teams
Although virtual meetings pose some challenges - they can be very
productive. In addition, they can
save companies money by reducing
travel costs - and reducing travel can
reduce the stress placed on employees and their families.
On the flip side, virtual meetings that are
not well managed or do not have the
communication tools in place to
effectively support them, can be a waste of time and money.
There are powerful reasons for making peace with virtual teams; like
it or not, they are here to stay.
Geographically fragmented teams are a reality. Making them work for
your organization is the challenge. You will likely get poor
results if you manage a virtual team the same way you would a
co-located team. New rules and disciplines
must be adopted and learned along with the appropriate set of
electronic communication tools for virtual collaboration. Companies
and consortia that have mastered these rules and invested in the
infrastructure are now developing products
faster than they could in a co-located environment.
Janet
Stewart-Lussier
Member of the Canadian
Association of Professional Speakers
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