Day: August 12, 2014

Virtual team members are scattered across the globe. A poor team leader is often responsible for diminishing co-ordination and productivity among the team members. As a result, you are left lurching in the middle and shelling out money to hire new members & firing previous ones. Poor management leads to project failures, shifting deadlines and poor service quality. Key reasons for the failure of the team are as follows: Lack of clarity – Even though you hired highly skilled professionals, virtual team members are plagued by differentiation. Individual members have their own way of working and a different definition of quality. They act like unguided souls who work hard based on presumptions. The end result is chaos. Insufficient information sharing – Virtual team members rely on tools to communicate and share information with each other. Inadequate training on the use of tools does no good to your company as the employees fail to exploit the potential of tools to share real-time information, thereby, causing lags. Clash of priorities – This highly skilled group of people give priorities to the work of their choice. Consequently, there is lack of co-ordination, missed deadlines and overall poor performance level of the team. A good manager is the one who recognizes these follies and devises strategic methods to resolve such matters. Let us briefly discuss the advantages of having a virtual team on-board before we head towards managing them. Advantages of having a virtual team Reduced cost – Virtual employees can be hired to do the same job at a much lesser salary as compared to your in-house staff. Moreover, administrative overheads are drastically cut down by negating office space and set-up. Even if you set up home-office for virtual employees, the cost is much lower than setting up the office. Centers of excellence– Highly skilled virtual employees are scattered across the globe. Every geographic location comes with its own set of expertise. Global integration– As and when business grows, the virtual team members form a team around themselves. This way, different teams around the globe work together to accomplish a common goal. Structural and demographic diversity – As opposed to hierarchical structure in a traditional organization, virtual teams are often unstructured as the team members belonging to different locations are reporting to different managers. Such diversity brings in varied feedback, work experience, nationality and networking opportunities. Managing a virtual team Classify the processes into task-oriented and socio-emotionalVirtual employees communicate with the help of technology unlike office employees who rely on face-to-face meetings. A task-oriented leadership approach is required to manage virtual employees as it is focused on the completion of particular tasks, which serves as a measure of their success and reliability. In addition to that, human personality evolves by repeating series of crisis and resolution. Pose your employees with challenges continuously to get the best result out of them. Build upon superior knowledge available remotelyEvery virtual employee working from a remote location has some or the other functional expertise. But the fact is that this expertise is not available to all the team members. Replicate the most desirable skill set across the team to improve overall productivity of your tasks through periodic trainings. Share superior knowledge with the team members so that they can evolve, use their existing knowledge to innovate and take a sense of pride in their work. Moreover, it is important that your employees learn with time or else they will have no reason to be loyal to your organization. Encourage self-leadership among team membersVirtual employees are deprived of social bonding with their colleagues. So, it is important to keep them engaged through interaction and information sharing via technology. They are unable to interact with their fellow team members face-to-face, negating the use of facial expressions and non-verbal cues. A team leader has to infuse leadership qualities in the team by asking them to actively share important information and take initiatives. It is essential that the team members are self-sufficient and rely less on the leader for managing their tasks. Focus your HR efforts not only on building virtual team leaders but leaders across the team. Arrange physical get-togethers sporadicallyFace-to-face get-together becomes indispensable when your goal is set-up for a permanent virtual team working on long-term basis. Such meetings improve communication, collaboration, understanding and cohesion among the group. The meetings don’t have to be formal always. Informal meetings like party, family get-together etc. help your team members to further strengthen their bond and generate larger returns for your company. The investment and time devoted in such get-togethers work in your favor considering the scale of your business. Informal/Formal video chatsThough e-mails and instant chat messengers are used for most of the communication needs, there are certain things that can be explained through visual interaction only. Encourage the use of video chat applications like Skype, iChat, OoVoo, AT&T Connect etc. to facilitate video chatting among the members. Video chats enable the team to interact through effective visual communication. They can pass visual cues through expression and see the person on the other side. Visual interaction makes your project more humane. Without any video communication, virtual team members are just like computers sitting at the two corners of the world. Cultivate a sense of global cultureVirtual employees are subject to different working environment like working alone from a remote place and interacting with culturally different people on a regular basis. The HR strategies need to include inter-cultural training as they are aligned towards fostering a global mindset among your virtual employees. A global mindset will prepare your employees to become diversity-friendly and be more flexible working with people belonging to a different time zone. If your business serves customers across the globe, then your employees need to realize so even if they are not directly dealing with them. Use screen sharing toolsConsidering the distance and lack of immediate expertise unavailable to employees, screen sharing technology has proven extremely helpful for virtual employees. The person on the other computer can take charge of what you are doing