Abstract
Most organizations now make use of virtual teams. Many of these virtual teams started out as physically co-located teams but with the need to reduce travel and related costs, audio and video technologies were introduced. However, the dynamics and management of virtual teams are different in almost every respect to co-located teams. The benefits and challenges of virtual teams are outlined, with particular reference to the effective management of language, cultural, time and location aspects of virtual teams and virtual meetings.
Keywords
A lesson from history
On 28 January 1986 the Challenger Shuttle launch ended in disaster as the booster rockets exploded. Seven astronauts died and America’s space technology reputation would take years to recover. On 27 January a virtual team meeting was held to discuss whether or not it was safe to launch the shuttle in cold weather. It broke all the rules of effective virtual meetings. For example, no one was sure who was an active participant in the various virtual meetings, no agenda had been agreed in advance and the papers for the meeting had been distributed by fax with the result that the sequence of pages of data were inconsistent across the meeting locations. The lack of management of this crucial virtual meeting was a major factor in the decision to launch (Vaughan, 1996). 1
At the present moment everyone seems to be writing about collaboration, offering advice on technology selection and implementation, and on building business cases for purchasing the technology. One of the primary justifications for the adoption of SharePoint is often ‘to enhance collaboration’ though very rarely has there been any systematic analysis of the extent to which employees are already collaborating successfully and whether the technology barriers are real or imagined. The same is true for the drive towards social businesses and social networking.
Implicit in nearly all the reports, publications, columns and blogs about collaboration is that there is a consistent business culture, employees are co-located and employees all speak, read and write a common language to a common standard.
A virtual team exists where one or more members of the team make some or all of their contributions from a different location and/or a different time zone and/or a different national culture than other members of the team. Virtual teams have not been created by information technology. Native Americans and the Chinese have communicated over long distances using coded smoke signals for several thousand years. The danger with IT is that it may end up highlighting inadequacies in the management of virtual teams, whilst not improving their effectiveness. The digital workplace vision is about providing location-independent access to information resources and to the skills and expertise of employees. A consequence of this is that working in effective virtual teams is going to be increasingly important.
In most organizations, teams have moved from being physically co-located to being virtual in an almost imperceptible way without any consideration of the different management challenges that will be involved, and without any training of team managers or team leaders. The objective of this article is to outline just some of the differences between physical and virtual meetings and suggest ways in which these can be addressed. The emphasis is on the operational aspects of virtual teams and virtual meetings. There is a very significant amount of research on these topics which is outside the scope of this article.
In the beginning
The research literature on virtual teams dates back to the initial development of Quality Circles in Japan in the mid-1960s, an approach that gathered considerable momentum in the motor industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Then in 1984, Paul Cashman and Irene Grief organized a workshop of people from various disciplines who shared an interest in how people work, with an eye to understanding how technology could support them. They coined the term ‘computer-supported cooperative work’ to describe this common interest, now more usually referred to as CSCW.
The early history of CSCW has been outlined by Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft), one of the acknowledged leaders in CSCW research and implementation. 2 Even today the CSCW community is a very strong one, with an annual conference organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery. The title of the group has now been expanded to Computer-Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing. 3
In many sectors of industry virtual team working has been practised for many years. Scientific research is an excellent example, where teams will be made up of researchers in universities and in companies in multiple countries. This practice continues to spread with the adoption of open innovation approaches. In scientific endeavour in particular English is very widely used and understood which significantly reduces this particular challenge in virtual team management (Hardy and Affentranger, 2013; Schuhmacher et al., 2013). 4,5
Virtual teams – benefits and challenges
Although the current language of business speaks of ‘collaboration’ it does not speak of ‘virtual collaboration’ but of ‘virtual teams’. This is useful because not all teams work in a collaborative way with a common cause. A team can be defined as a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems, and who manage their relationship across organizational boundaries. A team therefore has a unity of purpose, a social structure, and its members share a common responsibility for outcomes which is not necessarily a common cause. The work that has been carried out on collaborative personas by IBM Research makes a notable contribution to defining the different modes of team work (Matthews et al., 2011). 6
Probably the most comprehensive survey of virtual team adoption currently available was undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in late 2009. This survey 7 was restricted in scope to European organizations. The findings are as valid in 2014 as they were in 2009 given that virtual teams have been in operation for at least three decades longer than intranets. Another large scale survey of 600 multinational companies 8 was carried out in early 2010 by RW 3 Culture Wizard and the results match the EIU survey very closely.
The consensus that emerges from these two surveys about success factors for managing virtual teams
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is: set clear, achievable goals; ensure team members meet each other face-to-face at least once; select the right team members; take great care over the selection of team leaders; create a common sense of ownership of a project or an objective; have an agreed code of practice for the conduct of meetings.
Building a virtual team takes considerable care and effort. The considerations of language, location, time and culture have to be taken into account in not only the selection of the staff concerned but also in setting up and managing each meeting. There may be a key member of the virtual team who does not have good spoken language skills and it may be necessary to bring in an interpreter who themselves may not have the security clearance to be participating in the meeting.
Adding someone to the team may be required but removing someone could be very difficult. In a physical meeting situation a quiet word to a manager may be effective but in a virtual team that call has to be made by phone, and the person who is asked to leave may feel that not enough has been done to enable them to contribute to the meeting. The newcomer may also change the dynamics and levels of trust in the team.
The word TEAM provides a useful mnemonic for virtual teams:
Virtual teams and virtual meetings
The challenges of managing these are considerable but an even greater challenge is managing the team between meetings. There may well be no direct managerial control of the members of a virtual team, just a trust that each member will accomplish the tasks they have agreed to before the next team meeting. It is often only at the next meeting that failures to accomplish the tasks become evident, and this is usually because of local priorities taking precedence over team priorities.
The most common reason for a lack of progress is that individual virtual team members do not report to the same manager. They will each be very anxious to play their part in a meeting but on reporting back to their individual managers they may well find that the work they have committed to accomplish for the team is not a high priority for the manager. This may be especially the case in larger multinational organizations where local priorities override corporate initiatives.
The three dimensions of virtual teams
Virtual teams have three dimensions to their operation: national and organizational cultures (which include language); time; location.
These need to be taken into account at all times in the planning, execution and review of a virtual meeting. A simple ‘3D’ graphic pinned to a desktop can be a valuable mnemonic so that every decision about the management of a virtual team explicitly takes all three of these dimensions into account.
In all three dimensions an intranet can play a very important role in supporting virtual teams. Having weather information for all office locations on the intranet home page not only provides an initial neutral subject for conversations as the meeting connections are set up but also indicates potential problems for attendance arising from exceptional weather situations. Pictures of offices, both external and internal, also give a sense of location and culture.
Language
Most multinational companies adopt English as a corporate language for corporate communications, but certainly companies outside of the USA are made aware every day that this is a guideline and not a command. This is especially the case in Europe where it is difficult to travel more than 500 miles from a city centre without entering a country with a different language. In some areas of the world, notably Asia, using English as a language for managerial communication makes a lot of sense as learning languages such as Thai is a very considerable challenge. The evidence from the Digital Workplace Trends report, 2012 9 is that overall 10 per cent of organizations have language and cultural issues in collaborative work. The percentage increases with the scale of the organization, and nearly 75 per cent of companies with more than 50,000 employees reported that they experienced these issues to some extent.
In meetings with attendees from different countries it is often easier for them to understand English spoken as a second (or even third) language than English spoken by a native speaker because of the use of idioms and inadvertently complex sentence constructions. An important point and often overlooked, is that native speakers of English need to allow time between sentences to give others a chance to ‘translate’ concepts (rather than words) into their own language.
Whatever language is agreed for the meeting has to be adopted for all discussions. It is very disconcerting when some participants have side conversations in a different language. This is why a protocol or code of conduct for virtual team meetings is so important to develop and implement.
When planning virtual team meetings it is important to understand that there are four elements of language skills:
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the ability to speak; the ability to understand what is being said; the ability to write; the ability to read.
Individual team members will have different levels of skill in each of these four areas, and making an assumption to the contrary could lead to major problems with understanding and with decision making. When speaking to team members with a different linguistic background it can be useful to be aware of some of the subtle problems of conversation that arise (Beyene et al., 2014). 11
These include: some members of the team may feel that well-meant questions about their families or social interests are not appropriate topics; the use of an adversarial position to challenge a statement may be seen as being disrespectful in some cultures; talking at the same time as another speaker, which may be adopted as a means of encouraging the team member but could also be construed as rudeness; the use of indirect language, especially irony, sarcasm and metaphor, which may be very difficult for some team members to interpret.
This raises the question about the complexity of what might seem on the surface to be a very clear business language that everyone understands. Managers in the UK are adept at using irony to say the total opposite of what they mean. 12 With these and other language-related issues it is not possible to lay down a ‘correct’ approach but team members and, in particular, the team manager needs to be aware of these issues and be ready to modify their approach accordingly.
Time
Just some of the challenges of time in virtual meetings include: different working weeks (e.g. in the Middle East); different times to start and end the working day; different approaches to ‘lunch time’; different vacation periods; public holidays – national and regional; religious holidays (many vary in date each year); daylight saving time adjustments; different date formats (is 10/04/2014 10th April or 4th October?).
Some of the variations are quite subtle. For example, in France when a public holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday, it is common practice to ‘make the bridge’ (faire le pont) by taking off the Friday or Monday. It often comes as a surprise to US-based or US-owned companies that colleagues in Europe have much longer holiday periods and that the main vacation period for Scandinavian countries is not the same as for France, for example. There could be periods when for three months in the middle of the year it is very difficult to find dates for meetings. For any organization with virtual teams the intranet should be an authoritative source of information on these date and time issues, but finding a mutually convenient day and time requires good diary management through team calendars and presence indicators. 13
We all want to manage our own diaries and feel uncomfortable when someone calls a meeting at an unsuitable time without prior consultation. Even if we can actually participate in the meeting we may do so in a less than constructive way. Even a small change in time, say from 09.00 to 08.30 could be very difficult for people commuting by public transport to accommodate easily.
It is quite common for people to blank out periods of time when they need to work on a report or just want time to think. They may be willing to take part in a virtual meeting if they are confident that the meeting will be productive. Just relying on a shared corporate calendar can easily result in not being able to find a mutually convenient time, and then forcing a meeting time out of desperation. Virtual teams need very good channels of communication and very high levels of trust within the team. People may then be willing to set up a meeting at a time that is perhaps inconvenient to them in the wider interests of the team and the company, but this position takes time to evolve and the trust can easily be broken, never to be given again.
Location
The concept of location is also complex. Members of the virtual team could be on different floors of the same building, in different buildings, in different countries and of course not even in a building at all but in a train, plane or hotel dining room. With audio or Skype video conferences it might not be obvious where the attendees are actually sitting. The location may have an impact on ambient noise levels, on whether the attendee can be overheard by colleagues or strangers, and on whether it is possible for the attendee to write notes of the meeting. This mobile location component is increasingly important as mobile technology enables people to be away from their offices on a more extended basis.
Even a small company operating on a regional basis may want to include one or more of its employees with others in a virtual meeting. It is important to understand that even having one person phoning in to what otherwise would be a regular physical meeting will change the dynamics of the meeting. This is especially the case when the person leading the meeting tries to do so from a remote location, or even on vacation. This is because another aspect of location is the distribution effect. If the majority of the participants are in one location then they will be a dominant force in the discussion, especially if the leader of the meeting is also present at that location. They will also have the benefit of being able to see the body language of their colleagues and to time their contributions to the discussion.
It is not uncommon for meetings in which most of the participants are in the same room to forget that there are others taking part by telephone or Skype. It can be useful to tie a balloon on to the telephone or webcam to remind team members that there are other participants.
Treating team members as individuals
Not only may job titles and roles differ across an organization but so does the level of authority to make decisions and commit the organization to a course of action. Does a Senior Vice-President in the USA outrank a Divisional Director in the UK? A virtual meeting of ‘Marketing Managers’ across the world may end up with some members of the team having no authority to take action without reference to their manager.
Social conventions also need to be recognized. With Japanese companies, junior managers in a meeting will wait for the senior manager present to take a position, and the Chinese ethos is not to criticize in an open meeting. It is also not uncommon for people in some cultures to say ‘Yes’ when in fact they are not supporting the decision but are saying that they understand the issue and will refer it back to a more senior manager. Another aspect of social convention is how team members wish to be addressed. This is not just a question of working out the family and given names of employees from countries such as China but also how the names (e.g. Xiaojin Zhu) should be pronounced. Initially some members of the team may wished to be addressed as ‘Mr’ or ‘Dr’.
Audio and web conferences
Probably the two dominant technologies for virtual teams are audio conferencing (perhaps with a web channel to use for PowerPoint slides and other graphics) and video conferencing. It is still surprising how few organizations recognize that a group of people clustered around a speaker phone is not adequate for a virtual team meeting. Audio stations are very inexpensive but are rarely available, so participants tend to shout to make sure they can be heard. This is regarded as offensive by many so they will decide not to participate.
With audio conferencing it is not what is said that is important, but what is not said. It is easy for participants to use instant messaging, social media or even email to conduct side-channel conversations with others in a way that would not be possible in a physical meeting. ‘I’m going to say that we cannot meet the deadline. You and I know we can so don’t contradict me and we’ll both be heroes’ might be a typical back-channel instruction! The lack of body language also means that there is no indication that everyone is listening and understanding to the same level. This takes us back to language issues. A momentary frown by someone at a physical meeting may cause the speaker to clarify a point, or even ask if the person has a question or comment. This is not possible over a telephone call.
Many companies insist that each participant takes part using their PC or individual speaker phone so that it is easier for all concerned to note who is in a meeting. Applications such as Go-To-Meeting will show which member of the team is speaking, and this is very useful when people forget to introduce themselves.
There are now many web conferencing applications and it can take a while to understand how to use the facilities provided. There may be an icon that participants can use to indicate they wish to speak, but that may not be immediately obvious and the participant may not be sure what the indication is to the leader of the meeting. It is important to trial out a web conferencing application ahead of an initial meeting, or when a new member joins the team. A sound understanding of bandwidth and availability issues is very important, and the IT teams around the world need to be aware of the conferencing requirements for their locations.
Video conferences
Video conferencing does not always overcome the ‘human moment’ issues. Telepresence equipment is coming down in price but still requires high bandwidth network connections that may be difficult to set up in some countries. There may just be one camera on top of the video monitor that is being used by perhaps a dozen people sitting around a table. It is quite difficult to look at the camera and the monitor screen at the same time, and as with audio and web conferencing, prior practice sessions are very important. These sessions will also help team members to know more about their colleagues and to get used to the way that they speak before the team starts to work together on an important project.
Meeting duration
Taking part in a virtual meeting is challenging physically, intellectually and emotionally. It may just be possible to run a physical team for three hours with a short break, if only because participants know they can leave the room briefly and then return without missing a great deal. A five-minute break in a 180 minute meeting is only around 3 per cent of the meeting time. The same break in a one hour virtual meeting is 8 per cent of the meeting!
A virtual meeting that takes longer than 60 minutes is unlikely to be successful. This requires that the meeting is carefully timed without team members feeling that it has been stage-managed. There still has to be enough time for a constructive discussion and an agreed conclusion so almost certainly the agenda will have fewer items and the team leader needs to have a Plan B when going in to the meeting as to how a possible over-run will be managed.
Back channels
Organizations now have a wide range of support applications for meetings and projects, but these may not be in common to all the members of a virtual team. Email will be very important for virtual teams. Social media have a role to play but usually there is no audit trail and it is not clear what the distribution is of some social media. No one likes coming into a virtual team meeting to find that side discussions have been taking place on email that they are not aware of. Often problems arise that have nothing to do with cultural differences but with, for example, a lack of common communications protocols (not the inadvertent exclusion of participants in ‘group’ lists and the misinterpretation of common terms).
Certainly, when used appropriately, wikis, blogs, project spaces and instant messaging can improve the flow of information and documentation but may not improve levels of understanding, commitment and knowledge sharing. The interpersonal interactivity in a virtual meeting complements what can be achieved through largely asynchronous collaboration applications. Seeing the wider use of social media as a way of being able to cut right back on the complexity and cost of virtual team meetings is a false economy, and the impact of this approach may not become evident until a competitor reacts more quickly to a business opportunity.
Where social media can be very effective is in building team sites where not only can meeting information and documents be stored and accessed but team members can contribute profiles of their expertise and experience, and perhaps a video guide to their office and the areas that they will use for virtual team meetings. However, social media also use social forms of language and this can be a barrier to clear communication.
Feedback from virtual team members
When members of a team are working in the same location feedback about a meeting is easy to make, perhaps over lunch in the company restaurant. This is not possible with virtual teams, and therefore much more attention needs to be paid to making sure that there are effective feedback channels, both through line-reporting but also through the personnel and training departments.
The core issues to check with team members include: How were they brought into the team? What were the initial impressions of the team membership? What are their views on team relationships? How well defined and supported are the processes? Were their training needs identified and met? Were the applications used appropriate? How well they think the team has performed? How they will approach participating in a virtual team in the future?
Training in virtual team participation
In view of the increasing importance of virtual teams, companies should be providing training in how to manage virtual teams (Dore and Kelly, 2011). 14 Team leaders in particular will need to gain some additional skills.
These include: understanding the skills and experience that team members need to have to be effective members of a virtual team; maintaining close working relationships with the managers of team members to ensure they are aware of the organization and office environment in which team members are operating; taking additional time to prepare for a meeting so that, for example, all team members have the documents they need several days in advance; being adept at using conferencing and social media applications to help the team achieve objectives; being able to motivate team members that they have not met, and may not have chosen to be a member of the team; being ready to call team members by name to contribute, remembering which team members may not have spoken for some time; accepting that it is very difficult to concentrate on leading a virtual team meeting and make notes of the discussions and actions.
A team leader who is excellent in managing physical meetings may not be equally as proficient when managing virtual team meetings. If leading or even participating in virtual teams is a core activity then their performance should be included in annual performance appraisals. Some companies have built a certification process into virtual team participation so that employees (and managers) initially build up expertise in single country/same time zone virtual meetings and then progress to managing complex multinational and multicultural teams in due course.
Dealing with problem participants
There are a number of fairly common problems that arise in virtual meetings, such as participants who will not stop talking and others who are unwilling to make a contribution. Virtual team managers need to have solutions ready to deploy. It takes only one participant in a virtual team meeting to become a problem for the meeting to be remembered for what went wrong rather than the outcomes.
An approach that I have developed is based on the Mr Men personas developed by Roger Hargreaves, such as Mr Happy and Mr Tickle. These are familiar to people of all ages and from many different countries. It may be easier to talk about Mr Non-Stop and Mrs Quiet than the names of colleagues who exhibit these characteristics and involve the team in deciding how best to address the challenges they pose. However, it is important to note that the images are copyright and should not be used in training sessions.
In the case of Mrs Quiet it is clearly the role of the team leader to know who has spoken on a particular topic. The question to Mrs Quiet, however, should not be whether they wanted to say anything but to know the person well enough to be able to say ‘Mrs Quiet, you worked on the Darwin project last year. Is there anything we could learn from that project?’ 15
Whatever the approach, virtual team managers need to have solutions ready to deploy. It takes only one participant in a virtual team meeting to become a problem for the future value of the team to be put at risk.
Summary
There is no doubt that virtual teams can be a very effective way of bringing together the most appropriate set of skills and experience in order to meet business objectives without the costs and logistical problems of having a team of employees come together around the same table on a regular basis. However, there are also some very significant challenges that organizations need to be aware of and take active steps to manage in a pro-active way.
There are five critical success factors: Virtual teams should have very clear objectives so that it is possible to set the investment in the team against the outcome and also that team members bring appropriate skills, expertise and authority to take action. Without good team meetings a virtual team is very unlikely to achieve its objectives and so particular care should be taken in developing guidelines for virtual meetings and for facilitating feedback. Team dynamics of virtual teams can be quite fragile, often depending on a very high level of trust in people that team members may not have met before. Introducing a new team member into an existing team may mean starting the process of building trust all over again. People will have different levels of competence in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing in English even if the notional corporate language of the organization is English, and these levels of competence may be pushed to the limit and beyond when working in a global team. Every member of a virtual team should feel that they have gained from their participation and the experience is useful to their local situation and their personal career development.