Realities of Virtual teams

This article was published in the SAPPHIRE newsletter in 1999.  

Technology and globalisation have resulted in the creation of an environment where teams communicate and collaborate virtually. Managers today, are no longer bound by the constraints of time and distance; they are free to assemble the best talent and resources irrespective of where they find it. Virtual teams – is it just a temporary fad or a new way of doing business? Is it all technology and computers or does it entail much more?  

Virtual teams are classified depending on time and place - same time, same place (like face to face meetings); same time, different place (such as an audio conference or video conference); different time, same place (such as using a chat room or a shared file on a network); different time, different place (such as exchange of e-mail and voice mail messages).

Virtual teams face a lot of hard realities. For instance, they have to struggle through boring and non-productive videoconferences in which the images lag behind the audio to the point of distraction. Many a times an e-mail or voice mail message is sent in an emotional moment and is misinterpreted by the recipient. Moreover, significant differences in time zones often make virtual team meetings inconvenient for some team members.

The preference in some cultures to consider the individual first and the teams later, which may make a person who has grown up in a collectivistic society, feel uncomfortable with the independence of team-mates is an often overlooked problem. As these teams have participants from different parts of the company, different countries and radically different cultures, managers ought to devise ways to ensure smooth functioning of the team to complete the project at hand.

Thus, the role of HRM becomes much more vital in the effective functioning of virtual teams. Management of these teams requires a whole new set of skills and strategies. HR policies must support working virtually that integrate work methods, organizational cultures, technologies and goals. Systems need to be integrated and aligned in order to recognize, support, and reward those working in and leading virtual teams.

While designing a virtual team, the designer must have a clear strategy for matching technology to the task. The needs for social presence, information richness, and permanence must be considered. Other factors, such as time constraints, the experience levels of team members, and the availability of technology, also need to be addressed. The most important dimension is that virtual team members must develop and possess an additional set of competencies, which go beyond complementing the skills for working in traditional teams.

In an environment with little or no face-to-face contact or feedback, the biggest binding factor or "glue" that holds virtual teams is the trust. Developing trust is a critical activity early in the life of virtual teams. A virtual team’s trust radius needs to be larger than a traditional team’s. Trust depends on three factors: performance and competence, integrity, and concern for the well being of others. These factors apply across cultures though interpreted differently in different cultures.

Often, virtual team members complain of the fear that they will be overlooked for promotions as they lose visual and verbal proximity with their superiors. Changes need to be made in the existing organisational reward and recognition systems that favour individual and functional work, so that those virtual team members who frequently operate in a cross-functional and/or cross organisational environment are catered to. In a real environment, the reward structure can encompass both effort and results. Since effort is very difficult to discern in a virtual environment, purely result based reward structure is the transition being hinted at by virtual teams.

All these issues throw up a new problem - are virtual teams really virtual? Virtual teams can't exist in isolation that is an organisation needs to have real teams to accompany them. The members in the real teams need to feel and understand that the operation of virtual teams and that its end goals are aligned with the organisational objectives and are in effect, the same as theirs. Also, virtual teams need a few face-to-face meetings at the beginning of the team's life and subsequently, when necessary.