Make Your Team Stronger by Bridging 'Virtual Distance' - ' Expect Cultural Differences '
(
Page 2 of 2 )
Certainly, a team made up of members from, say, China and the United States should anticipate cultural differences. "It is important at some point to bring in a Chinese person to talk to the American members of the team and vice versa," Lojeski said.
"This is different than a liaison, because the Chinese person would be specifically looking to learn American values in terms of that project and team." This role could be rotated among different members of the team for long projects.
Social Distance. Face-to-face teams often will break down into formal and informal hierarchies based on the status of the people who are on the team. But in virtual teams, that tendency is much more pronounced.
A Java programmer, for instance, might be more likely to challenge the opinions of a vice president during a brainstorming session around a conference table than he or she would in e-mails or other virtual communication, especially if the programmer and the vice president had never met face-to-face.
These complex corporate relationships often leave workers to decide on their own how much they can trust other team members. One executive whom Lojeski surveyed said he didn't even know if he could assess whether he trusted someone or not without at least one in-person meeting.
Bill Hills, vice president of Life Sciences at SAIC, a consulting firm in McLean, Va., said virtual meetings always have a certain tension level when a high-ranking executive is present.
"As soon as the muckety-muck leaves, the conversation becomes more candid," he said. "No matter how much the executive asks people to be open and says there will be no reprisals, people are more wary on phone conferences because they can't see the person's body language."
The first thing team leaders need to appreciate is that team members who are higher up in the corporate food chain will be treated differently. "Leaders need to be aware of people who are in the out group, and they need to be trained to recognize those at high risk for status difference," Lojeski said. Those people might need training to learn to be more open when the situation calls for it.
"In all the companies I've been, I've never seen any training or guidance on how to run virtual meetings in order to address this," Hills said.
Social distance can be magnified by cultural values, as well. In India and some other Asian countries, for example, employees are generally discouraged from challenging a superior. In Japan it's virtually taboo to directly contradict any team member in public. "That can be a problem for Americans, who expect workers to be open and forthright," Lojeski said.
Attention/Contention. The more duties team members have outside the team, the more distant they feel from other team members. The workloads of team members should be considered before putting together virtual teams, and adjusted according to the importance of the teams. The only group in which this did not hold was for program managers, who gain experience and understanding from managing several different teams.
Team Size. As you'd expect, as teams grow in size, the virtual distance increases as well. Some teams in Lojeski's study had more than 100 members, far too many to maintain a close-knit focus. A good number of teams had 30 to 40 members. When teams become too large, Lojeski said, managers should break them into subsets to help maintain trust and hold off virtual distance.
Next Time: The other four factors that create virtual distance–and how to put them together to make teams more productive.
test
