Understanding and improving a virtual team

A virtual team refers to a group of individuals who normally work interdependently with a common goal across time, and who are distributed geographically but under the same organization.  The interdependence of the activities is enabled by electronic communication mainly instant messaging, web conferencing and e-mail.  The basic characteristic of a virtual team is that its members are not always able to meet and thus rely on various interactive technologies out of necessity (Serrat, 2017).

Pros and cons of virtue teams

Advantages

In an environment that is more competitive, virtual teams are increasingly becoming an important response to the needed low-cost, high time-to-market ratio and better and quick solutions to challenging organization issues. The organization is able to pool different expertise and talents through elimination of barriers created by limited time and space.  Hence, the major advantage of having a virtual team is that it allows for more flexibility and obtaining talents in the organization for diverse functions, from different locations without restrictions related to geographical distances (Serrat, 2017).  When the organization is able to have such a pool of knowledge and expertise, it can leverage the team as a significant aspect of competitive advantage.   This is more important if an organization is expanding globally, where it can find suitable people to work in specific geographical locations. In such a case, an organization can seek the services of external consultants without having to incur traveling, accommodation and downtime expenses in distant locations (Guo et.al 2009).  Moreover, a firm can expand its potential labor market and thus, making it possible to employ and retain best employees irrespective of their physical location.   The team created can be dynamic which allows for high quality work deliverables specially workers can be placed into many, concurrent teams (Guo et.al 2009).

 The flexibility allowed by a virtual team means that individuals can work with no geographical barriers when problems arise.  The cost of operations is reduced since the time and expenses incurred in traveling are greatly reduced. Since the team members can comfortably work at home, a virtual team enables them to have a work life balance so that they can attend to their personal matters such as family activities.  This is more applicable to workers with disabilities who would not need to commute on daily basis to a working location (Serrat, 2017).

Disadvantages of a virtual team

A major drawback of having a virtual team is that the team members may be working in different time zones which can make communication difficult due to short contact time window. This can lead to delays in completion of tasks that require collaboration and working under the same work schedule. Moreover, the confusion in working time and related delays may result to personal conflicts and even frustrations among the members of the team.  There is also the possibility of communication misinterpretations and failures which presents a big risk for the team. The members of the team may come from varying cultural backgrounds with different languages which may hamper effective communication. The communication process may lack important aspects like body expression and verbal cues and the intended perception of a message will not be achieved (Cascio, 2000). This may lead to inefficiencies in terms of task assignment and work deliverables. Some people may get offended when they misinterpret the messages even when the sender of the messages wanted a different meaning than what the receiver understood.  The lack of verbal cues and misinterpretation can trigger conflicts and this may be more difficult since perception can relies heavily on such cues, which cannot be offered by virtual communication (Cascio, 2000).   

Another major drawback of virtual team is lack of personal interaction due feelings among members that they are isolated. A certain degree of social interaction with fellow workers and supervisors is necessary for nearly all jobs.  Where such interaction is absent, the team members may feel isolated in terms of essential communications and even contact with the fellow members of even decision makers. This does not augur well for their work.  Where communication is inefficient and personal interaction is impossible, it is difficult to develop trust in the virtual team (Cascio, 2000). Trust is a major ingredient in achieving the set goals of the organization since a person undertakes his or her tasks with a belief that others in the team will fulfill their respective obligations.  Hence, lack of trust makes the various measures adopted for ensuring successful working relations and arrangements are valueless. In addition, while virtual may lead to cost reduction, such cost efficiencies may at times be lost. In a normal working environment, costly equipments are concentrated in one place so that most of the workers can access them. Virtual team may require that such equipments be distributed in various locations or that every worker to have his or her own (Iverson & Drake, 2014). This can be quite costly and at the same time beat the purpose of the virtual team.  All the aforementioned aspects can lead to lack of morale for employees especially those who work best while close to other people. The virtual teams may not be effective for tasks that require constant supervisions and physical presence of managers for best results to be obtained.

Companies utilizing virtual teams

The virtual teams have been seen as savvy strategy for business over the recent past especially among the large multinational companies that have had many workers working remotely. Other firms in the domestic market have embraced the idea of virtual team as a strategy that will help in achieving their objectives. Some of the firms that utilize virtual teams include IBM, Yahoo, Best Buy, Aetna, and General electric, SAP, Con Edison of New York, Community Hope and NJ Inc. The most outstanding firms in relation to virtual teams are SAP, General Electric and IBM and seem to have succeeded in adopting this strategy.  For SAP, it has over 30,000 workers in 60 countries and collaboration for the virtual team has been important to its success (Lepsinger , 2015).  The firm has been able to strategically location itself in various Research and Development centers in countries like Israel, China and United States.  The establishment of the team involved training programs and a community that blended online learning, coaching sessions, briefings and even conference calls.  IBM has over 200,000 employees in different countries and a major problem that led to creation of virtual team was the management of time zones due to the sheer size (Lepsinger , 2015). The decisions to allow employees work in their respective residential areas and following their schedule was seen as the major strategy.  Software for virtual meeting to enable increased collaboration made it possible to manage the work.

 General Electric with over 90,000 people adopted a virtual classroom where employees were able to collaborate and thus obtain common goals through quizzes and e-learning (Lepsinger , 2015).  The other firms did not gain such success due to lack of good collaboration and effective virtual communication. Virtual team collaboration was enabled by effective communication by use of softwares that allowed for virtual learning, training, teleconferencing while interaction in a firm like General Electric was enhanced by virtual classrooms and quizzes. These made it possible to manage accountability, build trust and even form strong bonds among members (Lepsinger , 2015). Miscommunication was also another problem addressed by the introduction of such approaches.

Addressing the emerging challenges

Boosting the morale of virtual teams is a challenge for human resource managers, but this can be solved by addressing some issues affect employees like career development and enhancing their identity in the organization.  The virtual employees should be made to feel that they are valued like others and their contribution to the organization is understood and recognized.  Improving a sense of belonging among the virtual team can help in improving the employees’ morale especially when they are retained on the basis of their contribution (Iverson & Drake, 2014). In order to eliminate miscommunication, an organization should adopt effective electronic communication and other technologies that will enable collaboration among the virtual team members. This will allow members from varying functional areas and geographical locations have a standard of communication and collaboration that they can related to (Iverson & Drake, 2014). Many failures in virtual communication emanates from an illusion that the passage of intended information has been communicated.  Moreover, building trust is a major aspect that helps in solving challenges related to virtual teams.  Building of trust in virtual environment depends on the ability to accomplish tasks and deliver them as required and on time so as to achieve an interpersonal relationship.  The organization should seek virtual team members who will guarantee that they will truthfully discharge their obligations competently while observing integrity (Iverson & Drake, 2014).

Recommendations

Under the right management, virtual teams can perform better than the traditional teams but this requires addressing one major concern; a person not knowing what others are doing about in regard to a task or project (Ferrazzi, 2012).  The focus of management should be to manage and even make the most of potential benefits and at the same time reducing the disadvantages. This requires putting processes in place, less but effective communication and focusing any conflict towards the tasks at hand. The right processes should be such that the work control is done where coordination of task assigning, decision making and remedies for poor commitment among team members. Effective communication should only be used when needed and this requires avoiding the assumption that a lot of communication means everybody understands (Ferrazzi, 2012). The firm should ensure there is predictable and quality communication. For instance, rules could specify how quickly a person should respond to request or actions. The conflict arising from virtual teams may not necessary be bad since it can make people find better solutions. Otherwise, conflicts at times may escalate and even become destructive since in such a team there is no empathy. The organization should implement some social-bonding activities like having virtual coffee and exchanging professional information. Such activities can lead to more efficiency and even better results for the company (Ferrazzi, 2012).

References

Iverson, S. V., & Drake, J. (2014). The handbook of high‐performance virtual teams: A toolkit for collaborating across boundaries. Edited by Jill Nemiro, Michael Beyerlein, Lori Bradley, & Susan Beyerlein. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 26(2), 63-66.

 

Guo, Z., D'ambra, J., Turner, T., & Zhang, H. (2009). Improving the effectiveness of virtual teams: A comparison of video-conferencing and face-to-face communication in China. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 52(1), 1-16.

Lepsinger , R., (2015).3 Companies with High-Performing Virtual Teams. Retrieved from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-companies-high-performing-virtual-teams-rick-lepsinger

Ferrazzi, K. (2012). Virtual teams can outperform traditional teams. Harvard Business Review, 20.

Serrat, O. (2017). Managing virtual teams. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 619-625). Springer, Singapore.

 

Cascio, W. F. (2000). Managing a virtual workplace. The Academy of Management Executive, 14(3), 81-90.