How can distributed teams better handle the challenges of being virtual teammates: task management, communication and a-synchronicity complications—in addition to mastering the basics of great teamwork when working across distance and time?
We sponsored research into this topic to first better understand how virtual teams differ from co-located teams, and second, to learn what is known to influence performance. The researchers’ findings are also echoed in an excellent article from MIT Sloan Management Review.
The first discovery was that there is a continuum of “virtual-ness:” while we tend to assume that virtual teams never meet each other face-to-face and co-located teams spend much on their time in each others’ presence, there are many variations between these two extremes—making it important to both recognize the impacts (bad and potentially good) distance and diversity can have, and what is known to drive success all along the continuum.
Challenge: the disadvantages of distance
This range of distance—from being in the next seat, to a different floor in the same building, to a different country in a different time zone—is more impactful than we might think. While we’d like to believe that computer-mediated communication (CMC) would negate the need for physical proximity, the Allen Curve* holds true even now. As the MIT article points out, even being a floor away dampens communication frequency and interpersonal bond building**.
Even greater distances, then, makes virtual teams highly dependent on computer-mediated communication technologies and susceptible to their shortcomings. Add the hurdles of time zone coordination, cultural, language and other forms of diversity, and it’s easy to see the myriad of challenges of effectively communicating with a dispersed team.
The lack of physical proximity and easy access to each other also handicaps the development of social cohesion and trust building.
These challenges can be overcome, though, with explicit and deliberate attention to the two types of best practices. The MIT Sloan article lays out two categories of critical ‘processes’ needed to help coordinate work and help build bonds that enable effective communication: task-related processes that encourage full participation and contribution, and socio-emotional processes that build team cohesion. Not only do the presence of these processes correlate to the performance of virtual teams, but their research found “that virtual teams with such processes can outperform their co-located counterparts, and that was true even for co-located teams with the same high levels of those processes.”
The more we understand and address the very real challenges virtual teams face, the more we overcome those inherent challenges and position both dispersed and co-located teams for success.
*According to Wikipedia: In communication theory, the Allen curve is a graphical representation that reveals the exponential drop in frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases. It was discovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas J. Allen in the late 1970s.
**For example, without the richness or context that being with someone provides—getting cues from their body language or attentiveness, or hearing tone and warmth in their voice, or being aware of that person’s situation—it can be difficult to interpret or transfer information with clarity, or interpret feedback or silence, especially when the information is ambiguous.