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Working with virtual teams and telecommuters
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems

The information in this article is current as of May 9, 2001.

Research on workplace communication suggests that people who work more than 10 metres away from each other hardly ever communicate. That’s why big organizations function more like dozens of little separate organizations; if your office is one floor apart from a colleague, you had might as well be in different cities.

Some companies are realizing that if they are too big to fit all of their staff into a 10 metre square room, they should just accept the reality of geographically dispersed teams and figure out how to deal with them effectively. Nortel, for example, is making a major corporate move towards virtual teams and telecommuting. Their experiments with virtual teaming are coming up with valuable information on how to make these arrangements work.

Virtual teams and telecommuting both refer to coworkers who are physically separated from each other and who communicate with each other or with their managers by electronic means (telephone, email, etc.). They may meet occasionally or a few times a week (face-to-face interaction is called ‘meat time’ in the technology industry), but most of their contact is remote. Telecommuting generally describes staff who work in home offices but relate centrally to a head office, mostly with their managers. Virtual teams refer to groups working on the same project(s) who may be located anywhere, including different corporate offices of the same organization, but who rarely see each other physically.

Nonprofits can benefit from virtual teams and telecommuting in several ways:

They provide a way for agencies and community groups to collaborate more inexpensively, or more effectively.

They may permit a reduction in office space if people can work from home offices.

They enable staff to be closer to the communities they serve; for example, setting up small neighbourhood-based offices rather than working in one big head office.

They offer more flexibility to staff who are dealing with illness, disability, family responsibilities, or long commutes.

Evaluations of telecommuters are finding that when they are properly managed, productivity is about the same, but workers highly value the flexibility. Telecommuting is increasingly seen by companies as a job benefit that can reduce absenteeism and retain workers. However, formal telecommuting programs are not easy to set up. Managers must learn how to track productivity rather than hours spent in front of a desk, and must be able to provide emotional support and some feeling of team belonging. Workers must learn to work with less structure, and with home-based distractions. Some of the questions that should be dealt with are: the expected hours of work; who pays for the computer and extra phone lines at the workers’ homes; who is responsible for file security and backup; and who pays for liability insurance. It’s always a good idea to pilot these arrangements with a few motivated and productive staff. You can find more information and advice on telecommuting at the Canadian Telework Association.

Good Enough Information Systems is deeply interested in virtual teams, because we’re a completely virtual organization. We don’t have telecommuting because there is no head office and no employees. We recruit, hire, manage and/or partner with our consultants entirely virtually; in fact, very few of us have met in person. We also work with most of our clients remotely, which enables us to work with organizations across Canada without incurring travel expenses. Based on our experience as well as reviews of the literature on successful virtual teaming (see for example, Managing Virtual Teams: Practical Techniques for High-Technology Project Managers by Martha Haywood), we have a few suggestions and observations for agencies that want to improve their abilities to work virtually.

The following tips are aimed at agencies that want to collaborate on joint projects. In other words, you are working with people who don’t share the same boss, so it’s difficult to control coworkers’ behaviour directly. If you don’t set up good rules and processes at the beginning of a project, it’s often a setup for failure. At the end of this article I’ve included some of the policies we ask our consultants to follow when they work with us.

The most important difference between virtual teams and meatplace teams is that you can’t track people down and force them to answer your questions if you can’t find their offices. If you don’t set up clear expectations for returning emails and phone calls, you will not be able to respond effectively when a team member drops out of sight. One of the first signs of a project going off the rails is that people stop returning calls. And if you haven’t set up firm rules for communication, the whole project grinds to a halt, or you spend all your time leaving messages and begging for responses. It’s very unpleasant.

The second most important difference is the difficulty of forming emotional connections between team members without face-to-face contact. Articles on virtual teams recommend meeting together at the beginning of a project if possible. Nice if you can do it! If you can’t, use telephone conferencing as much as possible to give people a feel for each other. Voice quality has much higher bandwidth than plain text (meaning that it carries more information). We use a combination of emails, instant messaging, frequent teleconferences and phone calls, and internet-based document sharing through NetMeeting. Incidentally, the teleconference provider we recommended in an earlier article has closed down. We are now using Darome, which charges 15c/minute/person CDN for telecons.

Remember that some people have a much greater need for visual contact than others. They respond to facial and body cues more than voice quality. Virtual teaming is tougher for ‘visual people’, and they will need extra support to feel connected. On the other hand, people who rely mostly on verbal and vocal quality cues do very well with phone contact; that includes most blind people, who are on a more even footing with sighted colleagues when everyone uses the phone. In fact, I always try to use phone meetings if there’s a blind person involved.

The third major difference is the absolute necessity for clarity on objectives and timelines when working virtually. You just cannot get away with ambiguity and confusion because there are not enough casual contacts to ‘catch’ misunderstandings. Task lists and milestones are vital. If you can’t negotiate objectives and continue to revise them as you go along, you won’t be able to perform adequately on complex projects, though you may be able to fly by the seat of your pants on small simple jobs. There’s a lot of research on this topic, and unfortunately (because they are tiresome and time-consuming), project management processes are vital if you’re going to build a successful virtual team.

Finally, many team members will have difficulty adjusting to independent work. Lots of people need organizational structure, active management or nagging coworkers, and those people don’t do well on virtual teams. They may need to be taught core skills, such as returning messages quickly, delivering work on time, asking for clarification, and dealing with the reduction in social support. If not, they may drop out of the project team and cause serious delays. Keep an eye out for members who are having trouble, and make sure you help them out before they get too frustrated, or replace them before your project is in deep trouble. In some cases, these team members may work very well within their own organizations under the supervision of a hovering manager, but fall apart when working in a virtual team. (On the other hand, those of us who like working independently often have problems accepting authority, as you might have been able to tell from my last sentence!)

Here are some of the policies we ask our consultants to follow, to facilitate work in a virtual team. By reading them, you may be able to get a feel for the problems and issues that come up in a virtual environment.

Policies for Good Enough Information Systems consultants: (excerpts)

24 Hr Turnaround on Emails

We need a quick turnaround on emails between team members, with a maximum of one business day unless you have already told the team you will be unavailable. Your response can be very short; for example, "I’m interested in the project but too busy to look at it now; will respond with estimate on Friday before 5pm" or even, "I will be on holiday from May 14 to 21. This is an automatic mail response".
Keeping Timelines

You are encouraged to negotiate reasonable timelines for your project tasks before accepting the task, to ensure that you don’t get overwhelmed with work. However, once you have committed to a delivery date, we expect you to keep it. If you think you will not be able to meet a deadline, contact your project manager immediately to inform him/her and discuss options.
Clarifying Expectations and Requirements

The major cause for project failure is not understanding user requirements. This applies to all levels, including lack of clarity between project manager and consultants about individual project tasks. You are responsible to fully understand what your task is, and you need to ask enough questions of your project manager to feel secure about accepting a task and a time estimate.
Confidentiality and Policies Agreement

Clients need to be assured that we will treat information about their organizations with professionalism and discretion. Some clients will require us to sign Non Disclosure Agreements, and a few will ask that we not even reveal their names. For all of our clients and projects, we agree to be bound by our policies, which emphasize professional behavior, confidentiality and security. [Comment: This is an important issue for cross-agency projects that deal with sensitive client or agency information. There should be an agreement about what information is shared outside the team.]
Role Clarification and Communication

Every project has a project manager who is responsible for ensuring that the client’s needs are met on time and on budget. You need to know who is project manager for each task that you accept, because we often take different roles on different projects. Suggestions, revisions and changes to project tasks must be negotiated with the project manager, not with your other team members or directly with the client. Otherwise, we end up with chaos and confusion. This is not intended to discourage creativity, criticism and feedback. Team teleconferences can encourage brainstorming, questions, arguments and so on, but everyone needs to be clear about who is responsible for making the actual decisions. [Comment: Complex projects require project managers — someone who is responsible for delivering the objectives on time and within the resources assigned to the project. If you don’t have a project manager, revise your expectations of success downward.]
Conflict Resolution

Consulting is hard work, involving lots of creative conflict and tough decisions. Hurt feelings, miscommunications and frustration with team members are not uncommon when stress mounts. Working in a virtual team makes it even harder to re-connect — emails can look ruder than the sender intended, and we can’t go out for beers after an intense meeting. Managing and resolving team conflict is an essential part of the consulting world. We are all learning how to do it in a virtual environment, and mistakes will be made. We are absolutely committed to figuring out how to work together, how to create an enjoyable and stimulating work environment, and how to keep tracking and resolving our mistakes so we can improve. We want to create a culture where problems are seen as opportunities for improvement, and where we can give each other clear, detailed and supportive feedback. We welcome suggestions on how to deal with team problems as they come up, so if you do have thoughts on better virtual teaming techniques, please talk to Suzanne or Gillian. [Comment: Always make sure that team members have more than one external person to complain to, in case they are having conflicts with their direct project manager. Virtual teams, like any teams, can get self-destructive if there’s no way to legitimately bring in help as conflicts arise. You need at least one trusted person outside the immediate team who can react to issues and deal with bottlenecks. If you don’t provide this escape valve, unhappy team members may drop out or spread damaging gossip.]

Good luck!
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.

President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net