Virtual Teams
November 17th, 2006[ Office Gossip ]
What’s below is verbatim from here…
Can absence make a team grow stronger? In 2002, NetAge teamed up with two business school professors to try to find out whether virtual teams really work. Harvard Business Review publishes the results this month as its Best Practice. We found that “far-flung” teams are more productive than their face-to-face counterparts if they keep three practices:
They exploit diversity. The team can’t just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.
They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality. By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.
They hold the team together. It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.