Hi all,
It would be nice to share our experiences about virtual teamwork. What kind of virtual teams have you attended? What did you find challenging? What made it successful ?
Here at FMI our HRD- team is working both virtually and face-to-face. Some of our team members work from distance, so we are used to have our weekly team meetings via video-conference. In the very beginning, I found it a little bit challenging to speak clearly enough, listen carefully ( especially not speak at same time with others ;)...) and learn how to use the technology. But after a couple of meetings we were doing already quite nicely!
I think for example video-conference is a good way to keep in touch if it´s not possible to meet face- to- face. When communicating mostly via email / written form there can be sometimes misunderstandings when you are not able to hear the voice and see the gestures. I guess people may have different preferations when communicating with others- some of us prefere more face- to-face meetings and some of us find emails much more efficient way to keep in touch with others.
Thank you, Satu, for opening the discussion!
My experiences:
More or less everything since 1999 has been a virtual team to me, since I work mostly alone and remotely from my home town. It's not the distance, but the project management and team spirit that is key to success or failure. Regular meetings (no matter face-to-face or online) with concrete checks that project goals have been met, real deadlines, real project management, real project plans... these have made working from distance effective. '
On the contrary virtual teams that have not worked for me have either lacked clear objectives and the team has not been able to establish a feeling of "we all working together", but the work has eventually ceased or only one or two team members have actually done anything. In virtual team it's even easier to drop out from the team and avoid the tasks given!
My experiences:
More or less everything since 1999 has been a virtual team to me, since I work mostly alone and remotely from my home town. It's not the distance, but the project management and team spirit that is key to success or failure. Regular meetings (no matter face-to-face or online) with concrete checks that project goals have been met, real deadlines, real project management, real project plans... these have made working from distance effective. '
On the contrary virtual teams that have not worked for me have either lacked clear objectives and the team has not been able to establish a feeling of "we all working together", but the work has eventually ceased or only one or two team members have actually done anything. In virtual team it's even easier to drop out from the team and avoid the tasks given!
So here’s what I’ve found challenging so far:
One of the first things I faced as a team lead was communication barriers. I realized I should be very consistent in taking time to communicate with my distant team members. I feel I’m still struggling with it – there’s the busy life reality, schedules that doesn’t work for us and the media that I’m still not comfortable with. But these are just excuses of course. Definitely the communication requires more determination at the early stages of a project or a team life cycle.
Re Vesa about target setting: Common or shared goals have long known to be a determinant of a successful team. Its common sense of course but go to any social psychology literature or management literature and you’ll find the same. How come it’s so damn difficult? I think what makes it even more challenging in distance work is the restrictions in communication caused by the media. If your (project or other) team’s mission is to enhance meteorological learning, the targets are not easily defined yet alone communicated. And writing this now reminds me that the success of a distance work probably partly depends on what types of tasks should be done or what type of goals communicated.
So I suggest that the more indefinable the goals are, the more time should be spent on communication at the early stages. And this also applies to the variety of communication media.
This topic feels very timely to me right now. I had a multiple-day face-to-face team meeting this week that I think parts of which might have been more productive had they been virtual, and I have a virtual team meeting next week that I wish were face to face. I'll explain…
Team meetings of any type can at times be hard to manage from my perspective. It is very easy to (1) get off track by diving into spontaneously arising topics not get key work accomplished, (2) delve into details that might be better solved in reflection and by individuals, or (3) find yourself in deadlocking disagreements when conflicting goals or communication styles come into play. In some ways, I think virtual meetings might actually have an advantage in overcoming these problems.
Working in virtual teams, like teaching and studying via distance learning, can be challenging because some people find it hard to take virtual groups as serious as face-to-face ones. They may not prepare their work as well or just can’t avoid becoming distracted with other things in their immediate environment. Virtual team members must have better attention spans and commitment to the goals of the team. If they continually put the work of the virtual team second in importance to the one more immediate, it is bound to suffer.I have been in some teams where it is hard to even set a date or follow through on a date for a meeting--something more important always arises.
But virtual teams have an advantage precisely because they require more preparation and focus on sticking to agendas (same can be true for distance learning). Team leaders cannot “wing it” quite as easily unless the team is already well established. To work, virtual teams require all the qualities listed by Vesa in his response (and qualities that any team require) -- regularity of meetings, firm deadlines (an expectation that late input will be ignored, and late assignments will have consequences--such as being removed from the team), established responsibilities and tracking (Project Management), and good plans from the start. This is a lot to live up to, but it is required. When it works, with a dedicated group, the results can surprise everyone, especially those who think the only way to work is when bumping elbows with one another.
That said, I think it is particularly good when the virtual team members have met face to face at some point in their professional lives. We are humans, and therefore social creatures.When starting a new project, it is also good to have a face-to-face meeting if possible.
The COMET NWP team has had to do virtual meetings to create the new, operationally oriented NWP Training Series (formerly "course"). The kickoff meeting to finalize topics and establish training series, course, and lesson goals was done virtually after a survey of Science Operations Officers (SOOs, responsible for weather forecast office training) gave us plenty of topics to work with, and a list of SOOs to invite to the virtual kickoff. All we had were phones and GoToMeeting. The meeting itself and several follow-up meetings to set up goals and learning objectives for each lesson in the courses of the training series went pretty smoothly. We even discussed guidelines on what makes for a good presentation for the lessons. All this took place even without seeing the participants. What came after did not, however.
After a year and 1/2 of working through this process, we've learned a few things. One is to consistently stay on the participants as they transition from being meeting participants to subject matter experts (SMEs). Initially, we had a weekly conference call where people "could" participate if they were running into a problem or had questions about the content they were developing. Needless to say, there was very little participation in a voluntary call. We should have worked with them individually through virtual conferencing as they began to develop their lesson scripts. This would have helped them stay within agreed-upon goals and learning objectives. Things went pretty far afield from what we'd agreed to in some cases, which resulted in more work later.
We did not adhere to the original deadlines, nor did we follow up with people when they passed. There was a system to track projects set up which wound up being ignored because it was too difficult to work with our SMEs on lesson documents. We've since found Google Docs to be very good for document sharing (but it doesn't have very good project tracking, if any).
We'll be "sitting down" (virtually) with the participants in this first project to have a post-mortem. It's clear already what we'd like to change; we are looking forward to our meeting participants, subsequently SMEs, telling us what they think (hopefully in a nice way
) about ways in which the initial process can be improved from their perspective.
After a year and 1/2 of working through this process, we've learned a few things. One is to consistently stay on the participants as they transition from being meeting participants to subject matter experts (SMEs). Initially, we had a weekly conference call where people "could" participate if they were running into a problem or had questions about the content they were developing. Needless to say, there was very little participation in a voluntary call. We should have worked with them individually through virtual conferencing as they began to develop their lesson scripts. This would have helped them stay within agreed-upon goals and learning objectives. Things went pretty far afield from what we'd agreed to in some cases, which resulted in more work later.
We did not adhere to the original deadlines, nor did we follow up with people when they passed. There was a system to track projects set up which wound up being ignored because it was too difficult to work with our SMEs on lesson documents. We've since found Google Docs to be very good for document sharing (but it doesn't have very good project tracking, if any).
We'll be "sitting down" (virtually) with the participants in this first project to have a post-mortem. It's clear already what we'd like to change; we are looking forward to our meeting participants, subsequently SMEs, telling us what they think (hopefully in a nice way
) about ways in which the initial process can be improved from their perspective.