Leading Virtually

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland:

• Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another;
• If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone;
• Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting;
  
• Participants can share applications; and
• Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

Continue reading ‘Wonderland: A Tool for Online Collaboration’ »

Popularity: 6% [?]

What: This past week, there continued to be a number of articles in regional newspapers about companies who are considering or trying out telecommuting. Check out a few from Michigan, Virginia, and Connecticut. There are plenty more available with a search.
Posts to which it is related: Journal article cited in the Digest on June 13, Leading in Face to Face Versus Virtual Teams.
Bottom line: Telecommuting is a hot topic. Very basic articles continue to show up in the popular press, saying that people are struggling with different pressures and thinking of telecommuting as a solution. However, most articles aren’t going in depth enough to help workers or managers understand the issues surrounding telecommuting. Sounds like great fodder for a full fledged Leading Virtually post.

What: This isn’t an article per se, but an opinion piece on WalletPop about the limits of working when not at work.
Posts to which it is related: The Leading Virtually Digest from June 20.
Bottom line: This piece raises the question of whether people should be compensated in some way when they have to check email (e.g., on a Blackberry) constantly. It seems to be increasingly expected that people are accessible any time, any place for work related issues. The bigger issue might be how people can manage work and non-work aspects of life when technology and norms are blurring the boundary between the two.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Recently, the Leading Virtually team had its first live meeting since we began blogging roughly 8 months ago. The entire team convened for the first time, and I had the honor of meeting Betsy, who I have been working with for months! Surinder was my professor at Binghamton University but we had not seen each other for about 5 months before this meeting took place. This face to face meeting has given me a new perspective on the advantages a virtual team can gain from a face to face meeting, even after working virtually for a period of time. These advantages fall mainly in the realm of team building:

• Strengthening of bonds among team members
• Creation of a similiar experience to build comfort among virtual team members
• Reinforcement of the importance of one’s work-related roles and their implications on “real” people and other team members

Meeting in the real world obviously has many benefits for a virtual team; however, what exactly are the advantages of these face to face meetings? After our face to face meeting, I noticed a strengthening of the bond amongst all the team members. Betsy became more than just a voice via Skype or a person who I collaborate with via email - she became a real person, a friend. I felt more of a connection with her than I had just through the work we have done together virtually. In other words, seeing Betsy immediately strengthened by bond with her. Seeing Surinder also strengthened the bond I had with him as we were able to talk about things as friends in person rather than virtually. As hard as it is for me to explain, the real life meeting gave our team an advantage in that we became closer as people, which will make it easier to work together in the future.

    The meeting also created a special experience for us that we now all share in common.  We had experienced many virtual meetings and work sessions, but this meeting was different and therefore kind of a stand-out event.  At the end of the meeting, I gave Betsy a hug as she left, something I had hesitated to do when I first arrived at the meeting because I was unsure if it was appropriate. After the meeting, I felt more comfortable with her and this simple form of social communication - a hug - became a symbol of that new found comfort within our team. An important aspect of our meeting is that we discussed things other than just our site; we also spoke about our personal lives. Thinking back, this face to face meeting has served as an “ice breaker” for future meetings we will conduct virtually by making us more comfortable with one another.

    Another advantage our face to face meeting has was that it reinforced the importance of each of our relative roles within the team. My deadlines now no longer affect a voice on Skype or a person writing email - they now affect my friends and colleagues. I feel that my tasks are much more important to complete because if I do not I will be letting down people I know. The implications of this is important for virtual teams. By creating bonds and raising the comfort level amongst team members through a face to face meeting, productivity in a virtual team may actually increase. Virtual team members will feel that their work has real life implications on real people that they know and connect with.

    In the past, we have found that most teams that work virtually initially meet face to face first before migrating to a virtual team platform. This serves a similiar purpose as it has for our team - to build trust and relationships among the various team members before beginning to work virtually. Although our team went against standard practice and met in person after a significant period of time working virtually, we received the same benefits as teams that meet at the beginning of their formation. I may even venture to say that our virtual meetings helped make the three of us more comfortable and laid back when we met for our face to face meeting and there was some benefit of “breaking the ice” virtually before meeting face to face.

    I highly recommend that distributed teams, virtual teams, telecommuters, etc. make time out to have a face to face meeting with the team they are going to be working with early on in the project. Sometimes this is simply not feasible; however, the members of the team should strive to meet face to face at least once during the project’s lifecycle as the benefits for team formation and relationship building are great. Betsy has discussed another advantage of our face to face meeting - the transfer of trust - which you can read about in her post here.

Continue reading ‘The Advantages of Face to Face Meetings for Virtual Teams’ »

Popularity: 67% [?]

Email is one of the most used technologies in virtual teams. This week’s digest focuses on email, for which I noticed an increased focus in the media. The increased focus may be due to large technology companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., coming together about a week ago to fight information overload - a problem to which email makes a significant contribution.

What: New York Times article about how the onslaught of email is hurting productivity and steps that companies are taking to deal with it.
Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology
Bottom Line: According to RescueTime, a company that studies computer habits, a typical information worker who sits at a computer all day uses the e-mail and instant messaging programs more than 50 and 77 times a day and checks out web sites 40 times a day. Evidence suggests that technology tools that have improved productivity can be counterproductive if overused. At Intel, for instance, employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions reported being more productive and creative as a result. About 650 billion dollars are reportedly lost in productivity every year in the U.S. due to interruptions. A big chunk of this loss arises from the time needed to recycle back to one’s work. Intel and other companies are trying to figure out ways to deal with email’s negative impact on productivity. Some solutions that they are trying include the following.

• Encouraging workers to (a) check e-mail messages less frequently, (b) send group messages more judiciously, and (c) not letting the constant inflow of emails and the requests they include to shake up to-do lists.
• Google introduced an experimental feature called as E-Mail Addict for its email service; this feature lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

What: Week-long coverage on NPR about the email age.
Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, Email Etiquette: Is the Thank You Message Simply a Thank You?
Bottom Line: Along with benefits such as speed, global reach, and mobility, email has brought a host of problems, such as work overload, legal troubles, loss of productivity, and loss of social contact. This coverage informs us about all these problems and the solutions many are adopting in order to deal with them. When you visit the specific topics covered, you will be able to access the podcasts of the coverage on radio. I listened to most of the coverage this week on radio when driving my daughter to school in the morning.  I recommend it very highly.

What: NY Times article about problems with email delivery.
Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, Email Etiquette: Is the Thank You Message Simply a Thank You?
Bottom Line: We tend to assume that our email will be delivered to its intended recipient. However, email can be miscarried due to which it may not reach its destination. While the basic email technology has a provision to send back a message about delivery failure, this message, oftentimes, does not reach us. Consequently, we are often left wondering (and end up making wrong assumptions about) why the intended recipient has not responded to our email. Two businesses, ReadNotify of Australia and MsgTag of New Zealand, provide delivery confirmation services. ReadNotify also tells you how long your message was viewed. Besides raising issues about intrusion into our lives, this feature also tells spammers who reads their emails. Obviously, they are going to spam that person even more!

Popularity: 14% [?]

There are three members of the Leading Virtually team who are currently the most active core. Of the three of us, I know Surinder well (he was my teacher and research collaborator when I was in graduate school). But I met Angelo for the first time in person last week. We have been working together for about 8 months without ever having met face to face. It was not surprising to find out in person that he’s as nice and sharp as he seemed in our virtual collaboration. But I realized when we met that I started to trust him as a collaborator as soon as we began to work together - there was essentially no period of time where I was sizing him up as part of the group. Interestingly, I realized this the moment I looked at his face and didn’t recognize him, though I recognized his voice and had a history of interaction in my memory. This so rarely happens, it caused a sort of jolt of realization.

How had I come to trust Angelo so immediately? Although it wasn’t conscious, I think that there was some transfer of trust. Surinder demonstrated clear signs of trusting Angelo (e.g., he asked him to be part of the group) and I trust Surinder, so through some non-conscious transitive process, I trusted Angelo also. In some ways this flies in the face of virtual team collaboration, since much of the focus is on how to build trust among team members. Research and practical suggestions assume it is harder to build trust in virtual teams, or that building trust happens with a slightly different mechanism than in face to face teams. Most research and recomendations for virtual team collaboration assumes a team of geographically dispersed people that really don’t know each other. Yet there is some connection between all the people in order for them to be assembled into one team. Does the connection happen at the higher level - higher managers connecting and recommending team members? Considering this process and its ramifications for trust might be very useful for people in organizations who want to utilize virtual teams. Imagine if trust in virtual teams could be developed much faster, allowing the team to work on their task or project in a more effective way, sooner in the team lifecycle.

Reputation and connections could be a crucial way to speed up the process of virtual team members learning to trust one another. If we have the technology to share documents, we have the technology to create social networks that are task-relevant. Some organizations have sophisticated information about employees on their intranet. In some of these, workers can list some basic elements of the resume - experience, skills, and interests. Much like LinkedIn or Facebook, organizations might also want to make visible a person’s connections to allow “third-party certification” from the colleagues one already knows and trusts.

Even if these social networking tools aren’t in place at an organization, virtual team leaders should be able to get a little creative in order to develop trust among members. We often make recommendations for the initial social interactions a virtual team should have to begin the trust and cohesion process. Perhaps trust could be built even faster if the team were to play a sort of Six Degrees of Separation using colleagues. See how many of the team members have a mutual contact within only a few degrees of separation. If team members give a little information about how they have interacted with the mutual contact (i.e., “we worked on the X project together in 2004 and still have coffee when I’m at headquarters” or “we were in 5 classes together during college”), trust will develop more quickly through this transfer of trust. Perhaps you as team leader suggest that team members contact their mutual colleagues to get even more confidence in one another.

Another idea is to ask team members to come to an early meeting with some kind of feedback or recommendation from others in the organization. For example, maybe you ask each team member to contact three colleagues, and ask each contact to provide one strength or skill they perceive about the focal person. Each team member then comes to the group meeting with three skills that others in the organization can vouch for, and they specifically name the source of that feedback. Again, if the contacts they draw from have a reputation, that trust might transfer to the group.

Research has been conducted on trust in several academic fields, including explicit discussion about the several sources of trust. However, it doesn’t seem that transfer of trust, or indirect sources of trust, has been researched in the context of virtual team collaboration. It would be useful to research the reasons why transfer of trust or reputation happens, and whether that has a significant impact on team outcomes. We welcome comments from our readers about your own experiences with transfer of trust. What is your experience with trust-building in virtual teams? Have you found that “third party certification” of a new colleague helps to build trust in virtual teams? Does having a strong reputation help others trust new colleagues?

Other Leading Virtually posts related to this:
Leading in Face to Face Versus Virtual Teams, Manipulate Perceptions to Improve Virtual Team Performance, Building Trust in Virtual Teams.

Popularity: 18% [?]

What: Wall Street Journal article (also available at Yahoo Finance!) about embarrassing moments during virtual meetings.
Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology
Bottom Line: Be mindful of the embarrassment that you may create for yourself if you don’t learn about and manage the technology (e.g., web meetings, video-conferencing, telephone-conferencing) that you are using for your virtual meetings. This article gives various examples of embarrassing moments caused when improper settings on technology led to a spillover of one’s private life  into the virtual world. Tips that you can follow to avoid such moments: (1) Set up connections and adjust sound levels and camera angles at least 15 minutes prior to a meeting; (2) Disable instant messaging and disruptive telephone settings; (3) Dress appropriately and be mindful of casual behavior; (4) Avoid eating, drinking, and gum-chewing.

What: Journal article titled “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences.
Citation: Gajendran, R. S., & Harrison, D. A. (2007). The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: Meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), 1524-1541.
Posts to which it is related: Leading in Face-to-Face versus Virtual teams, Recruiting for Virtual Collaboration and Virtual Teams
Bottom Line: A meta-analysis of 46 studies in natural settings involving 12,883 employees supports telecommuting, something that many companies and employees are considering due to rising fuel prices. The study found that telecommuting had small but mainly beneficial effects on proximal outcomes, such as perceived autonomy and work–family conflict (this went down with telecommuting). Telecommuting also had beneficial effects on more distal outcomes, such as job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and role stress. Also, high-intensity telecommuting (more than 2.5 days a week) accentuated telecommuting’s beneficial effects on work–family conflict but harmed relationships with coworkers. There was no detrimental effect of low-intensity telecommuting (less than 2.5 days a week) on the quality of workplace relationships.

What: NetworkWorld article about workers in the U.S. being unable to telecommute.
Posts to which it is related: Leading in Face-to-Face versus Virtual teams, Recruiting for Virtual Collaboration and Virtual Teams
Bottom Line: According to recent surveys, most U.S. workers are unable to telecommute even though gas prices are inching higher every day. Major reason: management resistance to telework. One way to overcome this is to encourage managers to telework and learn about telework’s benefits first hand. The article points to two tools, Telework Exchange’s Online Eligibility Gizmo and Telework Value Calculators, that help workers determine their eligibility to telecommute and make their case for telework to management.

Popularity: 17% [?]

For those who are interested in virtual team collaboration, the concept of teamwork is crucial. But rarely is “teamwork” actually defined. Just as the adage goes, we know it when we see it, but we may have trouble explicitly saying what makes for good teamwork. This week, Surinder sent me an academic journal article by Martin Hoegl and Hans Georg Gemuenden that has great practical application for defining what good collaboration or teamwork consists of. The authors call their concept “teamwork quality”, and define it in terms of 6 facets. They are:

1. Communication
2. Coordination
3. Balance of member contributions
4. Mutual support
5. Effort
6. Cohesion
   

The authors found evidence that teamwork quality is related both to team performance (defined by quality and efficiency) and personal success of team members (defined by satisfaction and learning).

This post, based on that article, has two pieces. First, I will briefly define and describe each facet of teamwork quality. This should be useful for people in the field to assess the quality of their virtual teamwork. Second, I will discuss some ways to foster teamwork quality when the team is virtual, something the authors of the article don’t specifically discuss. Please note that the term “teamwork quality” in this article does not include the nature of the team’s task or the quality of interactions with others outside the team — it is only about the processes within a team.

Continue reading ‘Assessing the Quality of Collaboration in Virtual Teams’ »

Popularity: 26% [?]

As more companies are considering the option of allowing their employees to telecommute (see the recent flurry of news about telecommuting), there is an increasing need to understand how leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face teams. In many cases, people have challenged the idea that leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face situations. I believe that leadership in virtual teams is different in at least two key ways:

1. In order to achieve the same level of effectiveness as in face-to-face teams, virtual team leadership takes a lot more effort.
   
   1. Relationship building requires effort.
   2. More mechanisms are needed to foster teamwork.
      
2. In virtual teams, there is a greater level of shared leadership.
   1. Members are equals.
   2. Build ownership.
      

I elaborate on these points below.

The extra effort in leading a virtual team arises partly from the need to build relationships. Because of the difficulty in coordinating synchronous (same-time) meetings, we end up relying a lot on email communication. The problem with email is that it tends to be task oriented. We tend to get to the task right away and the social conversation that is so critical for building relationships doesn’t happen. The leader of a virtual team has to work on building relationships in a virtual team starting at the very outset of a virtual team’s life. The leader of a face-to-face team does not have to do much by the way of relationship building because members of a face-to-face team may know each other from before or they often have a shared context (e.g., same company, same campus, same weather, same city, similar values, similar expectations, projects they may have worked on together in the past, etc.) which facilitates communication. When people who share a context get together, they have something other than the immediate task that gets social conversation going among them. The leader of a virtual team, on the other hand, has to find or create a shared context that enables team members to see that they are similar in some important aspects to others in their team. A feeling of similarity to another individual spawns feelings of liking that individual and gets social conversation going. If the leader is unable to find a shared context, then that leader may have to build familiarity among team members; familiarity with others is also known to lead to liking them. Building familiarity or a feeling of perceived similarity (or both) can be done using ice-breaker exercises and by the leader taking the time to learn about other members.

Click the link below to read the rest of this article.

Continue reading ‘Leading In Face-to-Face Versus Virtual Teams’ »

Popularity: 100% [?]

What: Forbes.com article about doing business in geographically dispersed virtual teams.
Posts to which it is related: Implicit Communication and Culture: What it means for leading virtual teams; Culture Matters in Virtual Teams.
Bottom Line: The author has a consulting business that helps companies manage IT-focused virtual teams that are globally dispersed.  He points out that there is a lot of buzz about the benefits of virtual teams, but that those benefits might not be as easy to achieve as it sometimes seems.  He points out that cross-cultural virtual team management requires skills not many people have learned or practiced.

What: A flurry of articles have come out recently about telecommuting (see an AFP article, an Entrepreneur.com daily update, a Reuters article, and a USA Today article)
Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, Virtual Teams - Beneficial or Detrimental?
Bottom Line: With gas prices rising painfully, everyone seems to be talking about telecommuting as an increasingly strong possibility for many workers in the US.  Telecommuting also might help to alleviate time wasted in traffic or on a commute.  One important fact - only about 25% of the US workforce have a job that lends itself to telecommuting.  Also important, several articles raise some of the potential problems with telecommuting, though it seems to be fashionable to suggest it as a solution to gas prices.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Email has become part of our everyday communication both in the office and at home. Correspondence that use to take place via the phone or in person are now being done virtually via email or webmail. For instance, a businessman may send an email to his colleague that sits just a few desks away to alert him of the latest developments in the office when once he might have just made contact in person. Because of the unique nature of email contact and the prevalence of email in our everyday communication, a new set of challenges have arisen when it comes to the rules of email etiquette. These rules are much different from those that govern other forms of contact and communication. Although people have been using email for many years, it is still not always clear what the rules of contact are.

One such rule is about saying “thank you” via email. Ambiguity in the rules of saying thank you was recently brought to my attention via an email exchange I had with a colleague who contacted Surinder for assistance with an IT-related problem. Surinder copied me on the email and told my colleague that I would be a good source for this information. I wrote back with a lengthy reply with some tips and advice for my colleague. He never took the time to simply thank Surinder or me, which I felt was inappropriate. However, others disagreed, arguing that my colleague may have felt it would have been a waste of Inbox space to send another email contact just to say thanks. This made me wonder: when is it appropriate to send a thank you via email? I would like to discuss some rules behind the email thank you message and when sending a thank you message via email is appropriate. I would also like to discuss the other roles that a thank you email can play. I think that the thank you email message is vital to effective email communication and is good etiquette when it comes to electronic communications; however, senders of a thank you email should make optimal use of the communication to make it more than a waste of space.

There are many instances when a thank you message should be sent. This is often overlooked during our busy schedule; however, not saying thank you can leave a substantial negative impression on team members. The example I noted above about my colleague serves as the perfect example of when a thank you message is appropriate and not just a waste of space. I spent time writing my reply to his question and a simple thank you was in order. Because of my colleague’s lack of etiquette in this communication, I am hesitant to go out of my way for him in the future. In situations where someone has taken the time to respond to your special request, it is important to reply with a thank you message. A good rule of thumb that you can use is to ask yourself whether or not you would expect to be thanked if you were the one providing the information. Another thing to consider is whether you would thank the person if you were receiving the information face-to-face or via phone. Sending a thank you message to a colleague is also appropriate if you do significant amount of work with that colleague but you don’t see her/him often. In these days of distributed work, saying a thank you may simply be another opportunity for you to build your relationship with a remote colleague.

On the other hand, there are times when a thank you message may be seen as Inbox filler and may even make the receiver angry. For instance, if you know the person you are dealing with is very busy and prefers brief email contact (you may see this in the form of one line emails you receive from this person), it would be appropriate to say thank you in advance along with your request. In fact, you may be helping yourself by putting a little pressure on this person to follow up on your request!

A thank you email message can also serve multiple purposes that have less to do with email etiquette and are more practical in nature. In today’s world of spam mail and imperfect email spam filters, legitimate email often gets blocked by an email host’s spam filter or gets lost in the spam folder on the recipient’s computer. I have often not received important emails because Outlook decided that they were spam mail. In other words, email senders can not be 100% sure if their email reached the recipient as intended. Therefore, a simple “Thank You” reply to an email can serve as more than just a form of email etiquette or wasteful contact; it can be an important way of confirming the receipt of critical or time sensitive material. A thank you message can be also be used to move a project or a set of tasks forward. When you receive somebody’s work, you can thank that person to not only acknowledge the work done but also to indicate what the next steps are (e.g., I will review your work and integrate it with the rest of the proposal) and to inform the sender about her/his next task (e.g., I look forward to reviewing the next part that you will be submitting next week). In other words, the thank you email can be used as a “springboard” for the next step in a series of communications between two people. It reinforces a time line for you and your colleague and sets expectations for what is to do be done next. Thus, if utilized effectively, a thank you message can become an important coordination message for your team.

It is important for us to keep in mind that email communication is prone to miscommunication. Lack of courtesy and etiquette in email communication can create feelings of negativity and resentment in a team. It can reduce morale if team members do not feel that their work or input is appreciated. At the same time, a simple ‘thank you’ email message can serve practical purposes for effective project management if used correctly. There are some instances in which you can excuse yourself from sending a thank you email. If you have substantial face-to-face contact with the person, communicate with the sender regularly in other ways, and if the issue is not a major issue, feel free to not say thank you via email. However, you should be conscious of simply putting away an email before considering saying thank you. It is important to put yourself into the other person’s shoes and asking yourself if you expect to be thanked for what you have communicated. And, if possible, make your thank you message more than a simple thank you message by using it as a tool for moving your team and its project forward.

Continue reading to see a “cheat sheet” with a summary of this post for a handy reference in writing thank you emails!

Continue reading ‘Email Etiquette: Is The ‘Thank You’ Message Simply a Thank You?’ »

Popularity: 96% [?]