What: Article titled “In-house perspective: The challenge of a virtual team” from ALB Legal News
Posts To Which It Is Related: Leading In Face-To-Face Versus Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology
Bottom Line: The author, Lynne Saunder, talks about virtual team issues that she faced when she move to a new role as a legal counsel in which she had to run an international team. While most of the virtual team issues that Saunder talks about should be familiar to readers of this blog (e.g., importance of face-to-face contact for building relationships, how to motivate people from a distance), she also offers interesting ideas about the challenges created by technology, effective use of technology, and how to motivate your remote team members. For instance, while technology makes you more accessible, it also demands discipline so that you are not working all the time. Also, today’s technology has created an expectation for a quick response — this can lead to situations where legal advice may be given without having the full picture. For this reason, Saunder says, she was not keen on using instant messaging (IM) early on. But now, she is a big user of IM but she relies on it to do what it does best — indicating if someone is available and checking if that person is available for a call. In order to motivate her remote team colleagues, Saunder relies on developing them through training. She also relies on giving them a break by temporarily placing them in a desirable location. She says: “The important thing is finding new professional opportunities that help people develop their skills, or it can be as simple as giving them a break.”

What: Knowledge@Wharton article “Water Cooler Talk Keeps Organizational Culture Real“
Posts To Which It Is Related: Confessions of a Telecommuter, Leading In Face-To-Face Versus Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, Rethinking the Value of Virtual Worlds for Virtual Team Collaboration, The Leading Virtually Digest, May 16, 2008.
Bottom Line: In our past posts, we have talked about the loss of water cooler conversations in virtual teams. In this article, Professor Blake Ashforth talks about the importance of such conversations for organizational functioning. His thesis is that an organization’s success is linked to its smallest social units, the tribes who gather to have social conversations in the workplace. While the organization’s objectives matter to employees, they matter only in a distal sense. What matters more for their work motivation and satisfaction is their local contacts, the people they come in contact on a frequent basis (e.g., their boss and co-workers). Organizations need to figure out a way to make such local groups meaningful to their members and to connect such groups to the wider organization. Employees function better if they feel like they know others in their local group better. This article gives rise to the following ideas for leaders of virtual teams:

• Create opportunities for exchange of personal information. Set aside some time in telephone calls for exchanging personal information.
• Use social networking technology to develop social relationships. If members of your organization belong to virtual teams that span different companies, you should consider social networking technology that spans different companies since organization specific technologies (see below for examples of organization specific technologies) may be relevant for intra-organizational virtual teams only.
• Consider the use of a virtual world to create a virtual water cooler and facilitate social conversations among virtual team members. Read more about the use of virtual worlds for facilitating social conversations in our past post “Rethinking the Value of Virtual Worlds for Virtual Team Collaboration“.

What: PC World article “Social Networking Behind the Firewall“
Posts To Which It Is Related: Confessions of a Telecommuter, Leading In Face-To-Face Versus Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, The Leading Virtually Digest, May 16, 2008.
Bottom Line: Companies are deploying social networking technology within their firewalls to let their employees connect and collaborate with each other. The article talks about Microsoft’s TownSquare, IBM’s Beehive, Best Buy’s BlueShirt Nation, and DeLoitte’s D Street, all of which are homegrown technologies that try to mimic the features of popular social networking technologies such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook. The input provided by employees on Best Buy’s BlueShirt Nation have brought store employees closer to corporate employees and even prompted organizational change. As with other enterprise-level systems, social networking technology requires the support of a company’s leadership to spur adoption and succeed. Once the technology’s adoption reaches a critical point, subsequent adoption tends to become viral in nature.