• Introduction to Virtual Teams & their Lifecycle Stages (audio-visual)
• Launching the Project (audio-visual)
• Establishing Norms (audio-visual)
• Process Optimization (audio-visual)
• Finishing & Adjourning (audio-visual)

Supporting Materials (including Quick Notes)

• Available here

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Establishing Norms

In the second stage in the virtual team lifecycle, the team establishes norms. Because virtual teams have little informal interaction, this is another stage in which leader facilitation is crucial. In this stage, challenges include building trust without face-to-face interaction, creating team identity, setting work standards, and clarifying roles and expectations. These challenges and how to deal with them are listed below.

Issue: It is difficult in virtual teams to develop trust among members
Action step: Because virtual team trust is initially based on reliability, assign initial tasks that help team members demonstrate their reliability

Issues: The team must build identity, roles & expectations are unclear, and there are no standards for doing work and for quality of deliverables
Action step: As a team, create a team compact (guidelines for creating a team compact are available. During this step, your team will decide which collaboration technologies to use to support its work. Email, telephone conferencing, and web-conferencing (e.g., WebEx or LiveMeeting) are commonly employed by virtual teams; in case your team would like to review additional technologies, see examples.

See an audio-visual presentation (16 minutes) that provides a detailed coverage of issues and action steps related to this stage.

Proceed to Process Optimization.

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