Managing a virtual team can be a lot of stress. Different time zones, different cultures and staff feeling that out of sight equals out of mind adds up to a dysfunctional environment. It doesn’t need to be that way. A virtual team can empower your organisation and here are some pointers.
In a blog post in Forbes last year, Sebastian Reiche, professor at IESE Business School, set out the ten tips to managing virtual teams. The post is well worth a read and points towards the importance of communications, team dynamics and good management practice irrespective of the location of the team. Check it out at http://www.forbes.com/sites/iese/2013/06/20/managing-virtual-teams-ten-tips/.
A recent report by the US Census Bureau noted that there are 13.4 million people, or 9.4% of US workers, employed on the basis of telecommuting at least 1 day per week from home in 2010. Professor Reiche’s tips are becoming more important to more managers by the day as we see that this is a 4.4 million increase in telecommuters from 13 years ago. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324539404578342503214110478
Down at the bottom of Prof Reiche’s is the kicker from my perspective, Managing Expectations. Although the article chooses to focus on the management of the employees expectations, this relationship is bidirectional. The business has an expectation of the staff that work for it. The only way to do this is through transparency.
In order to achieve this transparency there is a 1-2-3 that employers need to do:
1. Proceduralise the role
Everyone needs to know what they have to do, whether it is the quarterback, the bus driver or the telecommuter. If you are part of a joint enterprise goals need to be aligned. A definitive set of procedures need to be in place for the team. They facilitate a common understanding.
In the case of service management, escalation points, service level agreements, major incident management processes and configuration management databases give the staff the commonality that is lost when there isn’t a water cooler to lean up against of a Thursday morning.
2. Make them live
Staid documents die on the shelf/document store you leave them in. The procedure for dog grooming in an ICT environment isn’t going to get much use. Nor is the procedure for opening up the office in the morning. If it’s not relevant, don’t have it on the books. Tasks that are working well organically do not need procedures; where procedures are needed is to guide staff through uncertain tasks.
When you have a procedure, give it to a member of staff to own it. Make it part of their quarterly or annual review that they update it, publish it and present it. It can be used as a training exercise for new staff or as a means of building a subject matter expert from the ground up. This is a loss of control and it may not go in the direction that you would envisage; but the manager’s role is to guide and not to dictate.
The manager’s other lever when making a procedure live, is the toolset. Modern SaaS solutions make a shared understanding easier. A mobile or virtual team can check out a KanBan board over a webcam. A task list from a project management tool such as Smartsheet.
3. Ditch the process
Don’t be scared to drop a process, procedure or toolset. Everything has it’s time, everything has it’s place. When a toolset becomes tired and no longer fit for purpose get rid of it. Processes eventually get in the way. We all know companies where the word process is synonymous with bureaucracy and not training.
Align your Key Performance Indicators with your processes and when they stop being important change both. If you don’t measure it, nothing will be done is the adage for KPI management. The inverse is also true, if nothing is being done, stop measuring it. If there is an outcry, you can always reinstate it.
Nothing will replace the one to one interaction of being across a desk from your colleague, but there are ways of compensating.
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