
Typically, virtual teams must meet their objectives with expense profiles that differ little from the profiles of co-located teams. They might receive some increment of resources in the form of access to remote communications facilities, and they might even be permitted a little more travel than co-located teams, but such minor advantages rarely meet the real need.
Teamwork, especially virtual teamwork, is only as effective as the strength and health of the relationships between team members can support. Building and maintaining strong, healthy relationships requires at least some face-to-face connection. By the standards of co-located teams, travel budgets that meet the needs of virtual teams can only be characterized as generous.
Rational travel strategy for virtual teams rests on four principles.
- Relationship is the foundation of high performance
- Teammates need not like each other, but they must share a desire for collaborative achievement, which requires the strong relationships that enable a forthright exchange of ideas. Building relationships from the beginning of an effort is the superior approach. With no history, and especially no past difficulty, members can focus on relationship building rather than relationship repair. Email, telephone, texting, and video do not suffice.
- Virtual culture can bridge differences
- Later in the effort, When at home, people tend to interpret
their experiences with each other
in terms of their home culturesafter people have returned home, they tend to interpret their ongoing experiences with each other in terms of their home cultures. What might be an innocent message in the sender's culture might be offensive in the recipient's culture, even when no offense is intended. But when the team has established its own virtual culture, and a strong relationship between sender and recipient is in place, such mistaken interpretations are less likely. - Problem solving under stress is best done face-to-face
- Teams often solve difficult problems together under the stress of deadlines and budgets. Unfortunately, the challenges of the virtual environment can make solutions especially elusive. When the pressures are high enough, bringing people together face-to-face is the lowest cost path to a solution.
- The value of travel is early delivery
- If high performance teams are more productive, then their contributions to organizational objectives are greater and arrive sooner than would those of lower-performance teams. If travel contributes to performance, then we must evaluate travel costs in terms of early delivery of superior results. Yet, we rarely compare the cost of travel to the value of results. Instead, when we determine the travel budgets of projects staffed by virtual teams, we compare the cost of travel for virtual teams to the cost of travel for co-located teams, or what is worse, to zero.
Before people can care deeply about their shared achievements, their shared relationships must be strong. A generous travel budget might not guarantee strong relationships, but a miserly travel budget almost certainly guarantees weak ones. Top
Next Issue
Is your organization a participant in one or more global teams? Are you the owner/sponsor of a global team? Are you managing a global team? Is everything going well, or at least as well as any project goes? Probably not. Many of the troubles people encounter are traceable to the obstacles global teams face when building working professional relationships from afar. Read 303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams to learn how to make your global and distributed teams sing. Order Now!
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Related articles
More articles on Virtual and Global Teams:
Virtual Brainstorming: II
- When virtual teams must brainstorm, they try to do so virtually. But brainstorming isn't just another
meeting. There's a real risk that virtual brainstorms might produce inadequate results. Here's Part
II of some suggestions for reducing the risk.
Disjoint Awareness: Analysis
- Breaking large problems into smaller parts can sometimes create a set of risks that make solving the
problem in pieces more difficult than solving it as a whole. But we can still profit from breaking the
problem into parts if we manage those risks.
Mastering Messaging for Pandemics: II
- When pandemics rage, face-to-face meetings are largely curtailed. Clarity in text messaging and email
therefore becomes more important. Some sources of confusion that might not be noticeable in speech can
cause real trouble in messaging.
Newly Virtual Politics: Meetings
- Pandemic or not, workplace politics marches on. But with the pandemic and the prevalence of formerly
co-located teams becoming more virtual, workplace politics takes a new form, especially clearly so in
meetings.
Remote Hires: Inquiry
- When knowledge workers join organizations as remote hires, they must learn what's expected of them and
how it fits with what everyone else is doing. This can be difficult when everyone is remote. A systematic
knowledge-based inquiry procedure can help.
See also Virtual and Global Teams and Virtual and Global Teams for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming March 19: On Lying by Omission
- Of the many devious strategies of workplace politics, deception is among the most commonly used. And perhaps the most commonly used tactic of deception is lying. Since getting caught in a lie can be costly, people try to lie without lying. Available here and by RSS on March 19.
And on March 26: Seven Ways to Support Word-of-Mouth About Your Content
- Whether you're making a presentation or writing an article or a book, making your material more memorable is a desirable objective. After the talk, or after the reader sets down your work, what you have to offer will be accessible only if the auditor or reader remembers something about it. Available here and by RSS on March 26.
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