Want Your Virtual Teams to Deliver Results?

Make Sure They Have "People" Skills (2021年1月7日)

By Michael Leimbach, Ph.D.

We are at an interesting crossroad in history. Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with a decade-long trend of more dispersed work teams, created a critical challenge to team performance. The ability for teams to meet face-to-face is no longer the norm, let alone a possibility, for most.

Can virtual teams be as effective as more traditional co-located teams? Does the inability to interact together physically make high performance impossible?

In our experience, virtual teams have one key advantage over traditional teams: most virtual teams are more diverse than the typical co-located team and offer different perspectives and experiences to better innovate and find creative solutions to problems. On the flip side, these differences can be a liability if team members don’t appreciate them or can’t overcome the challenges of collaborating across the boundaries of time and space. If team members can’t communicate and work together smoothly, the team’s performance will be weaker than that of a traditional team. If they can, they will achieve superior performance.

According to our research, the most effective virtual teams share four “people-oriented” characteristics:

• Style Diversity. Team members appreciate and take advantage of differences in interpersonal style.
• Shared Norms. They have a clear set of ground rules for how people treat each other within the team.
• Mutual Support. They feel interdependent, and people feel supported. This creates trust, an essential factor in the ability to collaborate effectively.
• Communication Processes. They have a shared understanding of communication roles and develop communication practices that facilitate sharing information and resolving conflicts.

When managers make a special effort to ensure that virtual team members have these four skills, versus focusing only on task and technology concerns, they will see a higher payoff. With these capabilities as a foundation for working together, virtual teams can function as effectively, or even more effectively, than co-located teams, leveraging all the benefits of their valuable differences.

What kinds of communication problems have you experienced as a member or manager of a virtual team? Have you worked with a virtual team that was especially effective at collaborating to get things done? Let us know about your experiences.

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作者介绍

Michael Leimbach

Michael Leimbach博士，担任Wilson Learning全球研究和设计副总裁。Leimbach博士拥有超过25年的专业经验，带领团队进行诊断、学习和绩效提升等方面的研究和设计。他曾带领研究销售、领导力和组织有效性；并制定了Wilson Learning的影响力评估和投资回报模型。Leimbach博士曾为多家全球公司担任研究顾问，曾在ADHR专业杂志担任主辑，并曾在ISO技术委员会TC232担任领导角色 — 制定学习服务供应商的标准。他有四本合著书籍并发表了大量的专业文章，也经常在美国和全球会议中发表演讲。

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