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Even until a decade ago, only a handful of managers were dealing with virtual global teams. Today, it is rare for companies not to have teams dispersed across geographies and time zones. This virtual team strategy may have many advantages, but it presents its own set of challenges. How should managers organise these globally separated teams? How can they build trust when the team members don't meet face to face? More importantly, how can they turn distance and diversity into competitive advantages?
Make your team productive, engaged and available: Kuldeep Singh
Virtual working or telecommuting is going to be a major reality in the near future as companies expand their talent footprint globally. Also, research has shown that virtual teams have higher productivity than real teams. In fact, Michael Dell has mandated that by 2020 half of its workforce will work remotely at least part of the time. On the other extreme is the Yahoo! case when CEO Marissa Mayer announced a complete ban on working from home in late February 2013.
Nevertheless, remote working is here to stay due to its advantages like making organisations agile, attracting and retaining talent, providing work-life balance and saving money for the company by reducing cost on logistics and facility management. That said, not all employees or companies are suitable for virtual work.
Companies can provide many tools and technologies to make remote working easy but the real challenge lies in finding the right manager and employees who are fit for a remote working set up. Like employees who fill every other job, some workers are natural fits, while others seem to be the proverbial square pegs forced into round holes.
Telecommuting requires a few skills that are different from those required to working out of an office, even if the job responsibilities and requirements are exactly the same. While research has established that being present in office matters a lot when you consider career growth, the key challenge for the managers of a virtual team is to ensure that their team members are productive, well-engaged and available when they are needed.
Virtual teams will become as important as the Web itself to companies and hence, to be an effective remote manager, one needs to hone following important skills:
* Virtual collaboration: The ability to build collaborative work relationships among team members.
* Virtual empathy: The ability to build connections and nurture relationships with the remote team members virtually.
* Remote interactivity: The ability to create a real team ecosystem in a virtual set up which ensures members can exchange and seek information.
* The ability to work with minimal direction and supervision and build trust and promote self-leadership among virtual team members.
* The ability to ease interpersonal conflicts which can derail team work.
* The ability to manage knowledge sharing as the team members are geographically apart and knowledge created needs to be stored and made available when needed.
* The ability to communicate team goals, tasks, work processes and plans clearly.
* The ability to mentor team members.
Cultural sensitivity is a must-have for managers. Team members come on board from different geographies, which requires the manager to be aware of the unique cultural nuances of these varied locations.
KULDEEP SINGH
Senior director, HR, UST Global India
Set clear goals, give honest feedback: Mervyn Raphael
Globalisation has indeed made the world a smaller place. It is easier than ever for organisations to have a presence across geographies. Richard Branson on one occasion said that offices one day will be 'a thing of the past'. One of the new realities of this smaller world is that an ever increasing number of managers are faced with the prospects of managing remote teams. That said, not all managers find it easy to manage remote teams owing to reasons ranging from lack of physical proximity to divergent culture, climate and time zones.
Certainly leaders managing a remote team can use some help.
Here are the top four things to remember:
* Set clear expectations: The most important step towards managing remote teams successfully is ensuring that the expectations - in terms of goals, resources required and timelines - are agreed upon right at the outset by both the parties. This will help establish clearly the role of the local team members and that of the supporting managers. It is important to ensure a review process on a regular basis depending on the maturity of the team and the nature of operation the remotely managed office is engaged in.
* Know your team members: Invest time in knowing your team members. I mean really knowing them. Know their struggles, their successes, their strengths, their weaknesses, their aspirations, their constraints. To really know their team members, managers need to demonstrate active listening skills and empathy.
Once your team members know that you are genuinely interested in knowing them it will help create an atmosphere of trust and camaraderie that will help the team tide over tough times. Try and find time to speak to your team members individually with unfailing regularity.
* Give and seek feedback: The importance of feedback in a remote working scenario can hardly be over emphasised. Feedback needs to be balanced to be effective. A balanced feedback tells team members what they are doing right and also things that they are not doing well with clear suggestions on how to improve.
The essentials of a good feedback are the same whether you are in a real or virtual office. It needs to be fair, free and frank. Great managers give balanced feedback and also seek feedback on their own managerial skills and abilities. Great managers acknowledge that feedbacks work best when they are two-way conversation.
* Communicate, communicate, communicate: Great managers go to great lengths to ensure that they are being understood correctly, consistently and cogently. Indeed, most of the challenges related to managing remote teams revolve around communication - actually the lack of communication. Therefore, great managers ensure that everyone understands what needs to be done, why it needs to be done and by whom it needs to be done.
Even while managing remotely, a great manager manages expectations and outcomes. He will provide clarity and seek commitment from the team members while building ownership through coaching and mentoring.
MERVYN RAPHAEL
Managing director, People Business
