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Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are a great way to bring together people with varying expertise who may be scattered across geography, or maybe separated by the times that they work, or maybe hard to bring together in physical meetings for other reasons.

You can use virtual teams for problem solving, quality assurance, product development, information sharing, and a variety of team-oriented activities - just like in the physical world. We also know that virtual teams can be more innovative than their physical counterparts. But there are some rules you need to follow.

Rule number one: There should be a clear purpose and focus. If you don't have this, even having virtual technology doesn't help you get the job done.

Rule number two: Unless all the participants have worked together before, you'll have to allow for a time when they get to know each other. That can be in a physical meeting or in a series of virtual ones. If you use virtual meetings for this, you will have to have more contacts than you might if you can have a physical meeting.

Rule number three: Participants on a virtual team need to be aware that there are different kinds of communication rules when communicating online. We know that people in online communication often are more brusque, and sometimes even rude, than they would be in face-to-face conversation. If team members are aware of this tendency early on they can watch it in themselves or be called on it by other members.

With those rules in mind, here are a couple of tools to use with your virtual teams.

Physical Meetings - On any kind of long-term project, physical meetings, especially in the early stages, are important to help the team work better.

Virtual meetings are ways to handle specific, narrowly focused issues quickly when folks are separated by geography.

Virtual conferences are effective ways to bring in an expert or to allow one team member to make a presentation to others without having to put them all in the same place.

You can also use the grouping, or nickname, or list-making feature of your email software to make your virtual teams effective. The idea here is that each member of the team sends any communication about the team project to all of the other members of the team. That can be done easily with today's email software.

In most of the virtual teams that I've worked with, the majority of the work has been done using the email facility, supplemented by the other means.

Note: This article originally appeared in 1999. At that time there wasn't much effective meeting technology available. In 2003 there is. What's still true, though, in 2003 is that basics of putting virtual teams together and managing them for results are still the same. They have more to do with how human beings interact than they do with technology.

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