Trust in Virtual Teams

I recently came across a guest-post by Chris Bowler on Anywired.com titled Building Trust In a Virtual Team. I wanted to share it here because as we continue to develop our training materials and workshops I have noticed what I consider to be a recurring misconception among organizations attempting to transition to virtual teamwork. While conducting pre-workshop surveys or talking with clients it often surfaces that the biggest concern that many teams have is that technology is going to be the greatest challenge to working as a virtual team.

Yet, if you look at the results of almost any of the research into critical success factors for virtual teamwork you begin to see that activities like building trust and fostering informal communication play easily as large a role as technology in the success of your virtual team. But most organizations do not feel that they have to invest as much energy or attention in determining how they are going to approach these issues.

I thought that Mr. Bowler’s post was dead-on because he doesn’t talk around the issue: he says that trust is the biggest challenge, staight-up, and then he rolls up his sleeves and gives some real-world advice about how you can improve trust on your team.

Outsourcing IT systems and using software as a service (SaaS)

I was being interviewed by a reporter the other day for an article she was writing targeted at IT managers about best practices for managing and supporting teleworkers and remote offices. During our discussion she asked me if I had any advice for dealing with common stumbling blocks.  One of the points I suggested was – don’t think you have to setup all the technology in-house – consider using a variety of subscription services available for remote or mobile workers and virtual teams.

There was a time when implementing virtual teams or a telework program was a daunting task for any organization involving a lot of initial expenses and IT expertise.  One of the strategic advantages available to companies today are the wide variety of subscription services they can use to provide collaboration tools and flexibility to themselves and their employees quickly and without the initial expense of purchasing and setting up servers and sophisticated security systems. Read more