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

Disaster Recovery and Hurricane Preparedness Planning – ‘Define Your Day After’

Tomorrow is the last day of Hurricane Preparedness Week 2008 and a recent Mason-Dixon Poll shows that 2 mild storm seasons have lulled many people into a false sense of security. Among the poll results emergency management officials find most alarming are these:

• 54% don’t feel vulnerable to a hurricane or related tornado or flooding,
• 56% have no family disaster plan,
• 67% have no hurricane survival kit,
• 85% have taken no steps to make their homes stronger since the last hurricane season,
• 13% said they might not or would not evacuate even if ordered to do so, leaving thousands of residents at grave risk in the path of any given storm.

And these statistics don’t even address what people have or have not done to prepare their businesses for the eventuality of a hurricane or other emergency.

Well, this year The Department of Homeland Security is urging small businesses to ‘Define Their Day After’ through new public service advertisements and their Ready.gov website. Read more

TAO Podcast (Mobile Work Tip) – Movement and Stretching

Phil discusses the need to be mindful about remembering to move yourself around when working out of the office, and gives a great website with some yoga stretches (mydailyyoga.com) you can do right at your desk.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:56 — 1.8MB)

The growth of telework and virtual teams in midmarket companies

This past week I was interviewed for an article in eWeek entitled Telework Migrates to the Midmarket. The reporter was asking me why I thought midmarket companies (which she defined as companies with 50 – 1000 employees) were starting to embrace more telework and virtual teamwork. While it has been my observation that companies of all sizes, not just midmarket companies, are embracing the concept of having their employees work from outside the office – the question made me think – why the increase specifically in companies of this size? I think there are 2 main reasons for this . . .

My initial, more obvious thought, is that it is largely due to the increase in easy-to-use, affordable technology that companies of any size can implement without the need of a large IT staff – such as web based collaboration tools, remote access to computers, and web meeting services. These subscription services allow companies access to all the tools they need to work from anywhere without the IT headaches for implementation. Even solo professionals can take advantage of these tools. Read more

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