BY PATRICIA MAY
Your team leader is coming online as you go to bed. She’ll conference with two of her team members who are in your time zone, but feel more productive at night. Across the Pacific, another worker is putting final touches on a spreadsheet needed for a meeting in your Far East office. You’ll participate by video conference early in your day, late in theirs.
Thomas Friedman told us our world is flat, and that’s easy to believe today as we serve customers from all over the globe. This globalization — aided by the Internet and telecommunications advances — has also given us international virtual teams, knowledge-workers who may never physically meet, but who nevertheless work closely together.
PATRICIA MAY is president and CEO of Precision Language Services (www.precisionlanguage.com), a Women’s Business Enterprise National Council-certified document translation firm headquartered in Lakeville, MN, and a member of the National Advisory Board of Enterprising Women magazine. She can be contacted at 952-435-8178 (e-mail: pm@precisionlanguage.com). |
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Leading these virtual teams requires both traditional managerial expertise and a whole new set of skills necessary to keep such a loosely connected team productive while mining its positive aspects.
Round-the-clock productivity is one of the obvious advantages of international virtual teams. Whether they are traveling, living abroad, or native to other continents, someone is always working. Our office uses the time zones to our advantage by scheduling a project to move from east to west at various stages. A 12-hour project can be ready the next morning, rather than the next afternoon — significant extra hours when a court case hangs in the balance.
This strategy also lets us use rested workers, rather than forcing our people to work overnight to meet a deadline. When work is done live online on secure sites on the Web, workers 12 hours apart are scheduled to share passwords according to their working hours.
But “cross-ponding” (working from the United States to Europe and Asia) does have some drawbacks.
The same time differences that we use to move projects make it difficult to catch everyone awake at the same time. To forestall this problem, consult with your team early in the project and set a mutually agreeable time when all team members will be available, if only for an hour. Selecting a night owl for designated late-night communications means someone is always in touch.
As with physical teams, communication is the key to good virtual team function. Because the friendly greeting in the hall or the moment spent at a team member’s desk is missing when team members are scattered, it is vital to ping your workers more often than you would in a brick-and-mortar setting. Without your touch, people working in a remote office feel disconnected, and independent workers feel at sea. An occasional personal, chatty e-mail helps both morale and productivity.
Virtual teams suffer from the same personnel problems as those teams that share office space. Some people simply don’t work well together. Others tattle or curry favor with a project manager via e-mail. We have found that many problems can be avoided using group communication techniques.
E-mail groups and instant messaging, along with VOIP (voice-over-Internet protocol) phone systems and video conferencing, are obvious answers, but only if they’re actually used. We require all team members to direct questions and suggestions to the entire group, and all communication from our office flows to everyone when appropriate.
However, the project managers also make a point of contacting each team member privately at intervals to get a feel for how work is progressing. Learning everyone’s e-mail voice is an important early-diagnostic tool for projects in trouble. Working across time zones may also mean working across cultures, and in those cases, good communication becomes even more vital.
We have learned to spell out expectations clearly, unambiguously, and in several different formats to avoid misunderstanding. We have learned to be aware of differing gender roles and to phrase instructions accordingly. And we have learned that praise must be structured to fit the culture, and that one person’s gesture of gratitude is another person’s bribe.
Obviously, when working cross-culturally, the project manager needs to watch currency fluctuations. Perhaps not so obvious is the need to be aware of the way in which calendars differ. A work week in the Middle East may run Sunday through Thursday. Our teams in Canada work the entire last week of November while we’re eating turkey — but, they will not be available the second Monday in October, when they’re celebrating their own Thanksgiving.
Many countries seem to have a much more liberal holiday calendar than the United States, so it pays to check an international holiday calendar. Even if team members choose to work through the holiday, some public services, such as mail and banking, may not be available for them.
Further complications can arise when physical project information cannot go by e-mail and needs to be shipped. Bear in mind that overnight services may not be overnight when they’re overseas. You will pay dearly for shipping, so placing as much information as possible on a secure online site and ensuring that team members have access to fast download speeds is good financial sense.
There are other issues that need to be watched when people are working in many different time zones. Sudden political upheaval can create problems, not only for the project schedule, but for team members’ physical safety. The project manager needs to pay attention to international news and be aware of the places where trouble is likely.
Severe weather and natural disasters interrupt the best project plans. The advantage in having team members spread out is that not everyone is affected and work can possibly be shifted from one area to another. But, when the tsunami hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in January 2005, our first concern was that our colleagues working there were safe, along with their families. Through our international virtual teams, we have an impact all over the world, through relationships formed with locals and through staff sent abroad.
Acting with integrity takes on even greater importance as we become representatives not only of our companies, but also of our countries. We form global friendships, and that helps make our world not just flatter, but smaller.
(This article is reprinted from Vol. 8, No. 3 of Enterprising Women magazine. Copyright 2007, Enterprising Women Inc. Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited, except by express permission of the publisher. Would you like to comment on this article? Send a note to our editors.)
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