Yesterday I looked at the roles that a clear project vision, excellent communication, motivational strategies and recognising individual differences have on successfully managing a virtual team. To recap, a virtual team is one where not all the team members are based in the same location: a non-colocated team. More and more project teams are like this now, as we work in an global marketplace, and with third-party partners. Here are three more tips for making sure that your virtual team is as successful as possible:
1. Resolve conflict effectively
Encourage your team to talk to you, and to each other. One of the problems with virtual teams is that side conversations can take place, and a conflict could be brewing without you even knowing about it. It’s everyone’s responsibility to handle conflict professionally – and conflict isn’t always a bad thing. If two members of the team are having a difficult time, you can step in, but only if you know about it. Therefore, you should encourage an environment where everyone is responsible for proactively identifying and working to resolve conflict. Issues can be escalated to you where there is the need for more facilitation, but ideally the team can take some ownership for sorting out low-level issues themselves.
Conflict manifests itself in different ways depending on where you are in the project lifecycle. In the early days, the issue could be lack of cultural understanding or language problems. Later on, conflict could be caused by differing approaches to solving a technical or creative problem. The approach to resolving these conflicts is going to be different every time, but you should at least be aware of the possibility that these will happen – and even more alert to conflict than you would be for a colocated team.
2. Review performance continually
Just because things are going fine today doesn’t mean they will be tomorrow. You want to be a high-performing team, but that doesn’t happen overnight. And on a virtual team, it takes even longer. Think about how you are going to get to a high-performing state – and that means working out what ‘high-performing’ actually looks like. Chances are it looks like people working autonomously, referring to team members without having to go through you to open the channels of communication, but with regular progress reports and risk and issue reviews – and of course escalations up to you as the project manager. Discuss what a high-performing team looks like with your team, and then that gives you a starting point on how to get there.
New people joining the team creates an imbalance in skills and experience, so one of your tasks should be to bring new people into the fold as quickly as possible, so plan an induction process as soon as you realise you have a new starter on the way – or someone gives you a clue that they are going to leave!
3. Handle crises quickly
Projects have crises. That’s nothing new. But in a virtual team you have to act quickly to ensure everyone knows what is going on, and how the problem will be addressed. One of the issues can be ensuring everyone has the same information at the same time, for example, about a corporate strategy change, or a restructure. With team members in different time zones this can be difficult, and stopping the rumours can be hard. Virtual team members can feel isolated at the best of times, so you really need to consider getting everyone together for a briefing in these situations, even if it is only on the phone.
Crises and changes can have an impact on the project, and the team will need to work out together how to step up and meet the challenge. For example, if someone goes off sick and will not be back at work for a while, what impact will this have on the tasks that person will no longer be able to complete? Who can step in and do those activities, or if no one is available, what impact will that have on the project’s critical path? Understanding the issues gets you one step closer to being able to minimse the impact on the project delivery. And of course, make sure you add an entry to the issue log!