A Booster Shot for Virtual Team Collaboration: Part 2: Team Forming
Author: Clark Shah-Nelson, MA, DBA Candidate
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Is your organization looking to start and/or grow a virtual team? There is a healthy amount of research in academic journals to assist with planning and implementing in ways that foster effectiveness. Our recent systematic review synthesized findings from over twenty studies taking place in over 40 countries and across many sectors. The findings point to key factors in the area of technology tool selection (see previous post) and the importance of human resources management practices. Next we’ll take a deeper look at some of the study findings related to formation of virtual teams.
Team Forming: Focus on Competencies
The formation of the virtual team itself is vital for success. While virtual teams allow you to find and select the best of the best talent from the entire planet for your project, there are a couple key things to keep in mind beyond the person’s experience and team fit. Competency assessment in the initial team building process plays a role in forming success. Specifically, hiring decisions can be made by managers based on assessing individual virtual competencies (IVCs) and experience people have in their online life, including social media. The major realms of these competencies include virtual self-efficacy, social skills, and media skills. The study linked above, from Wang and Haggerty, includes a set of questions that can be used as a pre-employment instrument to help assess and measure these virtual competencies. They found that people with more online/virtual experience are more virtually competent and may achieve better outcomes. This isn’t surprising, since virtual teams rely on technology tools to communicate and collaborate and they also need socialization skills.
When creating the position description, HR representatives have an opportunity to ensure that the listing accurately depicts the nature of the position, role, responsibilities, tasks, and expectations. If the position is 100% remote, the job title should include that information as well as the location provided in the listing. Likewise, if it’s 50% remote, that should be communicated. A number of items should be included within the listed required skills that relate to various systems, tools, technologies and practices. For example, the position can list “high level of competence with project management and videoconferencing tools” or specify high level of experience with GitHub, Jira, Trello, Teams, Zoom or any number of other specific tools. Naturally your organization can and should also provide training, but there is a big difference between candidates who can do the work and fit the team but who also already know and use these tools vs. those who don’t.
Time Zones and Deadlines
Virtual teams allow your organization to bring together talented individuals from all around the globe. As we explored in the previous post, you will need to consider the work tasks, the nature of the projects/products/teams and needed communication for successful collaboration in order to make smart decisions about what is feasible in terms of geographical dispersion. From the Human Resources Management (HRM) perspective, when individuals need to build consensus and coordinate heavily in real time, or nearly real time, they might need to exclude candidates from certain geographical areas for selected projects or teams. If one person in Singapore uploads a fix on a strict product delivery deadline and the next person who needs to test and verify is in the US, there could be a serious time lag. While this may not be an issue for some industries, products or teams, you should consider whether or not tight timelines and deadlines might prevent your company from hiring for every position from the entire globe.
Summarized Tips
- Carefully craft team position descriptions to emphasize the virtual competencies needed for success.
- Utilize an instrument to assess candidate competence with specific virtual skills needed for the team as well as tools that will be utilized by the team.
- Assess each position in terms of the overarching project goals, timelines, deadlines and deliverables. Do these lend themselves to asynchronous collaboration or do they demand less time lag that might require workers to either work in proximal time zones or be willing to work odd/night time hours in order to more closely match hours for teammates around the globe
Now that you’ve formed your A-Virtual Team, remember that old A-Team TV show theme? While they aren’t a virtual team, they certainly do have to trust each other, share knowledge, coordinate and collaborate for success, each contributing their own unique skills and personality:
Team forming is a vital area for the success of virtual teams. From listing the position, to combing through resumes and candidate web searches for clues to assessing virtual competencies and interviewing techniques, these practices facilitate building the team for longevity and effectiveness. In the next post, we’ll explore ways to orient your new virtual team to the organization, culture, tools and most importantly, each other, so that they can form social bonds.