Virtual Team Success

A Practical Guide for Working and Leading from a Distance

Richard Lepsinger, Darleen DeRosa

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470872413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

In today's complex organizations it is not uncommon to have as many as 50 percent of employees working on virtual teams. As the "virtual revolution" continues to spread, how can companies ensure that virtual team collaboration is producing the desired results?

Highly practical and easy to navigate, Virtual Team Success leverages the authors' robust global research study and hands-on experience to provide an immediately usable resource for virtual team members and team leaders. This groundbreaking book is a hands-on, practical toolkit filled with down-to-earth examples and insights that can enhance the virtual team experience for everyone involved.

The authors' research study is one of the most comprehensive applied studies ever conducted on virtual teams, and all of the recommendations outlined are based on these findings as well as the authors' years of experience helping virtual teams and virtual team leaders effectively lead and collaborate from a distance. To help organizations and leaders enhance virtual team performance, the book includes:

• Why Virtual Teams Fail— outlines the four pitfalls that frequently derail virtual teams
• Profile of High Performing Teams— addresses the characteristics of the most effective virtual teams and what makes them successful
• Virtual Team Launch Kit— provides practical guidelines and tools for successfully launching virtual teams
• How to RAMP Up Your Team's Effectiveness— introduces a practical research-based model of virtual team effectiveness to improve team performance
• Profile of Top Performing Virtual Team Leaders— identifies the practices of the most successful virtual team leaders
• Facilitating High-Impact Virtual Meetings— includes tips and techniques to effectively lead "v-meetings"

Virtual Team Success also includes practical resources for virtual team leaders, quick reference guides for diagnosing virtual team problems, and six lessons for virtual team success.

Section One
Building High-Performing Virtual Teams

Chapter One
Why Virtual Teams Fail

“You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options:Adapt or die. … You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events.”

—Andrew S. Grove, Intel Corporation

Virtual teams are more prevalent than ever. It’s not hard to see why. Advances in technology have made it easier to organize and manage dispersed groups of people. And competitive pressures and the needs of today’s global market workforce have made virtual teams a necessity for some organizations.

Many companies are using virtual teams to reach business objectives and to get a leg up on their competition. However, in others, virtual teams are more opportunistic, emerging in response to a particular event or need. For example, joint ventures or acquisitions within the pharmaceutical industry have led to the use of virtual teams because different R&D functions need to collaborate to accomplish shared business goals.

But the fact that virtual teams continue to grow in popularity doesn’t mean they’re always being used and managed properly. Quite the contrary. When OnPoint started working with various organizations that used virtual teams, we noticed that few actually understood how to set their virtual teams up for success in order to ensure continued quality performance.

We found that many organizations simply recycled the same guidelines and best practices they were using for their co-located teams and hoped for the best. And frankly, that system wasn’t working. It seemed obvious that face-to-face teams and virtual teams were the proverbial “apples and oranges” situation.

To help these organizations maximize their investment in virtual collaboration, we wanted to better understand what virtual teams need in order to consistently meet their performance expectations, and we wanted to uncover the unique obstacles these teams face.

So, in order to identify the specific practices associated with the most successful virtual teams and to better understand why some virtual teams fail, we conducted a study of forty-eight virtual teams across a broad range of industries. Three questions motivated our research:

• Why do many virtual teams fail to meet performance expectations?
• What differentiates the very best virtual teams from those that are less successful?
• What differentiates highly effective virtual team leaders from those that are less effective?

Keep in mind that we weren’t using the study to compare face-to-face teams with virtual teams. Instead, we set out to understand what factors differentiate high-performing virtual teams from low-performing ones. We wanted to help so companies can implement specific high-impact strategies to make their virtual teams more productive.

As part of the study, we administered an online survey to 427 team members and leaders of intact virtual teams. (See the Appendix for demographics and study detail.) In addition, we collected third-party data from ninety-nine stakeholders—individuals who are very familiar with the teams, such as internal customers or the team leaders’ managers—to objectively assess team performance.

And to better understand the common experiences and challenges for virtual team leaders and team members, we conducted more than fifty telephone interviews with virtual team members, team leaders, human resource (HR) professionals, and stakeholders. Plus, in a separate study, we administered an online survey to 304 individuals who worked on virtual teams but were not on the same team.

Given the prevalence of virtual teamwork, our research uncovered several factors that were cause for concern:

• In our study of the 304 individuals who worked on virtual teams, 25 percent reported that their teams were not fully effective.
• Third-party stakeholders who were familiar with a given team’s performance were asked to rate its effectiveness. Of forty-eight teams, 27 percent were perceived to be adequate or below adequate in terms of their overall performance.
• When team members and team leaders were asked to assess their effectiveness, 17 percent of the teams rated their own performance as being adequate or below adequate.

The overall performance level of the teams seemed to be up for debate. When we looked at the gap between stakeholders’ and team members’ rating of the teams’ performance levels, we found that there was a significant gap with one-third of the teams. For some of these teams, stakeholders rated team performance higher than team members, and for the remaining teams, stakeholders rated team performance lower than team members. These findings indicate that a significant number of virtual teams are not effective, and perhaps more importantly, that there is a gap in how team effectiveness is perceived that often goes undetected.

Key Challenges

In short, our research found that, while many virtual teams are successful, a significant number are not reaching their full potential. And based on gaps in the perception of team effectiveness, it also appears that many organizations are not even aware that their virtual teams are performing poorly.

A study discussed in the MIT Sloan Management Review¹ reinforces our findings. In that study, only 18 percent of the seventy global business virtual teams assessed were found to be highly successful. That means a whopping 82 percent did not achieve their goals!

But why are so many virtual teams falling into these performance traps? In order to answer this question and to better understand the challenges that virtual teams face, we asked hundreds of virtual team members and leaders to select the top three challenges that hinder their teams’ performance. Table 1.1 outlines these results.

Perhaps not surprisingly, lack of face-to-face contact was cited as the top challenge. We found that the majority of virtual teams in our study reported meeting in-person only several times per year. However, we did find that lack of face-to-face contact was less of an issue for teams that had an initial face-to-face meeting within the first thirty to ninety days of working virtually together. Overall, these teams were more effective than teams that had never met up-front.

Table 1.1 Top Challenges of Virtual Teams

Challenges	Percentage of Responses
Lack of face-to-face contact with team members	46%
Lack of resources	37%
Time zone differences hinder our ability to collaborate	29%
Team members are on more than one team and cannot devote enough time to this team	27%
Team members do not share relevant information with one another	21%
Lack of skill training	20%

We also examined whether teams had different challenges based on their level of effectiveness. Interestingly, all the teams in our study, regardless of their performance, reported the same top challenges. However, team members on low-performing teams also reported that their team members were on too many different teams, a factor that was unique to this population.

Several additional challenges were consistently mentioned in our interviews and have also been observed in our work with virtual t...