Working Productively in a Virtual Team Environment
A virtual team is a distributed work team whose members predominantly communicate and coordinate their work via electronic media. Working with a team of people you can’t see presents many different challenges than with those you can walk down the hall to visit. Since there is little personal interaction, issues of trust, team identity, and lack of cohesion are often present. However, virtual work allows organizations to combine the best expertise regardless of geographic location, so it’s imperative they learn to manage their special communication, technical, and performance management challenges. Extra care must be taken to balance a sense of detachment and isolation that may exist without the special care and feeding of these teams.
Course Objectives
- Discuss effective teleconferencing guidelines for virtual meetings.
- Monitor employee productivity when you can’t see them.
- Determine the proper technology and channel for different communication needs.
- Keep track of group tasks, project status, and delegated items.
- Increase cohesiveness in getting the group to act like a team.
- Learn the 4 core characteristics of successful virtual teams.
- Increasing virtual team members’ connection and sense of belonging.
- Deal effectively with time zone, cultural, life balance, and language differences.
- Talk about the team’s “rules of engagement.”
- Encourage collaboration through the exchange and sharing of ideas and information.
- Discover how cultural differences make shape competition vs. cooperation on the team.
- Maintain a high level of consistent communication between team members.
Download a one-page PDF sheet about the VIRTUAL: Working and Managing in a Dispersed Team Environment course to share or print.
Check Laura’s schedule or Book Laura now!
