Some time ago I posted a piece titled “Providing ongoing assistance in the development of international communication skills” where I discussed ways organisations can support their personnel when they are working in virtual team based projects, how some ongoing support can help the team to continue to grow together and through that growth deliver a much better project or the same project in a more efficient way. Sadly, however, as often as not this ongoing support is not provided and in many cases even the initial support is not there.
Many organisations either do not recognise that there is a need for them to support their personnel in their efforts to work collaboratively in virtual team environments or they recognise it but lack either the resources, will or skills to provide the necessary support.
To any company that is in this situation, I would ask that you consider the potential benefits of having your projects completed in a more efficient manner and what that would mean to your overall business; would you get the product to market sooner, would it be a better product, beat your competition or start to recover the cost of the project sooner. If the answer to any of these is yes, as I suspect it will be, how much would you pay to get that benefit?
If you were to invest a proportion of the potential benefit in supporting your people to learn how to work together better, to provide them with better tools such as improved or more widely available video conferencing, a larger travel budget so more of the team can meet for that all important face to face experience, or putting a specialist communications coach into the project team, even on a part time basis.
To those employees who find themselves in the situation of having been assigned to a project with no training or support either before starting or in an ongoing basis, fear not, know you are not alone, there are many more like you on projects the world over, struggling to understand the situations you find yourselves in with your virtual team partners, and you will probably find that if it is happening to you on your project it will be happening to all of the others on the project. My suggestions would be these;
- Don’t keep your concerns to yourself, even if your company is not prepared or able to help you, you will find there will be people in your project team or your peer group who have the experience and skills to support you as you learn your way. — Look for these people, they may be easy or hard to find, but they will be there.
- Be patient with your new colleagues, they will be struggling just like you and will have many of the same concerns and issues as you, theirs will manifest themselves differently but they all have common origins.
- Be prepared to have some bad days, there will be days in your project where you think that the whole world is against you, those days will pass, the most important thing is firstly to survive them and then to reflect on the experience and learn from it in a positive way. If, for example, you have a major misunderstanding with your international colleagues, try to work to see what caused it and how to improve things for the next time, don’t just look to blame the other parties either, communication is a two way exercise, both parties share the responsibility to get it right.
- Celebrate together, when things go well don’t just celebrate in one your office, celebrate the good things as a global group, have a “virtual party” with all of the project teams in all of the locations rejoicing.
- Mourn the bad times together, sharing bad times in a project can be as powerful as sharing the good times, you will all learn from the problems together.
- Its not all about work, take a little time to get to know your virtual team mates, you may never meet face to face but that does not mean you can’t share aspects of your lives with one another.
With a little bit of hard work, some reflection and mutual forgiveness you can learn a great deal on a virtual team project, learn about your colleagues, the skills needed to be effective in the virtual teams environment and, perhaps most importantly, learn a lot about yourself.
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