Building a Virtual Team
- Articulate team goals and objectives
- List roles and responsibilities
- Determine when and how the team will communicate both formally and informally
– Team meetings
– Information sharing
– Guidelines and rules for using different technologies
– External communication
- Determine standards for when and how to coordinate team tasks
– Communicating status to manager, team members, client
– Tracking tasks
– Risk management
- Set guidelines for collaboration
– Brainstorming
– Sharing documents
– Making decisions
- Devise a strategy for relationship and trust building from a distance
– Virtual community
– Reliability
– Conflict management
- Determine when and how to execute best practices for performance management
– One-on-one meetings
– Motivational and formative feedback
Working on these key ground rules and guidelines as a team will help ensure you begin from a starting point of trust. You may have a good idea of how you want to approach each of the elements that you include in your initial meeting, but if your virtual team feels that these are being thrust upon them rather than decided as a group, you may find that they rebel against them and your efforts will have been wasted.
There will of course be elements of the discussion that are not up for debate, perhaps where policy or process are important, and in these cases you should make it very clear why you have made the decisions you have so that there is no confusion or opportunity for dissent.
