Five stages and ten top tips for busting barriers - e-Teams

Steve Barden of Epic Consulting provides some top tips on how organisations can exploit technology to manage their teams in the world of virtual, dispersed organisations.

The core of any successful business is teamwork. From the top down, every layer needs high-performing, focused and complementary teams who work together for a common purpose. Clearly, these groups of people don’t always function without some stresses and conflicts – such is the challenge of being part of, or managing, teams for success. However, one dynamic often overlooked in the wealth of literature on teams and their development is how to manage virtual teams. This stems, in part, from the assumptions informing the notions of teams and teamwork, i.e. that team members are co-located or are within a reasonable distance to support frequent person-to-person contact. However, modern organisational structures don’t necessarily facilitate such luxuries of co-location.

Although technology is clearly an enabler to support virtual teams, it's not necessarily the use of technology that changes the nature of how the teams operate or creates the main challenges for team managers and members. Often, virtual teams are more transient, being formed to deliver a particular business objective or project and then moving on. As a consequence, the risks of less-than-optimal delivery are higher; this article concentrates on the issues of communication, engagement and fulfilment and not on how to leverage the technology tools behind these activities. Also, it is important to recognise that most "virtual" teams operate in multiple modes, including having face-to-face meetings when possible.

Taking Bruce Tuckman's classic description of the stages of team development as a basis, there are clearly things that will specifically help virtual teams at each of the five stages:

Forming Stage

It’s a fact that most of us are driven by a desire to be accepted by others, and generally avoid controversy or conflict. During this stage, serious issues and feelings are typically avoided, and people focus on being busy with routines, such as team organisation, schedules, etc.  But team members are also gathering information and impressions about each other and about the scope of the task and how to approach it. This is a comfortable stage to be in, but the avoidance of conflict and threat means that not much actually gets done.

1. Selecting the team

Inevitably, if team members don’t know each other, their level of anxiety will be higher – even if the concerns are only perceived rather than real. It is especially important for virtual teams that time is taken to get to know the (potential) team members and establish how they operate and their level of experience in working as part of a virtual team. In this way you can ensure that you have insight into their character, and reduce the likelihood of conflicts of style arising and resolve possible issues before they arise. It’s good to:

• Use face-2-face opportunities whenever possible but especially at the beginning. This is particularly valid if the team members do not know each other. We are social beings who build trust and respect for each other best when we can engage all five senses in the forming experience.
• Get to know the people as best you can. If you can’t meet them personally, use email, phone interviews and even video conferencing to get a better understanding of them.
• Use a profiling questionnaire where appropriate to establish the personality traits of team members: Belbin is a popular model for team roles.
• Know their motivation for being part of a virtual team. Try to gain an understanding of what is motivating them. How independent are they?
• Set performance objectives for each person so there is no ambiguity about roles, tasks or expected outcomes.

2. Be inclusive

With virtual teams it’s vitally important that all members feel equally involved irrespective of their location, hours of work or role. Therefore, take extra effort to make the best possible use of video conferencing, virtual meeting tools and even good old voice and text telephony to keep everyone communicating.

• Allow sufficient time for this stage to develop thoroughly. Merely paying lip-service to this stage is likely to build only rocky foundations on which the future will flounder when the pressure is on.
• Remember once you’ve met, you’ll have more compassion and understanding for your fellow team members and that is key to future success.

Storming Stage

Individuals are likely to remain nice to each other only for so long. Some people's patience will break early, and minor confrontations will arise that are quickly dealt with or glossed over. These may relate to the work of the team itself, or to roles and responsibilities within it. Some will observe that it's good to be getting into the real issues, whilst others will wish to remain in the comfort and security of the Forming stage. Depending on the culture of the organisation and individuals, the conflict will be more or less suppressed, but it will still be there. To deal with the conflict, individuals may feel they are winning or losing battles, and will look for structural clarity and rules to prevent the conflict persisting.

3. Start by establishing a code of conduct

Often, conflicts and stresses arise from the disconnected and time-delayed nature of communications. Therefore, the code could include a principle of acknowledging a request for information within 24 or 48 hours. A complete response to a request might require more time but at least the person requesting the information would know that the request will be addressed. No one likes to feel that his or her request has disappeared into the ether or is unimportant to the recipient.

Another area of good conduct for video or voice conferencing is to make sure everyone has time to make their point and ask questions without talking over each other. This is true whenever it is used and is easier if everyone is online. Many such online conferences are ruined by the group in the room moving the discussion on without including those on the ‘phone.

4. Develop trust among the team members

Charles Handy, the author and management consultant, addresses this issue quite clearly. “If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organisation, we will have to rediscover how to run organisations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: technology on its own is not enough.”

The issue of trust is at the centre of successful virtual team management. The fact is that old-style command and control management, based on constant scrutiny, is simply impossible in a virtual environment. Leaders must learn how to change the nature of power and how it’s employed. If they don’t, technology will. Virtual leadership is about keeping everyone focused on getting the task done and successful leadership of virtual teams is determined by who’s most expert for the task at hand — not by corporate hierarchy.

Norming Stage

As the Storming stage evolves so do the rules of engagement for the team. The scope of their tasks and responsibilities is now clear and agreed. Having had their arguments, they now understand one another better, and can appreciate one other's skills and experience. Individuals listen to each other, appreciate and support each other, and are prepared to change pre-conceived views: they feel they're part of a cohesive, effective team. However, individuals have had to work hard to attain this stage, and may resist any pressure to change - especially from the outside - for fear that the team will break up, or revert to a ‘storm’.

5. Deal with communication problems

While most virtual team members have a positive experience overall, the biggest area of complaint often involves communication issues. These may include:

• Lack of project visibility. Team members know what they are doing on an individual basis but aren’t always sure where their pieces fit into the whole picture. Getting strategic and operational clarity is paramount to ensuring buy-in and commitment.
• Getting hold of people. It’s frustrating not being able to get a response from people when you need to.
• The media. Communication in a virtual environment has its own set of challenges. It can be difficult to derive the correct meaning from text-based messages, especially if the person is attempting to be sarcastic. Engender proper email etiquette.

6. Don’t forget diversity

This is more about recognising the equality of all, as well as accommodating the differences of team members, whether they are internal or external to the core organisation. It’s about those who are part-time as much as those who are full-time and both office and home-based workers – all constitute part of the diverse mix of virtual teams that needs to be considered in addition to the more usual diversity that occurs amongst people in modern businesses.

Performing Stage

Not all teams reach this stage. It is characterised by a state of interdependence and flexibility. Everyone knows each other well enough to be able to work together, and trusts each other enough to allow independent activity. Roles and responsibilities change according to need in an almost seamless way. Group identity, loyalty and morale are all high and everyone is equally task-orientated and people-orientated. This high degree of comfort means that all the energy of the team can be directed towards the scheduled task(s).

7. Give team members a sense of how the overall project is going.

The primary idea here is to improve the quality and type of communications between all team members. They need to know where they fit into the big picture. You can do this by:

• Sending all team members copies of an updated project schedule, or better, providing an electronic view of the online schedule.
• Making sure you share the challenges and successes, even if they appear insignificant or not directly related to the team’s core work. Although this is good for all teams it is particularly so for virtual teams, who have far less opportunity to share personal successes.

8. Sustaining

Even though performing well, it is still vital to keep everyone on task and engaged with the ambitions and successes (or difficulties) of the team while sustaining their motivation for achievement and recognition. Ways that this can be achieved are:

• Identify team leaders. Make provisions for alternatives in advance.
• Require regular updates from all team members. This is the best way to keep them all engaged.
• During regularly scheduled meetings, take time to discuss both the negative and positive.
• At the first indication of a problem - take action! This action may be in the form of direct intervention with the members involved or letting the entire team know that you are aware of what is happening and that it will be resolved.
• Most importantly - don't distance yourself from team members. Be available to them; this will increase the trust they have in you and shows them that you respect them.

Adjourning Stage

Apart from the lack of assonance (although some authors call this stage Deforming or Mourning in recognition of the sense of loss felt by team members), Tuckman didn’t add this stage until a decade after his original four-stage model. However, it is probably the most crucial and least successfully implemented in respect of today’s information age. It is about completion and disengagement, both from the tasks and the team members as they move into new roles and new teams. Individuals should be proud of their successes and reflective of the learning and development that the challenges of the experience presented. They also need to recognise what they've done, and consciously move on. 

9. Don’t lose the knowledge

It’s important to remember that as team members move on they take their knowledge and experience with them. In today’s businesses, talent management and managing that collective knowledge – along with the systems that organise such intellectual property - define the true value of the business.

Again, although this is not exclusive to virtual teams, any systems and processes that exist should work seamlessly for remote users. This is especially important if the team members were not or are no longer part of the same organisation.

This emphasis on knowledge management - harvesting the learning of the experience of team members so that it is available to the whole organisation – should be an integral part of any knowledge/learning strategy. Again, technology is the enabler but the procedures have to be established and adhered to. Think about:

• Making the processes and systems for team management and development accessible, straightforward and valuable to all.
• Ensuring all team managers and members have been trained in how they are to be used.

10. Keep the network alive

Although the main reason for bringing the team together may have passed, there are often benefits in keeping the network alive. So, use internet or workgroup calendaring software or even social software tools to keep in touch with team members’ movements and activities. Whilst the drive to keep communications flowing is diminished, it should not be difficult to keep up with scheduled trips where face-2-face ‘catchups’ can occur. In some cases an Alumni forum can be valuable to cross-fertilise best practice. Another approach is to agree that team members will let everyone know when they are travelling to another’s vicinity.

It is likely that where personal friendships subsist, the above will happen anyway. So really the focus should be on keeping work-related value flowing beyond the lifespan of the particular team.

Clearly many of the above tips raise issues around the culture of the organisation that have to be addressed if virtual teams are to be an effective paradigm for your organisation. Look out for a future article about how to build a culture that is supportive of virtual teams.