Collection of pieces of advice and tips for working in virtual teams,derived from two research projects, some literature and personal experience. creative commons 3.0 nonprofit, attribution, sharealike

1. International Virtual
Teamworking
Mark Childs
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

2. Effective Interpersonal Communication
 Specific time and medium should be identified for
regular communication
 Use multiple communication media
 Expectations of the speed and quality (open, honest
and realistic)
 Understanding the recipient’s intrapersonal
interpretation and perspective (e.g. personal beliefs
and culture)
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

3. Issues in virtual teamworking
• Timing of activities
• Technologies
• Training and testing
• Trust
• Techniques
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

4. Timing of activities
• Remember that the other members of the
group will have different demands on their
time.
• When establishing deadlines for work take
this into consideration
• Be open to negotiating deadlines, but
ensure you can still meet submission
dates at both ends
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

5. Technologies
• Identify the technologies you’re all used to using.
Technologies need to be able to:
– Transfer a lot of information from one person
to the others.  conveyance
– Be able to bring separate ideas together 
convergence
– Form a collaborative working space 
“coherence”
– Make you accessible to each other (but not
too accessible)  continuous presence
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

6. Conveyance
• Email is OK.
– difficult to archive and search
– Can get overloaded
– Make sure everyone has everyone’s address
– Never hit “Reply All” without reading who’s in
the recipient list.
• Dropbox is better
– BUT is very poor at version control
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

7. Convergence
• Has to be synchronous
– Chat (MSN, FB, Skype)
– Videoconferencing (Skype, HP Virtual rooms)
– Anything else?
– Downside of audio/visual over text ... Keeping
track of what is said  so write minutes
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

8. Meetings
Good Practice
• Agree an agenda and circulate in advance.
• Use meetings for discussion and not for
conveying information.
• Establish and agree a schedule of meetings.
• Circulate minutes and agreed actions as soon
as possible after the meeting.
• Maintain list of tasks, assigned person and
deadlines as shared document.

9. Coherence
• Collaboratively creating documents
– GoogleDocs
– Wikis
• Need to just “go for it” with revising each
other’s stuff
• Need cut-off points
• Need someone to take responsibility for
final tidying and formatting
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

10. Continuous presence
• “Always on” technologies
– Eg Skype
– Can be a huge timesink
– Useful when nearing end of project
– Don’t rely on constant presence alone, also
schedule meetings
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

11. Training and testing
• Don’t assume everyone can use the
technology in your group.
• Do trial runs before your meeting – there’s
nothing more irritating than waiting for the
one person who doesn’t know what to do
before you start your meeting.
• USE HEADPHONES or you will get echo
and annoy people (internal mic usually
better than external)
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

12. Group questions
• Which technologies do you think you might
use?
• What issues do you think there might be
with using them?
• Do you have any solutions to overcome
these problems?
• What help do you think you will need?
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

13. Trust
• Way to form trust
– Repeatedly fulfilling tasks
• More difficult to build, easier to lose in
teamwork
– Share all vital information in one place
– Include other end in all decision-making
– Create lists of who does what AND BY
WHEN, updated regularly in shared space
– Self-disclosure  introductory postings
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

14. Techniques to build rapport
• Chat
– Stand in for facial / body language
– Emoticons. Standardised in west.
• Videoconferencing:
– keep to one person per machine if possible,
avoids side discussions.
– If laggy, pause to give time for response
– Give everyone chance to talk before moving
on
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

15. Group questions
• What are your experiences of working in teams,
good and bad?
• How could these have been sorted?
• What breakdowns can occur when
communicating at a distance?
• How could these be avoided?

16. Communication strategy
• Agree and commit to a communication strategy
within your group
• Don’t drift, don’t use too many platforms
• Establish your technologies and stick to them
OR if you change tell everyone clearly what the
new ones are
• If side-discussions happen don’t make decisions
in them, bring them back to group
• Biggest undermining of trust is caused by
leaving people out of decision-making
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

17. Final task
• Plan which technologies you will consider
using and for which purpose.
• Identify where resources and skills may
need to be addressed.
• Work out a timeline for when decisions will
need to be made, and when meetings will
occur.
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology

18. Acknowledgments
Developed from research conducted in:
• “Managing Research Projects”
– Funder: ESRC.
– PI: Marie Garnett, University of Warwick
• “Learning to create a better built
environment”
– Funder: HP Catalyst
– PI: Robby Soetanto, Coventry University
M16BE – Cont Issues & Res Methodology