Working in a virtual team

Have you ever wondered about our life without internet? It’s hard to image this in our modern life.

The internet is an essential tool in our work, it helps us to keep in touch with our colleagues from different location, meet our customers or suppliers.   

Start you experience in a virtual team by encouraging strong bonds in your team. Like any conventional team, a virtual team consists of a group of people who interact to complete interdependent tasks and work towards common goals.

But, why does the reason for virtual team arise? There are some following reasons:

1.    In response to a crisis or emergency, when we have any restrictions;

2.    To take advance of the choice of the best skills and personnel irrespective of your location;

3.    To reduce offices overheads;

4.    To offer 24-hour coverage by team members;

5.    To enable cost-effective and flexible recourse scheduling.

When you set up a virtual team, you can recruit people with right skills, irrespective of their location, offer your customers round-the-clock availability or accessibility or just bring in people who work on a part time basis.

On the one side it means enormous flexibility but on the flip side you can face the challenges of managing members of the team you may never meet or dealing with people from different culture with different personalities.

In such kind of the team all members should work hard to ensure each person can contribute effectively and the pull together toward common goals.

Communication is the biggest challenge in a virtual team. Each member of a team should make extra effort to communicate effectively. As a manager you should encourage your team to stay in touch and get to one another better. You must schedule daily/ weekly remote get-togethers. You can also use intranet team notice board, team room, regular team newsletter. Above all your communications infrastructure should work smoothly and without inconveniences.

Recruiting a virtual team is a big challenge too. You should understand the fact that people in the conventional team who perform well may not perform well in a virtual environment. You must hire members who are self-motivated, results-oriented, who are able to work independently and have good communication skills. Don’t forget that you must learn the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. Try to create the virtual equivalent of an "open door policy" it helps you to clarify important spots in day to day communication.

The second challenge is monitoring performance and aligning incentives. You must decide in which way you can reward people for the achievement even if they are small. Ensure that team members know what they need to know.

Working in a remote team can lead to feeling of isolation. In this case you have to use virtual team-building exercises. They can build rapport and improve communication. There is a huge number of virtual team-building exercises. Start by defining your purpose and objectives. It’s extremely important that the outcome of the exercise meets your objective and think about the platform you want to use.

 When you are working in a virtual team try to engage your audience online so you are not talking to an empty room. To run your virtual meeting successfully you just need to follow several simple tips:

1.    Explore and choose the right platforms. They should suit your agenda. Take time to review each platform carefully before you decide which one to use.

2.    Try to learn and develop the skills and tools that you will need to succeed in this role. Success of the meeting depends on you as a facilitator. Use ice breakers technologies to get acquainted before discussing. Try out ice breakers well before the meeting to ensure they will have the desired effect. Rehearse using the meeting software beforehand. After that you will be able to operate him effortlessly during the meeting.

3.    Virtual meetings need more preparation than regular face-to-face meetings. Work some extra planning time into your schedule, so that you can be prepared for any technical challenges that may occur. Be punctual with your start and finish times; clear understand your goal of the meeting. Try to organize your information into 10- to 15-minute segments. This helps keep everyone engaged and focused. And one of the most important point to consider everyone's time zones.

4.    A day before your event, send out login details to everyone involved. And it is useful to consider assigning someone to handle any technology issues so you can focus solely on guiding the meeting.

5.    Set the ground rules it helps you to guide the behavior of everyone attending.

6.    Develop your active listening skills. Put your entire focus on the person who is speaking.

7.    Your job as the facilitator is to make sure that team members have plenty of opportunities to speak up. Don’t hesitate to ask for attendees' input. Keep everyone engaged by using activities and questions that require their participation.

As well as a virtual meeting you can conduct video interview. One of the main advantages of video interviewing is to enable you to speak with applicants anywhere in the world and recruit potential candidates faster and more flexible. Of course this type of interview has its downsides such as technical problems or a poor data connection. It also affects your ability to build rapport and read body language. Before the video interview think about your usual recruitment procedures and your potential candidates. Video interview can be a good tool if you're working to a tight deadline and you need to evaluate candidates quickly. Explore and examine online recruitment platforms beforehand you start you video interview process. Start planning and preparation for "live" interviews well in advance. Give your candidates all the information that they need about the video interview. Choose a quiet place with a suitable backdrop, and clear away any distractions. Make a positive first impression by smiling warmly and introducing yourself. Once the interview has started you should outline the agenda for the meeting, and describe the recruitment process. Check that he can see and hear you well. Shut down any unnecessary applications, give your interviewee your full attention and allow for a short time lag between your questions and the candidate's answers.