Leading Virtual Teams (HBR 20-Minute Manager Series) by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2016-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Keep people engaged

Your virtual water-cooler chats created beautiful and trusting relationships across the team. But how can you mobilize those social bonds to keep people engaged in, and motivated about, the work at hand?

Foster shared leadership. Assign special projects that team members can share during a meeting, or invite them to run a virtual team-building exercise, such as the weekly highlight-lowlight routine described earlier. As part of your plan to get the right people on the team, ask members to coach one another in their areas of expertise (refer back to your completed team surveys).

Recognize and praise collaborative behavior when you see it. If several people worked together to solve a problem, send an e-mail to the entire team expressing your appreciation and explaining how the work has helped the team overall.

Encourage people to acknowledge each other’s work. Praise people for calling out each other’s successes. Let them know that recognizing collaboration in others makes them look good, too. Develop norms for how members communicate that they “see” each other’s work, and give feedback wherever possible. Even a bland “Thanks,” “Nice,” or “I’m using this right now” goes a long way. Sharing genuine praise and appreciation is a prerequisite to offering comments that might be more critical: Research suggests the right balance is 10 to 1. Foster candor by supplying team members with the language for criticism, such as “I might suggest . . . ” or “Think about this.”

Play games. Games provide a low-stakes, fun environment in which team members practice pooling knowledge and coordinating for a common goal. This approach also helps members learn how other members think and act in an accelerated time frame and helps people iterate strategies for working together. For long-standing teams with a gamer culture, consider online role-playing games (RPGs) such as World of Warcraft, where team members talk as they play. If RPGs don’t fit your team culture, look at mobile multi player games such as online Scrabble. Even sharing music or book recommendations gives people a chance to explore each other’s thinking and connect on a personal level. Team-building activities can feel cheesy—it’s the nature of the beast—so encourage people to have a sense of humor about them: “It’s East Coast versus West Coast in Scrabble this week!”

Build a team with rhythm. Work in a physical office has a natural tempo: You see colleagues in predictable places at predictable times, you do certain kinds of work at the same time every day, you attend meetings with familiar people in familiar rooms. When some or all the members of a team are working remotely, it’s all too easy to feel disconnected without these patterns. One antidote is to be disciplined in creating and enforcing routines in virtual team work. Hold regular meetings, ideally on the same day and at the same time each week, starting and finishing on time. Make the meeting agendas routine where possible, and share them ahead of time. Good meeting practice matters more when you have a dispersed team, because following the rules helps create those shared expectations and experiences.

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