Managing Without Walls: Maximize Success With Virtual, Global, and Cross-Cultural Teams by Colleen Garton & Kevin Wegryn

Author:Colleen Garton & Kevin Wegryn [Garton, Colleen & Wegryn, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Management, General, Business Communication
ISBN: 9781583470626
Google: WQBcAAAACAAJ
Publisher: MC Press
Published: 2006-11-15T00:34:18.578576+00:00

Team Member Interaction

The team members will interact in different ways and for different reasons. The most important thing about team interaction is making sure there is some! Actually, make sure there is a lot.

When working virtually, it is so easy to forget you are part of a team. You get into your groove with the work you need to accomplish and, by applying focus and discipline, you can complete the work on time and maybe even a little ahead of schedule. Each team meeting or phone call is a distraction from getting your tasks completed. After a while, it is easy to just stop calling in for meetings and to not answer the phone if you can help it. As time goes by, people invite you to participate in fewer and fewer meetings, and you become almost a non-entity on the team.

If one of your team members has been behaving in this way, what has he accomplished? Perhaps he would say he gets more work done. He might think he is more productive because his work is always completed on time. Is this really true? If he is not participating in the team, then he is not completing all his assigned work. If he has no idea what is going on in his virtual community, how does he know his contributions are valuable? Is he working on the highest priority tasks, or the things that were the highest priority six months ago, when he last called in a for a meeting? If the team can function with hardly any input from this team member, why do you need him? If you hired this person for his knowledge, skills, and experience, what good are those things if the team is not getting any input from him? It is disrespectful to his team mates and to you to refuse to answer phone calls or to attend meetings. Maybe he is “too important” to attend. Is he, then, too important for the job?

If you have a team member who is beginning to skip meetings and not answer the phone, you need to deal with the situation quickly, before he or she becomes isolated from the team. Make sure there is a process for team members to communicate that they are unable to attend a meeting, and that the process includes communicating the reason for non-attendance. It is simple courtesy to let the meeting organizer know if you are unable to attend. If you notice a team member skipping meetings frequently with no apparent reason, speak to that person. Explain that his or her primary role is to be a team member and to play a participative role on the team. If he or she is finding it hard to complete assigned tasks on time due to meetings, phone calls, or other interruptions, work with the team member on prioritizing tasks to use time most efficiently.

Being a virtual employee means you are working together, apart; it does not mean you are working alone.

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