x
MarketHive has put together a really great training platform for free http://markethive.com/chriscorey
Red Giant, a company that develops video special-effects software, has gone from being two guys with an idea 10 years ago to a leader in its field by adopting a “there is no plan B” credo.
They define the goals for each project, put together small virtual teams and – here’s the big one – give them the responsibility for the success of the project.
Each team member shares a piece of that responsibility. “There is no Plan B,” says Micah Sharp, general manager of Red Giant. “It’s us.” Despite the company’s rapid growth, it doesn’t make team staffing decisions quickly.
“We like to date a lot first,” says Sharp, of the 50-person company, 36 of whom work virtually. Micah recognizes that not everybody is suited to virtual work. He says it takes a combination of entrepreneurial spirit and initiative as well as technical skills to thrive as a remote worker.
The virtual skill set OnPoint’s research with more than 400 virtual workers confirms that successful virtual employees need a somewhat different skill set than their collocated counterparts. Their study shows that successful virtual team members tend to be more self-directed and able to solve problems on their own than collocated counterparts who can more easily turn to others and may develop a habit of relying on outside help.
Virtual team members also tolerate ambiguity better than other employees – everything from that terse email from the boss that might be taken negatively by other staffers to not knowing important details about a project as quickly as collocated workers do. One of the most important attributes virtual workers need is excellent communication skills.
Not only do they have to express themselves well, but updating others and sharing project documents has to happen automatically and without fail. Distance and time lags are an inevitable downside of working remotely.
Virtual employees need to be hyper-vigilant about communicating with everyone else on the team. There’s no room for personality conflicts or information hoarding.
At the end of the day, virtual team workers need to be more resilient than the average employee – able to stay focused and work on their own, and able to deal with greater and more frequent communication gaps and lags.
But they have the same need as other employees to feel a sense of purpose in the work they do, and to feel connected to others within the organization. Interestingly, Gallup says a strong predictor of an employee’s productivity is whether they have a best friend at work.
Carefully chosen, small teams of self-directed people are the keys to creating high-performing virtual teams.
Human relationships make or break virtual teams One of the biggest mistakes I see business leaders make is thinking all they need for great collaboration is great collaboration technology.
Tools designed to help us more easily and clearly see and hear and text each other while automatically serving up information based on the context of the meeting are a great supplement to leadership skills. Yet it’s the soft skills – which nurture the human connections leaders must establish – that ultimately make collaboration successful.
As table stakes, you absolutely must get your mobile, distributed, virtual work force onto new technology that helps rather than hinders.
What do I mean by hinder? In a recent Unify survey of knowledge workers: Virtual team workers need to be more resilient than the average employee… but they have the same need to feel a sense of purpose in the work they do.
• 79 percent of respondents reported working always or frequently in virtual teams.
• Only 44 percent found virtual communication as productive as face-to-face communication.
• The vast majority connected via email, phone and conference calls
• Even though 72 percent said video would make teamwork easier, only 34 percent actually used video
• 43 percent admitted feeling confused and overwhelmed by the mishmash of collaboration technology at their disposal.
Chris Corey SEO Wildman
written by: Unify
