“The secret lies in meeting face-to-face before starting a virtual team”, is the first enthusiastic response to our question eliciting key factors that bode well for successful virtual collaboration. This is a common conception, and we will try to offer alternatives. After all, we are meeting with a group of German employees of international organizations who are participants in an annual conference hosted by the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin. And working on a daily basis with colleagues who are located in the many headquarters and field offices these international organizations operate around the world, they often don’t have the luxury of meeting face-to-face as often as and when they wish.
© Getty Images; Frank and Elena
Participants come from the United Nations, the European Union, OECD, or NATO. Among the 20 of them are a virtual community coordinator at UNICEF, an OECD manager who is currently building a global community of practice, and a human resources manager at the UN Secretariat. The latter asks whether the Virtual Performance Assessment (VPA) and the subsequent improvement process we are about to introduce can also be applied to conflict that can arise when a frustrated colleague calls from Bangkok and yells at the person on the other end of the world.
Our participants obviously know the quirks of virtual collaboration and communication well. Asked to share them, they quickly collect a mosaic of challenges: time zone management, common semantics, pronunciation, cultural differences, respect, lacking spontaneity, clearly defined goals, listening / reading closely, frequency of communication, technological issues, passivity (lack of give and take), getting to know each other personally, excessive cc’ing in email, … and the list continues. It doesn’t come as a surprise that each group, each team, each network appears to be different and here we begin to shift the attention to some common ground.
The concept of virtual closeness falls on sympathetic ears. Examples of situations when participants have experienced virtual closeness in their respective work contexts are readily shared. They experience virtual closeness through common topics, a shared language, appreciation of one’s coworkers, a shared awareness of existing diversity, good personal relations, and more than anything through jointly produced results. One member mentions humor as a unifying aspect in virtual communication and promptly triggers a discussion about the intercultural problems with that. The Chinese language, for example, doesn’t know the concepts of irony and sarcasm.
So how can a team or network know where best to intervene to generate more virtual closeness? This question catapults us right into the thick of the VPA. The idea of a structured assessment of virtual performance to identify entry points for smart interventions seems to make sense to participants as it offers a common language to analyze the perceived reality of remote teams and networks. To illustrate the process we introduce two exemplary VPA outputs, one from a global company and another from a UN learning network, and ask the group to review and interpret the two profiles. The neuralgic points in both profiles are identified easily and a common tentative interpretation is quickly reached. The majority of participants identifies with the challenges and strengths of the UN learning network output. The latter is characterized by high scores in communication and work styles, feedback competence, language skills, and information sharing, and by lower scores in the areas of work schedule overlap, time investment, workflow integration, and organizational relevance.
These results embody the typical strengths and challenges of networks as perceived by their members. Networks are shared spaces that are joined voluntarily by interested people who are attracted to what the network offers. When networks form in organizational structures that are, however, still partly a matrix and partly a traditional, hierarchical organization (as is often the case in global organizations), they will often experience challenges to the dimensions of organization and process and of space and time because the network’s needs tend to escape the organization.
A VPA can lead to a better understanding of such challenges and followed by a virtual performance improvement process (VPI) that is customized to the specific needs of a group. To illustrate such a process we provide a brief overview of the organization and team development interventions designed and delivered to the two example organizations. More specifically, we share strategies to overcome a lack in work schedule overlap (through global rotation, for example). We also introduce the notion that media ought to be selected carefully for different communication situations and share a table that allocates a variety of media to different communication situations. The bottom line is that the factors underlying virtual closeness can be influenced and are far too important to be left to chance.
The feedback from this truly inspiring group confirms that the goals of our short workshop have been met. The participants return to the world of UN, EU & Co. with a better understanding of virtual closeness and some ideas about how to create and foster it using a structured approach like the VPA/VPI.
Text by Susanne Skoruppa and Gunnar Brückner