Global,Virtual, The Worker Extensible Teams of the Future By Row Henson By Gerald Falkowski and Stephen Troutman

INTRODUCTION In our book1 “Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams,” published by IHRIM May 2005, we discussed the nuts and bolts of managing virtual teams. To our surprise as we wrote our book, we found we had to define terms like virtual2 and real as used in teaming environments. We also found we had to create a “Team Capital Model”3 to describe the characteristics and requirements of teaming in a virtual environment, since there was no existing model to describe being virtual. When we wrote the book, we had to leave some topics out, including the organizational challenges of managing multiple virtual teams and the implications of virtual teaming over time. These concepts were left out because our stated goal was to cover the basics of managing virtual teams. We bounded our discussion to the “how to” of virtual teaming because there was not a pressing need for these additional topics at that time and we did not want to scare people away with the longer-term implications of virtual teaming. Since then, virtual teaming has become boundariless and now we are ready to go beyond just managing virtual teams. Since publishing our book, the virtual topics of implications over time and multiple team environments have become more urgent. The global virtual economy has moved forward toward new human resource frontiers, characterised by shifting borders and boundarilessness. Organizations are realizing that virtual is much less costly and can be as effective as face-to-face, in many cases, so they are adding more and more virtual teams. We are seeing company leaders and human resource partners trying to take a more proactive role in helping the organizations they support understand and implement virtual teams. But, leaders tell us they simply aren’t sure of all the issues or when they know the issues they don’t know how to effectively manage them. Likewise, team members want to know how to manage their work, their lives, and their career proactively in this new environment. This article will explore in a case format the challenges, implications, and recommendations for leaders and team members as they swiftly moved from understanding virtual teaming concepts to implementing and sustaining multiple, extensible virtual teams, employees, and careers in a virtual environment. The challenges are based on the characteristics of virtual. Virtual means a participant is not only remote (in a different location) but also from a different organization, i.e., with different management chain. The one constant through this swift evolution is the undeniable benefits of virtual teams

which consistently produce higher quality output (due to the expertise which can be assembled) at remarkable levels of productivity (no cost or time lost to travel). The intellectual knowledge shared in the article is based on our practical experience helping global companies implement global virtual teams as well a survey of current literature and virtual teaming Web sites.4 Our hope is that leaders reading this article will learn how to think ahead – beyond virtual – take away a few new tips and techniques on how to effectively manage virtually. We also hope team members will gain an understanding of how to work and manage their work life and careers in the new frontier – beyond virtual.

BACKGROUND:AMALGAMATED CONSOLIDATED, INC Harry, the human resource director of ACI, Amalgamated Consolidated, Inc., was troubled. He was becoming more and more aware of the growing trend for the company to operate as a collection of virtual teams – employees from different organizations and from different locations working together in a boundariless environment. Some of these teams never come together organizationally or physically. He thought he had seen it all, from the early days of personal computing when a few ACI employees wanted to work remotely, to today when whole departments did not even have desks at the company facilities. Those changes required a lot of new HR approaches. But now, new challenges were arising from this boundariless, virtual environment – and he had to figure out how to take human resources beyond boundariless. Harry had a meeting at 9:00 this morning with Mark the director of the product design team for the Professional Widget product line. A couple of years ago, the Professional Widget team would simply take market research data and feedback about the current product and develop the next generation product all by themselves. Today, the process was much more complex with early involvement of marketing, sales, the service and support teams and customers. Since the skilled people needed for the new process worked all over the world, this meant more and more virtual teams. Harry wondered if this was what Mark would want to discuss. Mark, the director of design for the Professional Widget product family, had to keep his product line up-to-date to remain competitive. He needed to develop the best possible new products and, also, upgrade existing product designs in the shortest amount of time, at a competitive cost. Since they

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had tried out cross functional design teams their design quality had gone up substantially. Their early pilots of resident design teams brought together from around the world for a six week intensive design process had really worked great. But, cost was an issue and Mark also had to make continuous product improvements and mid-life upgrades to his products. These more mundane design needs could not support a travel budget like new product development. Naturally, Mark had gravitated to virtual teams. First, he could get access to the expertise he needed without incurring a large travel budget. Secondly, he could also get access to the best SME. These top people were often not available to his new product design teams because they could not be freed up for the six week resident program. They could not be away from their regular jobs for that long, because their expertise was also needed in their home organization. Mark now had four ”fully sanctioned” virtual teams, and he saw reports on an additional nine ”sponsored” virtual teams, started by his department heads. He knew of another 50 virtual teams. Some of these were sanctioned or sponsored by other functional areas and some had been started by the employees themselves. Virtual teaming had worked really well from the beginning, but now problems were starting to arise. Mark’s problem was that many of his design people were in demand for sales and marketing virtual team projects and this work was impacting their work as designers. He was also starting to see resistance from the other functions to free up people for his projects. There was an emerging pattern that some virtual teams were not as effective as in the past. It was also clear that this loss of efficiency and effectiveness varied greatly from team to team, so it could not be defined as a specific problem. In addition, he was hearing more complaints about workload from his managers and his employees. He had asked Bob, one of his trusted managers to look into these problems. He knew something had to be done or retention would start to become a problem. That is why he had scheduled a meeting with Harry. Bob was one of Mark’s most experienced and knowledgeable managers. But he was painfully aware that he no longer had a clear understanding of what his people were doing on a day-to-day basis. Over the last couple of years the expansion of the spans of control had made all his old approaches to keeping track of his people less effective. The fact that his people were working on virtual team projects outside the department made this more problematic. Bob had brought his concerns up casually with Mark at the end of their last status update meeting. Mark said he thought it was important and asked Bob to gather some more information about the issue. Mark said he would talk to Harry in HR to see if this was a pervasive issue. Mark suggested they get back together next week to compare notes. Ellen pondered her upcoming work week and she had some problems. She is an experienced product designer and the technical lead for her group. She is the premier SME in her area and is always in demand. This had always been true going back over ten years. In the past, she and her boss had worked out some rules of thumb to help her decide when she should say, ”yes” to some requests and when she should

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go back to her boss for approval before starting on some new project. This had worked well until the last couple of years, but now the requests were coming from different functional areas and from different levels of management and she had a new boss. Her new boss, Bob, like her old boss and all management, had acquired additional responsibilities and now had twice as many people to manage as five years ago. Bob also lived in a different time zone. Ellen had several concerns. The first was that Bob, her new boss, did not know what she did on a day-to-day basis. It was not really his fault or an unusual problem; he simply did not have the time to understand or keep track of all of her projects and the other activities she worked on. She had mentioned this to Bob and they agreed she should brief him on all of her active projects, but it was evident this would be difficult with both of their busy schedules. The second problem was that she really only worked for her boss part time anyway. As a virtual team member, she was “matrixed” out to a number of different organizations and their projects. The third problem, created by the first two, was that what she did no longer clearly fit any job description. Sometimes she was a designer, other times a SME on one of several topics, often she was a facilitator, and occasionally she was a project leader. Her job performance was no longer visible by any one person or even any one team. She wondered what her performance appraisal score would be at the end of this year. Ed was pretty new to ACI. He had been hired into the design organization less than a year ago. He was put immediately to work on a large product upgrade that put his recent degree in engineering to excellent use. After about four months, people had recognized his skill and he started getting ”recruited” to work on other projects in the department and because of his recent degree on virtual teams. He dutifully went to his manager, Bob, with each request and got approval to join the various project teams. However, although Bob travelled into town almost every week they only actually sat down and talked about once a month or so. When they did talk, Bob was mostly worried about how Ed was doing on the two local projects that belonged to Bob’s department. Ed was getting much more positive feedback from his virtual projects, and it was becoming clear that his manager did not know or apparently care much about them. Ed was starting to worry about his career options and potential at ACI. Pete had been a successful team leader in the past on several large projects within his accounting organization, but now his latest project was starting to fall behind schedule. He had been assigned to lead a large project that would require a lot of work outside of accounting. His cross functional project team was made up of eight team members, with only one coming from accounting. In addition, it was the first virtual team he had ever led. He was leading the team as he had led other teams in the past, but, with everyone from different organizations, they were not responding very well to his leadership. The following four cases offer tips and techniques on how to effectively operate in a global matrixed environment. Case one examines workload management for people on multiple virtual teams. Case two looks at how to deal with performance

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issues in a multi-team virtual environment. Case 3 offers tips on building a sense of belonging and organizational affinity for people on multiple virtual teams. Case four provides a perspective on being a virtual team member.

making. The workload and project information will also be of value to project managers and people doing planning or research. Having project and workload information to roll up from the bottom to the top of an organization can provide tremendous insight at all levels.

CASE 1:WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT FOR PEOPLE ON MULTIPLE VIRTUAL TEAMS

Description: As a new employee Ed was careful to get permission from his manager, Bob, before engaging in any projects. Bob approved each assignment as it came up. Now, several months later and well into the work, Bob does not seem to recall two of the virtual projects. Ellen’s situation is similar except that as a more senior employee, she pretty much managed her own assignments anyway. Both Ed and Ellen are concerned about being over loaded with work, but Bob, their manager, did not seem to be able to keep up with what they were working on. In fact, Bob showed up today with two new small projects, one for Ed and one for Ellen. Challenges: With virtual teaming, the workload of an employee is no longer as visible to management as it was in the past. This is not just a virtual problem, it is also caused by the team based approaches and the ”matrixed” organizational model in place today in which cross functional projects are not managed from a single organization. In addition, due to “right sizing,” many businesses managers have more responsibilities and greater spans of control than in the past. The result is team members have more projects with more diversity of roles, while managers have more people and more projects about which they have to keep up to date. Implications: It is very clear that improving our work load tracking and management systems is required in a virtual and matrixed world. Information about work assignments must be available to both managers and employees, since both must deal with the problem. It must span all of the work performed both in and out of the department of a given set of workers. Finally, flexibility and scalability of the work load data must be considered, since data gathered in one place for one purpose, may have to be available and useable across the organization as well as up and down the management chain for planning and decision making. Recommendations: Harry should lead the acquisition and deployment of a process to track projects and workload. An automated tool will almost certainly be required since the process must operate at the employee level as well as at several levels of management to be valuable. The employees, like Ed and Ellen, are often the only ones who know exactly what they are working on. Making the workload tracking process valuable to the employees will ensure the data is accurate and timely for other uses. The data gathered must be made accessible to all levels of management. Each level will have different uses of the data so design for flexible use is critical. First, line managers will use it to track the work and manage their employee’s workload and project assignments. This will solve Bob’s problem of not being able to recall the projects upon which Ed is working. Second line managers will use categorized data to observe trends, make decisions on work direction, and to balance resources. Executive management will use the summarized data in strategic decision

CASE 2: DEALING WITH PERFORMANCE ISSUES IN A MULTI-TEAM VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT. Description: Ellen, the experienced product designer and technical lead for her group is currently assigned to three separate global virtual teams. She “reports” to three virtual project team leaders as well as to her boss, Bob. One of her virtual team leaders is Pete. For Bob, she has five smaller teams upon which she works. She leads three of those teams. Also, as a SME she receives a fairly constant stream of small projects and questions about her subject area. This is normally the equivalent work of being on a sixth team. The two “Mid-life Product” virtual design teams are on schedule. As expected, Ellen is contributing nearly 40 percent of her work time to keep the two teams on track. Unfortunately for Ellen, the third virtual team working on the “Next Generation” product design is behind schedule. Ellen is quite frustrated in the way the project team leader, Pete, is using a command and control leadership style, instead of the collaboration and empowerment approach of the leaders of the other two virtual teams. Ellen is certain they could be moving a lot faster if he would let his team members collaborate and apply their expertise as they saw fit, instead of giving orders that some team members simply ignored. Pete also seemed to be holding them back by requiring his approval for each change in an assignment or role. Peter was demanding more and more hands on time with Ellen and the other team members as the project schedule started to slip behind. Ellen let Bob know there was a problem brewing and that, in her opinion, Peter was creating inefficiency through his approach. She also told Bob that the errant project was about to impact the five other projects and the SME role she performed for Bob. Ellen and Bob did not know that Pete was escalating through his management chain to get more resources for his project; including more of Ellen’s time along with resources from Ellen’s other two virtual team projects. Challenges: Virtual teams with their cross organizational make-up and lack of a single management chain do not lend themselves to a command and control leadership approach. The issue of a leadership style, command and control, in this case, is about to impact not just the project itself but it is about to spill out into other projects and up into the management system as well. Ellen has alerted her management, while Pete is escalating to his management. The problem, in this case, is that there is no place that the management chains come together until very high up in the organization. Some interesting challenges from this case include: How will they go about resolving the cross organizational issues? Who will decide (since Bob and Peter are not even in the same organization)? Will we have to go above Mark, the director of product design, since Pete does not report to him? Implications: Seemingly small management issues, like Pete’s leadership approach or the failure to make progress in

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one project, can have large impacts in the management system in virtual environments if potential systemic problems are not addressed from the very beginning before a project starts. In this case, we need to know two things: What is the process for allocating resources to a project that is falling behind schedule without impacting other on-schedule projects? And, how does this process work across organizational boundaries? The clear implication is that we have to decide before the crisis occurs, how we will resolve issues of this type and who will make the decisions. Since cross functional work teams are more effective at dealing with complex problems, doesn’t it make sense that cross functional management teams will do a better job at dealing with management issues? Recommendations: Form a cross functional team of managers to investigate the project and its impact. This team should probably include Bob, Pete’s manager, and managers from other departments represented on the team. At the same time, form a team of executives, mirroring the make up of the manager team. The executive team will act as an escalation point and decision-making body to ratify or reject any recommendation coming forward from the manager team. The executive team may also have to enforce the implementation of any decisions. The first task of the cross functional manager team is to determine if there is a leadership problem or some other problem causing the project to slip. Performing a team maturity assessment5 to understand the issues facing the errant team would be a great start. The assessment data might indicate that the team was experiencing a “process loss” – that is, their total performance was something less that the sum of their individual contributors. Leadership issues or other problems may be the culprit. Depending on the results of the analysis by the manager team, they can decide on a set of actions. In this case, additional expertise, such as a virtual teaming expert, may be brought in to coach Pete on how to lead his virtual team. Or, maybe they will find that Pete does need additional resources, in which case, the cross functional management team can agree to the fix, not just dump more work on Ellen. If the cross functional management team cannot agree on a solution, then they must escalate the problem to the cross functional executive team. From their higher view in the organization, they may see other options or they may find it easier to come to consensus on one of the solutions considered by the management team. One thing is clear, it is the executives’ responsibility to decide on a set of actions that will lead to the correction of the problem of the errant team and get them on track again. It is much better to establish the cross functional management and executive teams before they are needed. Trying to put a decision team in place during a crisis can be a crisis all of its own.

CASE 3: BUILDING A SENSE OF TEAM IDENTITY, BELONGING AND ORGANIZATIONAL AFFINITY FOR PEOPLE ON MULTIPLE VIRTUAL TEAMS

Description: Ed and Ellen, as knowledge workers, both had a good understanding of what they were working on. They knew their projects. They also knew the people on their

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projects. In fact, they had developed professional and personal relationships with them. What they did not know so well, especially Ed as a new employee, was everyone in their own department. Even Ellen, as an SME within the department, was starting to lose touch with many parts of her own organization after all the changes in the last year. They both felt disconnected and wondered what they should consider “home” – their department or their project teams. Bob, Ed and Ellen’s boss, was aware of two things. The first was that he was not fully aware of what his team members were working on. Bob had an embarrassing moment in which he was caught not remembering a project to which he had assigned Ed. The second problem was more subtle. Bob sensed that these two employees did not feel connected to their department or to him. They were losing or had never had a sense of belonging. Certainly, this was aggravated by the amount of time they spent working virtually. Challenges: Team identity and belonging is an important and well known requirement for effective teaming of all types. Virtual employees have differences in local physical context, less random contact with others in their department, virtual projects outside their department, time zone issues, and culture and language difficulties that make it difficult to establish and maintain belonging and team identity. These are amongst a longer list of factors that contribute to the feeling of not belonging. It is not surprising that virtual team leaders often find it difficult to instill a sense of belonging to people they usually only meet over a telephone, rarely or never see face to face, who come from different cultures and customs, with unique personalities, and varying comfort levels with a common language, such as English. Virtual team members often have little visible reason to trust one another, are working under incredible time pressures to satisfy multiple stakeholders’ demands, and also have to maintain productivity and budget targets. Implications: Building and maintaining team identity and belonging is even more challenging for virtual teams. This means more work for team leaders and everyone’s managers. Lack of team identity or belonging usually means the team will be less efficient and effective in developing and delivering its product. This is due to lack of respect for each other, and low trust levels that directly impact work output. Building an environment for trust and establishing a culture of respect is a key leadership role. Perhaps as important as the impact on an individual project are the larger HR implications. Lack of belonging can show up in HR indicators, such as, decreased employee morale. Lack of morale always has retention impacts. Finally, in a virtual environment, problems from one team can pollinate widely across other virtual teams. Visibility into other organizations is easier and this means that management must clean up those issues that used to only be “in house.” Recommendations: Determine what type of team identity and belonging is the problem. Is it the virtual project team or the ”home” department that we are concerned about? The solution is to develop and execute an identity and belonging plan in either case, and just choose who executes the solution changes. If it is for the ”home” organization, then the

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employee’s manager, Bob in this case, should create a work plan to build and sustain the long-distant relationships necessary to create feelings of belonging and identity. If it is for a virtual project, then the project leader should create a “team identity” plan to span the course of the project. It is important for a team leader to be well organized, because plans to improve identity and belonging are often not “hard” actions and are easy to let slip away. The plans should be specific and time-based: “Call Ed on the 23rd, ask him how he is feeling about the new project and his workload.” Management contacts are critical and must be actively managed by the manager or virtual team leader. Rich and timely communications about ”issues that matter” are essential in creating feelings of belonging. In our book, Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams, Chapter 3 focused on Elementary Team Building and Facilitation;6 we discuss how to enable team identity and belonging. You must ensure that everyone has a clear sense of the goals, objectives, and purpose for their sponsoring organization or the project team. Everyone on the team or in the department must participate in a team identity and belonging process that defines the following: • Who are we? • What do we do? • Who is responsible and accountable? • Who do we do it for and to? • How will we know when it’s done? • How will we (and others) monitor progress and performance? • How will we (and others) measure results? Bob probably needs to review these questions with Ed and Ellen right away. Bob also needs to determine how he is going to keep up-to-date on their work assignments (see Case 1). Managers and team leaders can play a key role in watching for the early warning signs of team members “not belonging feelings” via a “management listening post” such as; employee opinion or credo surveys, management/team leader one-on-one employee feedback session, town hall meeting, water cooler talk, etc. Employees also have an important self-initiated role in team identity and belonging. This is because they are the one constituent to whom belonging and identity is most important. Employees have the key role of ensuring their issues and concerns are known to the management, team leaders and peers.

CASE 4: BEING A VIRTUAL TEAM MEMBER Description: Ellen and Ed sit at both ends of employment. Ellen is the experienced, long-term, trusted, and, often selfmanaging employee. Ed is the new employee, still building trust and needing a little more coaching and closer supervision. They both are worried about their work/life balance and working in a virtual environment but for slightly different reasons. As Ellen worked on her work plan for the week she saw that once again there would be no unscheduled time, even if she worked 12-hour days. In the old days, she would always leave

at least 10 percent of her calendar open for crises (unscheduled events) and try for five percent for “thinking” (creativity or root-cause problem solving). Since virtual teaming had arrived, she has had so many external demands, each driven by their own deadlines, that real planning was not possible at her level. She observed that she would spend only 50 percent of her time this 50-hour week working in her “design job” and the rest would be projects that needed her expertise and would use her skills, but were not really “design” work. This was OK with Ellen because she could also see how important these virtual projects were. While she knew her participation was critical to the virtual team’s success, she wondered if her manager knew it. Were the long hours worth it? She wondered what would be her next career step. As he approached his first-year anniversary, Ed was working on four virtual project teams and two internal projects. On two of his virtual projects he was the only engineering representative, which was both fun and a little scary. He was getting great experience, but more than once, due to time pressures, he had to guess at the right answer. Was this the right thing to do? Over the last few months Ed found himself having to deal with excessive work load, as several of the projects ramped up. When Ed brought the subject up with his boss, it became clear that Bob did not even recall assigning Ed to one of the virtual projects. Bob agreed he had to get up-to-date on Ed’s projects. How would he be appraised if his boss did not even know what project he was on? Ed wondered how he should be demonstrating what he could do for his boss. He wondered what would be his next career step. Challenges: Virtual employees have a number of issues they need to deal with beyond those of their non-virtual peers. How does a virtual employee manage their time when their requirements are coming from several different places, many outside of their organization? How do they manage their careers when their manager may not even know what they are working on and what skills they are gaining? How does a virtual employee deal with their lack of visibility and the absence of physical contact with their manager and peers? How does a virtual worker ensure that they are getting proper credit for what they are doing? How do virtual workers engage with their peers? How do they balance work and personal life? Implications: Virtual employees have additional responsibilities when compared to “local” employees. On a day-to-day basis, virtual employees need to be more disciplined, directed, and self-managing. They must be more proactive in work load and time management. They must focus on building and sustaining relationships by finding ways to replace the lack of face-to-face contact. For instance, they must define how they get day-to-day feedback and “water cooler” information sharing? If they are working out of their homes they must deal with both the logistics issues and the potential distractions from working at home. Being out of sight, they also need to be focused more on the right things for their careers. Going beyond virtual means that the employees need to weave this “extra work” into their everyday behaviors and the businesses also need to change in how they operate to incorporate and facilitate the employee’s efforts. The fundamental difference is that local workers have ac-

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cess to the subtle connections that come from personal contact with their managers and peers. To overcome the natural advantage of the local employee, businesses must educate everyone on the virtual team culture. Team members need to be educated on the additional rigor and responsibilities required of a virtual worker operating in the new frontier. Managers and project team leaders also need this same education and additional training on managing in this environment – beyond virtual. Recommendations: To deal with the extra responsibilities of being virtual, employees like ED and Ellen, need to develop enhanced skills, beyond those of normal employees. On a day-to-day basis they need to become expert in two categories of virtual skills and execute them in a superior way: 1. Interpersonal skills, which include: • Virtual communications via phone, e-mail, video conference, instant messaging and other technological means. • Relationship building, including establishing and maintaining trust. 2. Personal Skills, which include: • Prioritization, time, and workload management, especially work/life balance; and, • Self-management and discipline. Interpersonal skills, as defined above, are directly related to engaging with others, while the personal skills ensure we are focused on the right things, including the management of time, work, career and personal life. Successful personal skills are a big help in executing interpersonal skills. For instance, the virtual employee who has prioritized their items for discussion before engaging in interpersonal communications will be more likely to address her most important issues when the communication occurs. In addition, if they have also focused on their interpersonal skills, they are much more likely to have selected the best method to get their message across. Ed and Ellen cannot just let communication, business relationships, and their career ”just happen” because they will be at a disadvantage compared to their peers who are not virtual. To be successful they need to develop both their personal and interpersonal skills. In a beyond virtual world, everyone should be trained in these skills. If training is not provided by the business in these skill areas, then the virtual employee must find training on their own. There are many books, self-help programs, and classes to address these skill areas for the virtual employee. In addition to the individual employees, a business also has a responsibility in the virtual world. Harry, the HR director, is beginning to understand that it is important for the business to understand and deal with the issues of virtual. He is realizing that they needed to train the management team, the project and team leaders, as well as the virtual employees on roles and responsibilities of the virtual work environment. He knows his HR organization has nothing to offer on being virtual. In the short term, he knows new educational materials are needed to provide insight on what virtual means for both virtual and non-virtual workers and

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managers. He also sees that training materials are needed that contain best practices on how to operate in a virtual business environment. We recommend that Harry look beyond just the virtual work relationships and think beyond virtual work to all of the other aspects of the business. Do we need a different type of employee? This means recruiting may change. Do we need different work rules and conditions of employment? This means employment contracts and practices may change. Do we need different ways to approach and manage work projects? This means our management systems may change. Do we need different reward structures? This means incentives and management behaviors may change. Do we need different retention practices? This means management practices and HR offerings may change. Do we need different applications and tools? Information Technology may change. In answering the preceding questions, we recommend that Harry consider the following eight characteristics that apply particularly to both virtual managers and virtual team members. • Good communicator, • Good relationship builder, • Good virtual team player (leader and follower roles), • Reliable and trustworthy, • Balanced in work and personal life, • Self-managed, to high priority goals, • Disciplined, with a results-focused work style, and • Good with time management and workload management. The bottom line is that virtual people must think about these skills and make sure they do something every day to ensure that each of them is a positive attribute. Non-virtual people need to be cognizant of the particular issues of their virtual peers or employees. All must work together to communicate and establish relationships. Human resources leaders need to be proactive and develop policies, practices, and training on how to operate in the new virtual paradigm.

SUMMING UP Virtual teams offer the potential of working around the clock, harnessing diverse skills, and bringing many more and varied perspectives to a problem or project. In the case study, ACI, like many global companies, has evolved into a complex matrixed virtual company, leveraging, with many of its employees, the efficiency of virtual teams and operating in the new virtual frontier. We are seeing the first signs that ACI is starting to really think about the implications beyond only the productivity from virtual teams – that is going beyond virtual. Harry was aware that HR had no programs to deal with the virtual ”out of sight, out of mind” environment. Mark was worried about managing and coordinating across projects and organizations in the virtual environment. Bob was his own worse critic as he disclosed how he was having trouble keeping up with the virtual projects in which his team participated. Ed and Ellen had their concerns about being on their own. So, the case study presents a familiar picture of a business just starting to wrestle with virtual issues, even though virtual teaming is already firmly embedded in their work practice.

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This dichotomy of a functioning virtual teaming practice on one hand, without a virtual policy or supporting infrastructure on the other is why so many of our recommendations are targeted at training. The first thing that needs to be done is establish awareness. Training is one important way to do this. Out of developing awareness will come the need to understand the issues and develop virtual policy. The existing user need, already visible in the case study, will drive the acquisition of tools, education and infrastructure. The company’s virtual policy will help to guide and integrate virtual programs – as they move beyond virtual. The good news is that best practices in global virtual teaming are available and are already reshaping how we think about operating in this new frontier. Some progressive human resource organizations are starting to formally engage in virtual teaming. For example, in our work at a major global pharmaceutical company, corporate human resource partners are coaching leaders on how to be communicationintensive leaders, a requirement of managing in a virtual environment. These team leaders are taught how to check in on each of their virtual members frequently, how to mentor them, and how to establish and communicate team norms, i.e., how the team will behave. They learn how to handle diversity purposefully, recognizing it early in the team’s life cycle and leveraging it throughout the team’s life cycle.7 They know how virtual teams can build trust through a planned team communication strategy and frequent in-process, team-building sessions. All this is done without ever meeting face to face. We hope that the challenges, implications, and recommendations we offered, based on our experience, will help you in your journey to design and implement systems in your business that take you beyond virtual.

ENDNOTES 1 Gerald Falkowski and Stephen Troutman IHRIM book titled: Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams, published May 2005. The first four chapters present the Team Capital Model and the three checklists that are fundamental to successful virtual teaming. Chapter 5 is a case study that shows how the virtual team model works in practice. Chapters 6-8 provide detailed discussion of elements critical to all virtual teams: trust, culture and technology. Chapter 9 provides a discussion of how to manage large, complex, and multi-team projects. The final chapter provides guidance on how to simplify and un-complicate the execution of your virtual team. The appendix contains templates and chapter references to checklist, assessments and other tools we have developed and use for managing virtual teams. https://www.ihrimjournal.com/bookorder.php 2 Gerald Falkowski and Stephen Troutman. Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams, Page 3, Figure 1. 3 Gerald Falkowski and Stephen Troutman. Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams, Page 5, Figure 2. 4 A reference site for the information needs of leaders and team members working on remote, dispersed or virtual projects. http://www.startwright.com/virtual.htm. 5 Team Maturity Assessment designed to understand and work on the maturity level of a team. The questions are con-

structed based on research in the area of team maturity and its critical success factors, which include accountability, goal information and competency. 6 Gerald Falkowski and Stephen Troutman. Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams, Chapter 3, pages 23-37. 7 The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of team development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. This model has become the basis for subsequent models of team dynamics and frequently used management theory to describe the behavior of existing teams’ forming, storming model.

Gerald Falkowski (Gerry) specializes in global virtual team training and executive and business coaching. He has more than 30 years of industry experience in management, leadership development, human resources, information technology, and business transformation consulting. He was an associate partner with IBM Business Consulting Services, where he developed and implemented organizational change management methodologies for large-scale, global information technology projects. Falkowski is a faculty member with the University of Minnesota’s Business and IT department, and teaches courses in virtual teaming and organization change management. He also serves on the University’s advisory board for perfecting the implementation of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). He is a certified business coach and managing partner with BetterCompany consulting. He has a degree in engineering, computer science and business management. He is a co-author of the IHRIM book: Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams. He authored chapters in the IHRIM books: Out of Site: An Inside Look at HR Outsourcing and Common Cause: Shared Services for Human Resources. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected]. Stephen Troutman (Steve) is IBM’s World Wide Process Design owner for the Opportunity Management (OM) process. His OM process owner role provides both standards and best practices for opportunity management sales activities across all IBM businesses. In this role, he has worked virtually as both a team leader and team member on multiple virtual teams over the last four years. Prior to this assignment, he spent 10 years as an IBM Business Transformation consultant and associate partner in IBM Business Consulting Services. He led several virtual engagements as a consultant. Prior to consulting, Troutman spent 14 years in IBM sales and sales management. He is retired from the U.S. Navy Reserve, where he achieved the rank of captain and honed leadership and management skills in seven Commanding Officer billets. He is also a futurist and active member of the World Future Society’s oldest chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With more than 30 years of experience in management, sales and consulting, he is an occasional speaker on transformation management, futures topics, and, of course, virtual teaming. He has lead or coached remote and virtual teams in commercial business, government, and non-profit organizations. Troutman is a co-author of the book, Remote Control: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Virtual Teams. He has an M.B.A. in entrepreneurship and venture management and a B.S. in management, both from the University of Southern California. He can be reached at [email protected].

IHRIM Journal • Volume XI, Number 1 • 2007

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