Team management is a tricky balance between motivation, control, and support. But when you add dispersion to the mix, things get a lot more complicated. Managing virtual teams that rarely meet in person and can span across the globe is an amazing feat of technology and progress, but it still has its challenges.
In this post, we are going to discuss some of the major differences between managing virtual teams and colocated ones. We are also going to lay out a path forward in case you find yourself struggling with this new virtual norm.
We will cover the following.
- What is a team?
- What is a dispersed or virtual team?
- Risks of Managing Virtual Teams
- Benefits of Managing Virtual Teams
- How To Manage A Virtual Team, Step-By-Step
- 11 Quick Tips For Managing Virtual Teams
Managing virtual teams involves adjusting a lot of the ideals of management in a usual setting, so we ask that you consider all these ideas wholeheartedly.
What is a Team?
Teams in a professional setting are a lot like sports teams. By combining their skills and setting each person in different roles, a group comes together to achieve a common goal. Each role is necessary and has completely different responsibilities than the others to ensure optimal coverage.
Each of those roles is (hopefully) assigned to individuals based on their apparent strengths and weaknesses. Basically, if someone isn’t great at math, you don’t assign them to do only that.
Compared to a “group,” which looks more like a bunch of people with roughly similar goals. There could be multiple of the same role collected in a space with the title “team” slapped on, but it’s not the same.
What is a Dispersed or Virtual Team?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all seen a huge increase in “remote work.” Remote, dispersed, distant, or detached work represents any job that can be done outside of the traditional or usual setting.
More than ever, companies have the ability to reduce overhead costs, combine a wide variety of talents, and get work done in the new world. Location doesn’t limit anything anymore. It’s basically down to how strong your wifi is. Some argue it’s the worst thing to ever happen to the workforce, and others say it’s the best. Either way, virtual teams are here to stay.
From a management perspective, remote, dispersed, or virtual teams are more difficult to keep up with. In some cases, members of a virtual team won’t ever meet up, which can severely reduce the frequency and quality of communications—something management relies heavily on.
The Risk of Managing Virtual Teams
Let’s be honest. No work model is perfect. More often than not, we are often stuck making the best of what we have. The only difference is that, unlike any other time, remote work is an option. So, you’ll have to decide if it’s the right option for you.
But it’s more likely that you are already knee-deep in a remote existence, so let’s talk about some of the issues you might be seeing.
1. Collaboration is more difficult.
Emails are useful, but depending on who you are, waiting for an email to answer that one random question you have can be hard. It can kill momentum and drag the pace. When your counterparts are a flimsy cubicle wall away, you can shout your questions, get an immediate, shouted response, and move on.
When the team is dispersed across the country (or the world), it doesn’t work like that.
2. Coordination is more difficult.
It’s not uncommon for teams to coordinate their efforts to handle tasks, and when everyone lives in different locations, joining up is a logistics nightmare. Sometimes, there is no easy way to make attendance possible for everyone. Depending on how global your team is, someone is waking up at 3 a.m. to make that meeting, and that kills a lot of the motivation.
It’s more likely that people will try to “just handle it” themselves, which doesn’t always result in the best outcome.
3. Connection can be lacking.
Emails can only get so warm and fuzzy. Building a friendship through email is not easy and is rarely done. What’s more likely is people will gently try to get along and get through communicating to get back to their work. Trust is harder to forge, and without trust, all of the team’s strengths can waiver.
4. Conflict can flourish.
No one is going to get along all the time. It’s impossible, especially on a team that has to come together a lot. So, when someone’s feathers get ruffled by someone in a completely different timezone, what happens?
Well, those icky feelings can easily fester and rot the little connection dispersed coworkers have. Without someone taking the initiative to clear the air, everyone will just sit around breathing in the smoke.
5. Different types of people work in different ways.
No one works the same, even if they were born and raised in the same zipcode. People are so unique in how they prefer to function, get work done, and collaborate. If you add completely different cultures to the mix, it complicates it more.
How we express ourselves, view the actions of others, and make sense of it all completely relies on how we were raised and how we’ve navigated life. All of that is going to vary depending on 1) who you are and 2) where you are from.
The Benefits of Managing Virtual Teams
After reading about the risks and issues associated with managing virtual teams, you might be wondering if there are any benefits. Rest assured that there are plenty, but they depend on the team’s ability to face the challenge.
A lack of intention and effort will lead you right to the issues. But if you take this bull by the horns, you can only go up from here.
So, what are the advantages of managing a virtual team?
- The amount of flexibility
- The lack of limits
- Improved access to resources
- Many opportunities for improvement
- Diversity
1. Flexibility, Flexibility, and More Flexibility.
This is not to be ignored. The usual commute-oriented 9-5 offers little to no flexibility, and it shows. People joke about their jobs being soul-sucking. A lack of flexibility is how that happens. And when people have their souls sucked out of them, they aren’t going to be swinging out their best ideas. If anything, they swirl down into a rut.
When people have the power to adjust their schedule to their preferences, they automatically enjoy it more. Are they a night person? Are they a morning person? When do they want to eat? It’s all up to them, and when you are managing virtual teams, you understand that quality is important. And in a dispersed setting, it’s much more possible than a “brick and mortar” one.
2. No One Is Limited By Location.
When Japan implemented the bullet train system, its economy became one of the most competitive in the world. Every metric for input, output, and job quality improved because they could travel hundreds of miles with ease. What was once a 6-hour drive spanning over 300 miles became a 2.5-hour bullet train ride.
Now, imagine that you could log in to your work, and there was no commute. You didn’t have to spend any amount of time sitting, staring at tail lights. That also means you can access any number of highly specialized employees that live anywhere in the world.
3. Better Access To Better Resources.
The internet is one of the best resources for information that the human race has ever seen. Your business existing inside of that resource (or using it to its benefit) can drastically improve things for you. Think about everything you’ve learned from a quick Google search. It’s hard to picture living without that access these days, and while lots of people like to complain about it, that doesn’t dismiss the fact that it’s drastically improved how we work.
4. Expert Help Is Everywhere.
People can become highly specialized in one craft or many these days. So, it makes sense that that would benefit your business. Everyone can improve their quality of output through learning.
5. More Diversity.
While “diversity” has become quite the buzzword, it’s true that different perspectives can improve the output of the whole. When you have an assortment of people working toward a collective goal, everyone is opened up to different ways of working, feedback, and new networks. Sure, that can cause some of the issues we talked about, but it can also result in your team finding continuous improvement opportunities as they get more comfortable with being a little uncomfortable.
How to Manage A Virtual Team
Team management, project management, or any type of overseeing others is a complicated task. You are in charge of controlling, supporting, and supervising a group of people with individual goals, needs, dreams, and quirks. Somehow, you have to balance all of that and keep people moving along—hopefully of their own accord.
If you are managing a virtual team, you have to come to terms with the fact that it will not look like managing a colocated team. Your focus shifts. Your team’s needs change. The office can be filled with camaraderie, momentum, connection, and creativity. It’s an environment that is rich in relevant information.
A virtual workspace is not automatically without those things, but it takes more work to facilitate. It also requires management to rethink how they’ll make all of those great team-related features accessible to every member, no matter their location. We think that’s possible in four steps.
- Build the right team
- Recognize your issues
- Pick your processes
- Task-related
- Socio-emotional
- Figure out how you’ll manage
Let us explain.
1. Build the Right Virtual Team
More often than not, something wild happens, and you find yourself needing to switch to remote work. That could look like an organizational change you weren’t expecting or a global pandemic. Either way, you’ve got to make changes—and fast. If this setup looks like yours, you’ll likely have little to no control over who is on your team.
That means you’ll have to work with what you are given in a generally crappy situation, but that isn’t to say you are hopeless. You’ll just have to be highly adaptable as you work through managing a virtual team.
The Team is Chosen For You
In a suddenly remote situation, we recommend you start by ironing out the details. Make sure everyone on your team clearly understands what is needed from them. Give people the ability to suggest changes to current workflows and be open to adjustments.
Look at where you are headed what goals you are trying to meet, and decide what is needed (from each person) to get you there. Remember, this sudden stage is going to start off rocky no matter what, so it’s important that you roll with the crunches. Encourage your team to do the same.
Pro Tip: Suddenly having to work from home can feel like a boundary-less wasteland where your whole life becomes work because the separations are out the window. Most of us don’t have to take our work with us, so when it follows you home and lives somewhere in your house, it’s hard to turn “work” off. When managing virtual teams like this, be sure to encourage your team to have boundaries while setting your own. A “work-life balance” is incredibly important when doing remote work.
Choosing Your Team
If you have control over this transition into remote work, we suggest you use it. It takes a special type to work from home, and not everyone is cut out for it. If you have team members who really enjoy coming into the office each day, don’t take that away from them. Similarly, if you are going to be managing a virtual team and you know a few people who would love that, try and get them on board. If you can, give people the choice.
Second, clearly define what is expected from each team member. If you expect them to maintain the output they contributed while in the office, make that clear. If their role is shifting into something different, make that clear, too.
Lastly, be very careful about the first impression you make when you start managing a virtual team. Do you want to have a heavy hand? Start that way. Don’t slowly start putting pressure on people. Instead, be more aggressive about expectations in the beginning and ease off when you are comfortable. Also, implement little ways you can keep people motivated and involved.
Perhaps you require daily check-in emails or messages where people explain where they got yesterday and what they hope to accomplish today. Have regularly scheduled meetings where you openly discuss how you plan to support team members. And if you plan to use a management system, get that started before anything else.
2. Recognize Your Issues
The work you do and how you do it is unique to you, your team, and your organization. That means the potential issues you face in pursuit of completion will also be unique. No matter how you got here, you’ll need to be honest and attempt to identify what your issues will be.
If you’ve been thrown into this remote landscape out of the blue, think about what attributes your team thrived on before the transition. What did each team member need from you in order to be successful? Then, create a realistic plan for continuing that support in this new setting.
The most common challenges people face when managing a virtual team include
- Finding adequate solutions to their problems
- Getting people to trust each other
- Being as productive as possible
- Developing and maintaining clear direction
- Creating a culture (even in the virtual office)
When managing a virtual team, you’ll have to be creative about how you address your issues, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
3. Pick Your Processes
“Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That’s why we train so hard.” Navy Seals are in a lot of tricky situations that are outside the average person’s box of imagination, which means they can’t analyze a great many patterns in their work—the circumstances are rarely the same.
So, they train and train and train some more. They use processes and procedures to prepare every person in the group to meet the call of their role no matter the situation. In a much less drastic way, you can do the same for your team.
We don’t mean to say that you train them for every possible circumstance under enemy fire. Instead, we’d encourage you to iron down a handful of critical processes that your team can always fall back on. These will help coordinate work, facilitate open and regular communication, and improve outcomes when managing virtual teams.
Generally, these processes are broken up into two categories: task-related processes and socio-emotional processes.
Task-Related
Every person is on the team because they have something to contribute to the goal. Task-related processes are used to ensure that every team member is contributing—and in a remote setting, these are the most crucial. They not only increase collective support, but they also help improve work coordination and balance everyone’s levels of contribution. On top of that, they enhance the effort of everyone involved.
Task-related processes look like checklists, KanBan boards, and progress updates that everyone can see. They can also look like meetings where team members explain and walk others through the progress they’ve made.
Socio-Emotional
Socio-emotional processes are those that make people feel like they are actually a part of a team and not like a one-man pirate ship floating around the ocean by themselves. They help people bond and maintain interpersonal relationships. And before you dismiss these as useless, hippy, fluff ideas, understand that teams that have these types of connections always outperform teams that don’t. So get that judgy mindset out of here.
These processes can look like informal gatherings, celebratory meetings, and any communication that doesn’t center around completing tasks. Remember, the stronger the bonds, the less you’ll face all those challenges we mentioned above.
Processes For Managing Virtual Teams, Key Takeaway!
There is no denying that dispersion carries risk. It’s inevitable, but it (in all actuality) isn’t any more risky than having people in an office. With poor management, any team can be led astray. All that is to say, managing a virtual team has different risks.
You can combat these with solid task-related processes that openly display how people are doing, what they are working on, and how it’s going. If there are issues, they should feel safe to display that, too. If anything, they should be encouraged to do so.
Overall, good, thorough task-related processes always improve the performance and efficiency of a virtual team. So, when you are managing one, don’t forget to use those. The other stuff (the socio-emotional processes) are important too, but lacking those usually affects interpersonal issues like conflict, cooperation, and communication—all of which can eventually lead to performance issues.
The point is you should prioritize task-related processes and follow those up with socio-emotional ones. You’ll have the best shot at success that way.
4. Figure Out How You’re Managing Virtual Teams
There is no one right way to manage a virtual team. Who you are, who your team is, the size of your team, the organization you work in, and your goals all impact the way you manage. The only constant we suggest is the special attention given to task-related processes that will support the collective.
You won’t be able to model your management style exactly by this guide, but there are some watts we can help you decide. So, as you think about how you plan to manage a virtual team, consider the following ideas.
1. Any Distance Matters
The term “dispersed team” usually makes people think of a team spread across the globe, but that’s only half of it. Technically, any type of separation that takes you out of earshot is enough to place your team in the “dispersed” category. Even if you just work on different floors, that can be significant.
Forbes did a critical review of 750 studies that looked at the impact of dispersion on productivity and found that team members on different floors performed worse than teams with intercontinental dispersion. What happens is they don’t recognize that there is a distance even while relying more on telecommunication and technology than their colocated counterparts.
They don’t see the dispersion, and because of that, they don’t do anything to counter it.
When managing virtual teams, you can’t overlook small distances. Implement open workspaces as much as possible and encourage people to come together to work together. And when you are working across distances, take extra care to maintain those CRUCIAL TASK-RELATED processes to keep everyone in sync.
2. Lean Into Teamwork
Collaboration is often where the best ideas and solutions come from. As a leader of a virtual team, it’s your responsibility to cultivate that. However, to do that, you’ll need a team capable of doing their jobs and working as a part of the team in an unusual setting.
That means when staffing your team, you need to look at ability, availability, expertise, and social skills. Often, managers just aim for people who are capable and available while completely disregarding how well someone will fit into the existing landscape of personalities. Don’t do that.
Also, don’t expect people to hit the ground running and be amazing at collaborating with their international counterparts—or at all if they aren’t used to working on a virtual team.
3. Promote Independence
On a virtual team, being able to take initiative is extremely important. People need to know enough and be confident enough to get moving, even when it’s just them, a laptop, and their couch. In managing a virtual team, you need to encourage people to be self-starters. Members of each team should be made aware of the difficulties within dispersed teams.
Most of the time, leaders of virtual teams oversee outcomes and strategic movements while team members are responsible for doing their work. Those managing virtual teams have even less direct control of the individuals than on a colocated team, so everyone needs to be aware of that issue and be able to roll with it.
To put it differently, people have to be trusted to be alone and do what needs to be done. Most coming from a colocated office situation will not be used to that.
4. Get In Their Faces
We don’t mean that you need to throw hands with anyone, but rather, make sure that people see the people behind the emails from time to time. Leaders managing virtual teams might use weekly or monthly check-ins to do this, but remember not to dismiss this.
If you can meet in person, that is best, but use this time to support collaboration, get people more comfortable with their coworkers, and encourage cohesion. The more united your team feels, the better it will perform.
5. Create A Culture
We’ve discussed the importance of company culture in a few posts, and we always preface by begging readers not to reject the culture idea because it sounds like a bunch of hoopla. People do their best when they feel like they are a part of something. Yes, your team is showing up for a paycheck—a very important thing. You can also help them show up to meet goals, achieve potential, and feel like they are working for something bigger than a paycheck.
11 Quick Tips for Managing a Virtual Team
If you are in the middle of managing a virtual team and you need some quick inspiration for making your operation a bit cleaner, here are some!
Pro Tip: Don’t be afraid to ask your team what they need from you. You’ll get the best and most accurate information on what to improve from them. They are a resource, and if they feel safe with you, they will tell you exactly what they need.
- Allow people to work on their own clocks – No one is the same and has the same preference for getting work done. If you let your night owls and morning birds do their own thing, you’ll notice an immediate uptick in creativity and collaboration because people are able to get in their best headspace.
- Be available – As the manager of a virtual team, you need to be the most contactable member of the team. We are not saying you should be able to answer emails in the middle of your REM cycle. We are saying that making it clear when you are and aren’t available is important.
- Keep things clear – Whether you decide to use a KanBan style board, a project management system with a dashboard displaying everyone’s progress, or a daily newsletter that lets people know what’s up, you need to make sure everyone knows where everyone is at. Transparency is your best friend when managing a virtual team.
- Track output – This one is tricky, but implementing deadlines can be helpful (especially realistic ones). Don’t ask people to pull off magic, but you should definitely encourage progress. Managing virtual teams can include a lot of time-dragging because everyone is off doing their own things. Having monthly or weekly quotas or expectations can also help.
- Encourage balance – The people you work with are indeed people. They have a lot more going on in their lives than just this work. Don’t forget that. Encouraging people to have adequate work-life balance can occasionally impact productivity, but it will help with things like burnout, turnover, and long-term loyalty.
- Use the right people – If there are people who cannot work in this environment, don’t make them. Give them the tools to improve. Encourage and support them wherever possible, but if the colocated setting is better for them, let them have it. Also, if you have people who are itching to work remotely, let them. Lay down a solid foundation of expectations and responsibilities and allow them to meet the challenge.
- Management tools are your friend – Email chains are not enough. When we talk about transparency, a management system is integral to that. It’s simply integral all around.
- Reward people – Ensure people know when they are doing a good job. Give people as much as you can. Reward their effort as much as possible. This seems basic or unnecessary, but it’s not. Gold stars feel great, especially when there is an actual reward attached.
- Clarify everything – Job descriptions are extremely important because they outline what the bare minimum expectations of a role. But that’s not where the clarification can end. You need to clearly outline everyone’s roles, the tasks they are in charge of, the processes they are a part of, and the goals they are expected to meet. Don’t assume they’ll know. They won’t.
- Communication tools are helpful, too – Especially on heavily dispersed teams, you need to be able to communicate in quicker settings than emails. You could use Zoom meetings, Slack, messages, or any other platform that allows people to display when they are online and available to take input. Some people work best when distractions are limited, so be careful with this one and use it depending on the nature of your work.
- Get people thinking about the future – Make plans. Base projects around seasons or deadlines and then get people on board with working toward that goal. Whether it’s based on holidays, seasons, or quarters, it doesn’t matter. Just do your team a favor and ask them to look up at what’s ahead occasionally.
Managing A Virtual Team Is What You Make It
Some wonder if being productive when managing a virtual team is possible, and it is. But with great power comes great responsibility. You have many options and very few limits, and you have to be careful with them.
Dispersed teams allow companies to take advantage of talent, expertise, and all kinds of perspectives. We won’t lie. They are harder to manage, but they can also be much more rewarding—especially when you use the right people. If handled with care and intention, managing a virtual team can be the blessing you never knew your company needed.
