8 Rules for Building Globally Dispersed High Performance Teams

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article on “Working Together… When Apart: As employees scatter around the globe, virtual teamwork has become crucial. Here are 10 rules for making it work” by Lynda Gratton (June 16-17, 2007). You can access the article on WSJ.com or Business Insight section of MITSloan Management Review.

After managing a large team of globally distributed developers, I also came up with my rules for making virtual teams work. So, if you have to play the hand that is already dealt, here are my rules for building high-performance virtual teams.

1. Align organizational values to support virtual teams — Just do it! might be a great slogan for encouraging employees to act, but not as effective when the goal is to improve teamwork and communication between your dispersed teams, especially at the early stages of team forming and storming (reference: Tuckman Model of Team Development). Along the same lines, e-mail might be your preferred mode of communication, but it can also be a challange for teams where English is their second language. You’ll be suprised to see how a simple phone call can improve team productivity, communication and morale.
2. Think local, act global — Not everyone can work productively in isolation, i.e. limited face-to-face contact, work is done mainly through e-mail, IM and some phone conferences. So, where possible look for ways to establish a small team working together at a given location. It will improve trust, build a sense of commitment and support the feeling of being part of a larger team. Also, support diversity by encouraging each of your locations to have their own culture. However, make sure they all share your common organizational values.
3. Practice transparency and objectivity — This is a good rule to follow regardless, but even more important if you are managing a virtual team. Remember, someone’s perception becomes another’s reality. Transparency enables interested parties to understand what and why, while objectivity brings facts, diverse perspectives and sense of fairness into the discussion.
4. Agree and enforce team processes — The last thing you need is an unexpected check-in right before a major build and release cycle. Make sure your team understand and follows the agreed upon procedures and tools.
5. Promote leaders with good facilitation skills — When bringing diverse teams and experiences into a new project, it helps to have a good facilitator that has everyone’s trust and respect. See my previous post on characteristics of a good facilitator.
6. Risk manage your project — Vacations, sick days, and unexpected issues are inevitable. However, these emergencies are ever more heightened when dealing with differences in time zones and communication gaps. With that, risk manage your project by identifying and assigning backup individuals to risky areas, or dividing up the work among different sites.
7. Rotate meeting times and locations — Working across different time zones and locations is disruptive to personal life. So, share the load by rotating meeting times and face-to-face meeting locations.
8. Mandate a day of silence — Although it is great to have a team that can virtually work 24×6, and maybe even 24×7, the overhead associated with working in a virtual environment can be wearying. So, depending on the intensity of the interactions, declare a day, such as every virtual Friday, as a quiet day. This will give everyone a break, and allow people to recharge their batteries.

So, what works for you?

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