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Thursday, December 4, 2008
An Analysis of Global Virtual Teams: Conflict & Leadership (PinkLady's web poster)
I really enjoyed reading about global virtual teams. I have had to work with many different teams around the world lately and some experiences have been better than others. As stated, misunderstandings tend to be more frequent because of the lack of visual cues. What I found helped me a lot is making sure my communication was very clear so people would not be confused about my message and my goals. The more I explained what I was trying to do the more successful the collaboration was. It is inevitable that in today's global economy people have to work virtually with team around the world. The better one person learns to be aware of the differences between virtual teamwork and physical teamwork, the more successful this person is going to be.
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As you mentioned, I agree that one must be very clear in communicating through virtual teams. This is exceedingly important in global teams. I've had the unfortunate problems of trying to joke around with some of these global teams... and it did not end well.
In my experience, this took a lot of the fun out of work. I enjoy the interaction I have with fellow employees and being so clear and precise eliminated the little bit of personalization left by virtual teaming.
Perhaps I'm just old school and need to learn to treat business as business.
In reading these comments about the difficulty with virtual teams, I'm wondering if it's so much the medium that's the problem as it is the communication context. I've used online communication to communicate with work teams that weren't in my building, but were from the same area, were of the same general cultural background, and were around the same age and professional level as I was. We joked around constantly, had very easygoing conversations, and only occasionally had to pick up the phone in order to clarify something that would have taken too long to type. When I went out to the movies one with one of my coworkers three months after she started with the company, it seemed utterly bizarre to me that it was our first face-to-face meeting - I felt as though I knew her just as well as coworkers who I saw day after day.
I see my husband having the same sort of rapport over IRC with his coworkers, both locally and the ones from Bangalore - but he admits that occasionally there are some things "lost in translation" with his Indian coworkers, not because of language, but because of nuance and culture. Likewise, when I talked to my boss (who was in her sixties) over IM when we were in other buildings, I often found myself having more difficulty communicating with her, because she typed as little as she possibly could get away with - which led to important things getting left out. I'm not saying that all older workers have that sort of discomfort with mediated communication - some of my SL colleagues would be quite offended if I said that! - but when there's a difference in communication philosophy over any medium, misunderstandings arise.
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