Virtual Team Dynamics - The Ulfire Podcast

This article discusses how we all apply filters to our cultural experiences. These filters can either help of hinder our ability to work effectively in cross cultural situations.
If our filters lead us to react badly to some of the experiences, that reaction may be interpreted by our local colleagues as representing disapproval, leading to a break down of relationships and eventual degrading of our abilities to collaborate. If however, our cultural filters allow us to experience different things as new, interesting and simply different we can use them to build stronger and more enduring working relationships.

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Working across multiple timezones can bring many challenges to those involved, not least of which is how to maintain a healthy work life balance. In this article we consider some of the major issues to be addressed when a project manager is faced with leading a distributed team. We identify some things to avoid and offer suggestions of ways that a balance can be achieved that lets both the Project Manager and their staff survive the project.

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Understanding the relationship between outsourcing and the use of virtual teams is important to facilitate strong working relationships between offices. When a business starts to outsource its work it needs to plan for how it will manage its relationships, many of which will move from face to face to virtual. Some businesses will simply assign work to another location and await its completion and return, this is a very high risk approach however.
Experience has shown that the greater the level of planning and preparation that goes into establishing communication between locations, the more predictable the outcomes will be. This predictability reduces the risks to the business and improves its chances of a successful outcome.
This article considers the relationship between outsourcing and virtual teams and introduces some of the issues to be considered.

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Corporate culture is a critical part of building and maintaining a brand. Matching employees and business partners to a business's culture will ensure that the business has a clear public image and will help clients and future employees determine if your business is right for them. The challenge of building a corporate culture in a virtual team based organisation is a complex one, particularly when the business is established as a distributed team model from the start.

This article attempts to unpack some of the challenges facing both new and established businesses when establishing a corporate culture in a virtual environment and sets out some of the steps that need to be considered along the way.

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There are a number of scenario's to consider when thinking about the future of work. Clearly technological evolution and indeed revolution will have a major impact, that is very much a given, the big question is how will society respond to the technological changes, at the personal, corporate and societal levels. Will there be resistance or acceptance of the technologies and their impact on the status quo, how will large corporates and developed economies respond to the disruption to their traditional place in the pecking order, and how will we prepare the next generation to gain the most benefit from the changes.

This post considers several different scenarios then introduces three different options that may be possible, options of defence, allowance and embracing of the changes.

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Delivering and receiving feedback in cross cultural teams is a relatively high risk, but high reward endeavour. Done well it can help built strong and dependable teams who understand each other and are committed to supporting each other in their work. Managed badly, the feedback cycle can destroy working relationships through seemingly innocent comments, misunderstandings and reactions.
Feedback may either be seen as overly critical or overly praising dependant on the expectations and cultural norms of the parties involved.
This article attempts to set out a few points to consider when planning for a cross cultural feedback exercise.

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Effective workshare planning is imperative for the success of any virtual team project. Planning the way in which the work to be undertaken will be shared, who will be responsible for the outcomes of the project and obtaining the full engagement at the overall business level will ensure the project is given every possibility of success.
This article discusses some of the major factors to consider when embarking on a workshare planning exercise.

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Building trust across cultures is a complex and difficult task that is critical to the success of a virtual team. Without a fundamental level of working trust between individuals and groups it is not possible to establish or maintain a high performing team.

There are several different ways in which individuals are culturally programmed to build trust, through transactional experiences, relationship building or through working with those who have a strong shared common interest or history. Each of these will readily understand how to build trust with like individuals but will struggle to do so with those who have a different culturally programmed way of building trust.

This article discusses both the differences between the different ways trust is built and offers some methods to build trust across cultures.

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Team building is one of the keys to successful virtual teams. With the teams forming to undertake a specific project or deliver a change to an organisation it is often easy to overlook the bonding phase between virtual colleagues, when this happens the team will take longer to form and the bonds binding team members will usually be weaker, leading to fragile relationships that will break down under tension.

Undertaking well planned and structured face to face or remote team building will help to avoid these weaknesses and instead build a team that is cohesive and interdependent, that will survive the inevitable internal conflicts and ultimately deliver the best outcomes for the business.

This article discusses ways that team building can be planned and undertaken in virtual team environments.

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Understanding how to balance the different team attributes of personnel from different cultural backgrounds can unlock a broad range of potential synergies in a virtual team. Team members from individualistic cultures, where often teams are made up of specialists, are best suited to some work while those from more collective cultures, where teams tend to be built to get the best overall outcome from the group are stronger in other areas.

This article considers how to go about establishing the right balance and introduces some of the factors to consider.

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