Katrina picked up the pencil and punched Ed's number. The circuit completed and she could hear the line ring. It rang again. She started tapping the pencil on her desk. The line rang again. 'Still not there,' she thought, tapping the pencil. 'Where is he?'
Then Ed's voice came on the line, but it was his outgoing message. Katrina thought for a moment, and hung up. "Damn," she said out loud, to nobody.
Frustrated as she might be, Katrina has just done something smart — rather than leave Ed yet another message, she decided to just hang up, saving both Ed and herself some time.
Virtual teams depend on effective telephone and email communications, and that effectiveness has both individual and team components. Here's Part I of some guidelines for virtual team communications. See "Virtual Communications: II," Point Lookout for February 2, 2005, for more.
- Have regular check-ins
- If you lead or manage the team, check in with each team member regularly. Depending on the nature of the work, you might check in daily, or two or three times a week — less often than that risks disconnection.
- Make appointments
- Communicating within
a virtual team
as if you were
co-located almost
never works - Making appointments minimizes phone tag, which is expensive in terms of stress, frustration, and time spent. When you want to talk with someone, make an appointment, possibly by email or by text message.
- Keep your appointments
- Running a little late when someone is waiting outside your office does hurt, but not nearly as much as running late for a phone conversation. When you're late for a phone appointment, the caller often has less idea what's happening or when you'll be available.
- If you're running late, take time out in advance — if you can — to advise your next appointment that you're late. Rescheduling is best.
- Agree on message response times
- Adopt a standard of reasonableness for the elapsed time to respond to email or phone messages. A rough rule of thumb: respond in about half the time you thought was reasonable outside of the remote management context.
- Use meta-responses
- If you can't return a message promptly, send a message saying so. If you can explain why, all the better, but at least let your partner know that you're aware of the delay, and estimate when you can respond.
- Define a three-level priority scale for messages
- Green messages (good news or bad) are nonurgent, yellow is possibly urgent, and red messages are urgent. Use this scale for email and voicemail, taking care never to inflate a priority just to get attention.
- Agree that nonresponse is a performance issue
- Agree that failure to respond to (or at least to acknowledge) a message within a "reasonable" time could be a serious performance issue. Clearly define the kinds of circumstances that could excuse the failure to respond.
I'd like to continue, but we're out of time for this week. Let's continue at the same time next week. Top
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Reader Comments
- Chris Riemer (www.knowledgestreet.com)
- Your advice is generally nontechnological, but I thought I'd mention something that was a great help in improving the efficiency of a virtual team I managed in the past: webcams.
- We already had a network backbone, and I spent a few bucks to buy a webcam for each location. Using only Microsoft's NetMeeting, it gave me a chance to see the folks who were many miles away, and that was an opportunity to notice a new hair cut, or see a smile, or share a picture of the dog. It made us feel much more in touch than the telephone alone. I was famous for drawing ideas on my white board, so this also let me communicate in the way I like to, even if the white board was pretty hard to see with a webcam.
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
Take Regular Temperature Readings
- Team interactions are unimaginably complex. To avoid misunderstandings, offenses, omissions, and mistaken
suppositions, teams need open communications. But no one has a full picture of everything that's happening.
The Temperature Reading is a tool for surfacing hidden and invisible information, puzzles, appreciations,
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Trips to Abilene
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we say that they're taking a trip to Abilene. Here are some tips for noticing and preventing trips to Abilene.
The True Costs of Indirectness
- Indirect communications are veiled, ambiguous, excessively diplomatic, or conveyed to people other than
the actual target. We often use indirectness to avoid confrontation or to avoid dealing with conflict.
It can be an expensive practice.
Symbolic Self-Completion and Projects
- The theory of symbolic self-completion holds that to define themselves, humans sometimes assert indicators
of achievement that either they do not have, or that do not mean what they seem to mean. This behavior
has consequences for managing project-oriented organizations.
The Utility Pole Antipattern: II
- Complex organizational processes can delay action. They can set people against one other and prevent
organizations from achieving their objectives. In this Part II of our examination of these complexities,
we look into what keeps processes complicated, and how to deal with them.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming September 3: Contributions in Team Meetings: Advocating
- An agenda in the form of an ordered list of topics might not provide an appropriate framework for a given meeting. For example, if A depends on B, and B depends on A, we must find a way to discuss A and B together in some orderly fashion. Here are some alternatives to linear, ordered agendas. Available here and by RSS on September 3.
And on September 10: Contributions in Team Meetings: Scoping
- Some meetings focus on solving specific problems. We call them "working sessions." More often, we delegate problem solving to task teams, while meetings wrestle with the difficult task of identifying or "scoping" problems rather than solving them. Scoping discussions can be perilous. Available here and by RSS on September 10.
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