Virtual Teams Need Generous Travel Budgets

Typically, virtual teams must meet their objectives with expense profiles that differ little from the profiles of co-located teams. They might receive some increment of resources in the form of access to remote communications facilities, and they might even be permitted a little more travel than co-located teams, but such minor advantages rarely meet the real need.

Teamwork, especially virtual teamwork, is only as effective as the strength and health of the relationships between team members can support. Building and maintaining strong, healthy relationships requires at least some face-to-face connection. By the standards of co-located teams, travel budgets that meet the needs of virtual teams can only be characterized as generous.

Rational travel strategy for virtual teams rests on four principles.

Relationship is the foundation of high performance

Teammates need not like each other, but they must share a desire for collaborative achievement, which requires the strong relationships that enable a forthright exchange of ideas. Building relationships from the beginning of an effort is the superior approach. With no history, and especially no past difficulty, members can focus on relationship building rather than relationship repair. Email, telephone, texting, and video do not suffice.

Virtual culture can bridge differences

Later in the effort, When at home, people tend to interpret
their experiences with each other
in terms of their home culturesafter people have returned home, they tend to interpret their ongoing experiences with each other in terms of their home cultures. What might be an innocent message in the sender's culture might be offensive in the recipient's culture, even when no offense is intended. But when the team has established its own virtual culture, and a strong relationship between sender and recipient is in place, such mistaken interpretations are less likely.

Problem solving under stress is best done face-to-face

Teams often solve difficult problems together under the stress of deadlines and budgets. Unfortunately, the challenges of the virtual environment can make solutions especially elusive. When the pressures are high enough, bringing people together face-to-face is the lowest cost path to a solution.

The value of travel is early delivery

If high performance teams are more productive, then their contributions to organizational objectives are greater and arrive sooner than would those of lower-performance teams. If travel contributes to performance, then we must evaluate travel costs in terms of early delivery of superior results. Yet, we rarely compare the cost of travel to the value of results. Instead, when we determine the travel budgets of projects staffed by virtual teams, we compare the cost of travel for virtual teams to the cost of travel for co-located teams, or what is worse, to zero.

Before people can care deeply about their shared achievements, their shared relationships must be strong. A generous travel budget might not guarantee strong relationships, but a miserly travel budget almost certainly guarantees weak ones.  Top    Next Issue

Is your organization a participant in one or more global teams? Are you the owner/sponsor of a global team? Are you managing a global team? Is everything going well, or at least as well as any project goes? Probably not. Many of the troubles people encounter are traceable to the obstacles global teams face when building working professional relationships from afar. Read 303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams to learn how to make your global and distributed teams sing. Order Now!

Your comments are welcome

About Point Lookout

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.

This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.

Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.

Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.

Related articles

More articles on Virtual and Global Teams:

Conventional Foolishness

Every specialization has a set of beliefs, often called "conventional wisdom." When these beliefs are so obvious that they're unquestioned and even unnoticed, there's an opportunity to leap ahead of the pack — by questioning the conventional wisdom.

Social Entry Strategies: I

Much more than work happens in the workplace. We also engage in social behaviors, including one sometimes called social entry. We use social entry strategies to make places for ourselves in social groups at work.

Virtual Trips to Abilene

One dysfunction of face-to-face meetings is the Trip to Abilene, which leads groups to make decisions no members actually support. It can afflict virtual meetings, too, even more easily.

Remote Hires: Communications

When knowledge-oriented organizations hire remote workers, success is limited by the communications facilities they provide. Remote hires need phones, computers, email, text, video, calendars, and more. Communications infrastructure drives productivity.

Fractures in Virtual Teams

Virtual teams — teams not co-located — do sometimes encounter difficulties maintaining unity of direction, or even unity of purpose. When they fracture, they do so in particular ways. Bone fractures provide a metaphor useful for guiding interventions.

See also Virtual and Global Teams and Virtual and Global Teams for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming May 14: Working with the Overconfident

A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.

And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers

Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.

Coaching services

I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenDJpmhgyaDTwBQXkhner@ChacmGoYuzfZpOvDQdRkoCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.

Get the ebook!

Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:

• Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
• Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
• Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
• Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
• Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
• Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )

Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info