Milestone Group Quarterly: October 2007
Articles
The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams
Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps
In the past decade, face-to-face work has met with near-sudden death. Well, almost. Sure, billions of people around the planet still congregate on a daily basis to carry out their organizations’ “mission statements”—whether harvesting rice or harvesting returns on investments.
But, as we read daily online and in last-century modes like the morning paper—and as we see increasingly on commercials (Cisco’s human network campaign, for instance)—“long-distance” teams have become the modus operandi for most enterprises.
Even people who previously thought virtual teams were a bad idea now experiment with them. “In my 10 years as a CIO, I've strongly believed that productivity is best when everyone works in close physical proximity,” writes CareGroup’s “geek doctor” John Halamka on Life as a Healthcare CIO, his blog.
Halamka was one of the true believers in the "’over the cubicle’ effect…brainstorm[ing] with colleagues ad hoc,” where people could deal with the urgent together and build the warm-fuzzy of trust in person.
Calling his post “An About-Face on Flexible Work Arrangements,” Halamka writes, “The world has changed and new factors need to be considered.” Citing everything from the cost of commuting to environmental impact to faster and more diverse technologies, he is now exploring “the entire spectrum of flexible work arrangements.”
Halamka’s challenge may be unusually large—he oversees technology for a healthcare system that supports Harvard Medical School, a large academic medical center, and services 3000 doctors, 18,000 faculty, and three million patients—but his instinct mirrors the leading-edge practices of other progressive executives.
And, like them, he may soon be congratulating his teams on their achievements. Several years ago, long before “wiki” was a word dropped into every other sentence of any business conversation, we teamed up with a couple of business school professors to uncover the DNA that executives facing Halamka’s situation hunger for: the “best practices” in “far-flung teams.”
With support from the Society for Information Management and access to the database of our consulting company, we quickly recruited and interviewed 54 teams in 26 companies across 15 industries. We posed two principal questions: One, what management practices did they use? Two, what technology did they use?
The single most important qualifying question to participate was this: The team had to do most of its work at a distance, not face-to-face. Nearly all of our teams worked virtually exclusively; very few met face-to-face at all even when team members were separated by only a few miles. Our findings, published by Harvard Business Review as “Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?”, surprised even us, who’ve been ballyhooing this new way of working for a quarter-century.
Instead of regarding the lack of face-to-face as an impediment, our teams found it advantageous. Many projects came in under-budget, ahead of schedule, and with breakthrough results. The outcome of one such project, conducted at what was then Boeing-Rocketdyne, was so successful that our HBR co-authors, along with the project’s managers, published it as a case study under the title, “Radical Innovation without Collocation.”
In addition to avoiding airports, hotels, and mind-numbing meetings, our teams reported one benefit that, once you hear it, seems patently obvious: if you work from your desk rather than a conference room, even one that you can bring a laptop to, you have all your information at your fingertips, including that much-disparaged but highly efficient (and portable) technology, print.
To make certain that people had relatively similar perches from which to communicate, our teams generally observed the dictum that everyone dial into conference calls from their desks, rather than from conference rooms even when a number of people were situated in the same facility. The purpose? To make sure that the lone rangers in far-off locations—often there was one distant person with the rest of the team in one or two other buildings—had the same chance to contribute as the others.
Overall, we pulled three major findings from the study:
- These teams flourished under the “onus” of diversity. The more diverse the membership, the more innovative its results. Diversity was broadly defined by these teams to include not only the obvious meanings—gender, race, nationality, and culture—but also discipline, cognitive style, and personality differences. But the benefit was realized only through very wide-ranging conversations and a tolerance for some amount of “storming” among members. When team members disagreed, leaders paired them on challenging tasks.
- They used technology to simulate face-to-face. In practice, this meant that more than four out of five teams used the very simple “killer-app” combo available to nearly everyone these days: conference calls with screen sharing (via the Web) coupled with shared online workspaces, whether high-end, feature-filled virtual team rooms or well-organized shared drives. Interestingly, many of our teams banned email altogether except for one-to-one communication. Why? Group emails, with lengthy "cc: lists" and replies to replies to replies, are hardly efficient ways to transmit information and make real human connections.
- The third finding, likely not a big surprise to those running virtual teams now—leaders had to work very hard to hold their teams together—carried an important sub-bullet: leaders orchestrated their conference calls as “can’t miss” events where status reporting was frowned upon, if not completely discouraged. A con call without status reports? Since most people’s first act when setting up a virtual team is to schedule weekly calls for just that purpose, this finding takes a minute to settle gracefully in the fields of common sense. Why use precious real-time communication to review information that you can more easily transmit and absorb asynchronously? Our teams posted their status reports ahead of meetings; members were expected to have read them before the calls. What, then, was the purpose of conference calls? To deal with conflict and make decisions. Nothing lends itself to real-time communication better than the tough stuff.
As our CIO-doctor-turned-virtual-working-convert Halamka says, "the world has changed." Commuting has become burdensome, expensive, and not particularly environmentally appealing. When the two of us began writing about distributed organizations in the early 1980s, we needed an acoustic coupler, a dial-up connection, and really quick eye-hand coordination: if we didn’t cram the receiver into the cradle fast enough, we found ourselves dialing time and again. And, we traveled a lot. Now, we have cable modems that attach us to the globe so seamlessly that groceries, not client meetings, are what make us leave the house.
Virtual teams are the workhorses—and the unexpected blessings—of today’s organizations. Whether crossing organizational, geographic, time-zone, cultural, language, or discipline boundaries, far-flung teams are the beautiful inventions that simplify work for smart enterprises.
Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps are CEO and Chief Scientist, respectively, of NetAge, a Boston based consultancy that helps organizations adapt to working across boundaries, and co-authors of many books, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. Jessica maintains an active blog at Endless Knots.
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