Poor comms management harms virtual teams

Better practices and more unified tools with text and visual options could improve productivity, say researchers

The growing trend towards virtual teams where staff work together while dispersed over multiple locations is reducing productivity and increasing employee conflict at many firms, according to research by occupational psychology consultancy Pearn Kandola published yesterday.

The study, commissioned by networking giant Cisco, found that while the use of virtual teams is growing as more firms encourage home working and seek to exploit " follow the sun" business models using teams in different time zones, many firms are failing to follow best practices for communication and so are not seeing the expected productivity gains.

Carolyn Shearsmith, occupational psychologist at Pearn Kandola and one of the report’s authors, said that it takes four times as long to communicate using text tools, such as email, compared with face-to-face conversations. She added that an estimated 64 percent of communication is non-verbal, so virtual teams also find it harder to build trust, resulting in a greater risk of employee conflict.

"People in virtual teams struggle to build relationships [within the team] because virtual communication is very depersonalised and anonymous - you can’t really communicate a smile by text," said Shearsmith. "It also tends to be more task focused… which means people think more about their own role. This means there is less empathy and a higher risk of conflict."

Steve Frost of Cisco agreed that the lack of trust found in many virtual teams was hampering adoption of remote working and reducing the benefits for those firms that do use the model.

Firms can enhance productivity within virtual teams by drawing up clear work guidelines and giving teams access to a range of different communication tools, Shearsmith said. She added that acknowledging receipt of electronic communications; using presence-aware communication tools; encouraging informal conversations; and using rich media such as video where possible can all help to reduce the risk of conflict and improve productivity.

Shearsmith added that firms must be careful to pick the right communication tool for each task. "People lack awareness of how different communication media suit different tasks," she added. "For example, video is good at the start of a project as it helps build relationships within a team, while email is probably the best for sending complex data."

Frost said that moving between different communication media has traditionally been difficult and costly as they have been developed in separate silos. However, he argued that the emerging generation of unified communications platforms featuring integrated instant messaging, email, video and audio tools was making it easier for virtual teams to exploit the full range of media.

Van Diamandakis of web conferencing specialist WebEx agreed that virtual teams need access to a range of collaboration tools. "You need to give people a suite," he said. "Sometimes web conferencing is not right, sometimes it's messaging, sometimes it's chat, sometimes it's email."

The full report is accessible here.