Transcript: Why communication is key for virtual teams

culled from:theglobeandmail.com

KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to JoAnne Yates from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology].

JoAnne, what have you learned in your research about virtual teams?

JOANNE YATES – One of the most important things I think is the necessity to make explicit all of the sorts of agreement among a group that normally happen implicitly. So, how often are we going to communicate? In what ways? How do we handle that and how do we make that explicit? Because if you don’t make that explicit you end up getting in trouble.

One of the issues I think is really important is something called the mutual knowledge issue – how do you know what they know and how do they know what you know and do you both know that each other knows it? Katherine Crampton has done some work on mutual knowledge and the importance of that for trust and teams, and to get that you need to be way more explicit.

If you are all in the same location you don’t have to talk about it, it’s just – everyone knows what is going on. But that is not true in virtual teams. So this issue of explicitness; making a communication plan, making agreements, this is how rapidly we will get back to you, if you send an e-mail within 12 hours you will get a response; that kind of agreement is really important because if you don’t have that then you will get misunderstandings.

KARL MOORE – What are some of the additional kinds of overheads that come from being in a global virtual team?

JOANNE YATES – So, I think there is the overhead to making these explicit agreements but the fact is that occasionally it is useful. You find this in teams where there is one person geographically dispersed and everyone else is in the same location. Because they have to spell everything out explicitly for that one person at a distance, sometimes it even helps a collocated team because occasionally there are things that people in a collocated team don’t know about and need to know about.

Occasionally, it is even useful to have a person at a distance but most of the time it is a matter of the overhead of having to be much more explicit, having to say and say again and say again the same things. For example, if you don’t respond to an e-mail, if you are at a distant location and you have a holiday and so you aren’t in the office that day, no one is in the office that day where you are, so you don’t respond to an e-mail until the following day. And they think that you are just not being responsive, you are not holding up your end of the process. So people will assume that you are not a good team member rather than understanding it’s because you had this holiday. So you have to tell them, “I have a holiday coming up. I won’t be online today.” That’s how this works.