Four Tips for Managing Dispersed Teams

I recently posted an article about businesses struggling to manage their stay-at-home workers. If lack of face time with individual staff members is difficult, then imagine having to lead a team of workers who live in different cities, perhaps even different countries, and have never met in person. How do you turn these remote employees into a cohesive team?

The MIT Sloan Management Review has some good advice in their summer issue.

Authors Frank Siebdrat, Martin Hoegl and Holger Ernst (Hoegl and Ernst are professors at Germany's WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management) identify four keys to getting effective performances out of virtual teams:
1. Choose team players: The ability to communicate and coordinate tasks with other members becomes even more significant in a dispersed team. If your team consists of experts who lack these crucial skills, your team won't get very far.

2. Encourage all members to take on leadership roles: Since it's difficult to be a hands-on virtual manager, it's important to give team members the autonomy to manage their work and solve problems on their own.

3. Hold periodic face-to-face meetings: While not possible for all dispersed teams, face-to-face meetings, especially at the start of a project, are a key strategy for creating understanding of the project and allowing group members to bond.

4. Develop a global mindset: The authors found that companies with a strong global culture created more successful virtual teams. Giving employees international assignments, in which they encounter diversity and work in new contexts, ensures they can successfully contribute to a dispersed team.

Among the authors' more surprising findings was that team members located across different cities and countries often outperformed teams with small levels of dispersion -- for example, team members who worked on different floors of the same office building. The reason? The team members in the same building don't consider themselves dispersed and "may easily underestimate the barriers to collaboration deriving from, for instance, having to climb a flight of stairs," the authors write. Those with greater physical distance will be more aware of their challenges and make greater efforts to communicate.

Empty cubicle image courtesy of Flickr user _e.t, CC 2.0