Managing Global Teams: Live Communication is Key to Success

While email and other technologies play an immense role in successfully working with a global team, live communication ensures better output, according to a new study from Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

Fuqua professor Jonathon Cummings, along with J. Alberto Espinosa of American University and Cynthia Pickering of Intel, conducted a multi-year study of Intel's global teams that spanned 22 countries and 53 locations. They found that group members who relied on non-live communication because their work hours did not overlap with their global associates suffered the most "coordination delay," which refers to time lost waiting for responses and information from other group members.

Here are a few tips for managing productive global teams, based on their findings:

• Use non-standard working hours: Managers should shift team schedules to ensure at least an hour or two of overlapping work hours.
• Divide project duties accordingly: Make sure that job duties requiring the most interaction are split between locations with overlapping hours.
• Utilize multiple communication methods: Use email and other technologies to move projects along, but not to the exclusion of frequent live communication.

The bottom line, according to Cummings: "Although technology can tremendously improve productivity, the Intel experience demonstrates that live communication made possible by overlapping work hours is still critical for a distributed team's success."

Image courtesy of Flickr user The U.S. National Archives, CC 2.0.