MaaS360™

At a recent training event, two managers sat at the back of the room as a senior executive from their firm spoke to them about the days when he was a line manager. He waxed rhapsodic about the way he used to focus on the “soft skills” of management, of the “HP Way” and “Management by Walking Around,” and how they needed to get away from their desks—stop sending so much email and really connect with their teams. Heads nodded. Some in agreement—most in boredom. Finally one attendee turned to the other and muttered in frustration, “Yeah, but it’s a long bloody walk to Bangalore.”


That’s the problem facing many of today’s managers—while the challenges of creating, managing and getting the most out of people hasn’t changed in thousands of years, the constraints under which we work now are very different from even a few years ago.
 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of “remote” and “virtual” teams. Problems that were common but manageable by committed teams when they could all get together physically are made even more dramatic when separated by time, distance and even corporate or national cultures.


Because of distance and communication challenges, the costs of failure are higher than ever—and many projects are threatened by forces they don’t even know exist until the project is behind budget or crashes completely.


How confident are you that your managers and teams have the skills, tools and attitude to address these challenges?


How do you know?


What’s the Problem?

The world of work has changed forever. More people are working remotely with people they don’t know using technology they barely can keep up with—but the financial stakes have never been higher.


Here are a few salient facts:

 
• 70% of managers above 1st-level supervisor now have at least one team member who is not co-located with them.


• At Fortune 100 companies, it is estimated that 70% of managers don’t co-locate with the majority of their teams.


• According to PMI (Project Management Institute), the number of projects run by virtual teams has doubled every year since 2001 and sits at over 80% of projects.


Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “If nations want to avoid war, they should avoid the thousand little pinpricks that lead to it."
 

What are the little things that lead to massive team and project failure? There are many, but the most common complaints are:


• Missed deadlines due to competing priorities, especially on cross-functional teams.


• Insufficient trust between team members, often putting managers in the middle and taking up valuable time and resources.


• Communication errors—usually caused by not proactively communicating among team members.


• Viewing technology as a nuisance, or as not being the right tool for the job. Many people don’t know how to use the tools to truly communicate (which is different than knowing functionality, or which button to push).


The costs of these problems are not trivial. Lack of crossfunctional communication between teams working on the Airbus 350 project is a great example. Built in parts using the most modern technology available, each individual location’s work was perfect. The problem was that the different components didn’t fit together when it came time to assemble the airplane. One team was using a different set of specs than another.
 

$6 billion is a lot of money to lose because of an easily addressed communication problem.

 

Why Are Virtual Teams Different and Why Does It Matter?

First, let’s define the difference between a remote team and a virtual team. Remote teams have all the problems that virtual teams have:


• Team members separated by time and distance.

• Communication is mediated by technology.

• Human contact is harder to maintain.

• Lack of frequent and incidental communication means that mistakes are often not identified until very late in the process.
 

Virtual teams certainly share all these potential pitfalls, with one important distinction—the team or project leader often does not have direct line-of-sight reporting responsibility for these workers. They actually work for someone else.


At best, it means competing for time and mindshare with other parts of the worker’s job. At worst, it means the manager gets all of the responsibility for the work without the ability to coordinate, hire or fire the project team directly.

 
This means that on top of all the reasons projects have succeeded or failed over the years, the person with the most responsibility (the project manager or team leader) often has the least amount of authority (threats of firing slackers are pretty much empty).


There are three important things to remember about running a successful virtual team. The success of the project often depends on how well these factors are taken into account and exploited:


• Persuasion and influence are the key communication skills—coercion and manipulation are largely ineffective and unproductive.


• Technology and online tools are great, but they are effective only if they are used to create context and human connections. Mere data transfer will result in short-term time savings and long-term communication problems.


• Managers and team leaders must use all the skills they’ve always used, but management by walking around must be done virtually—and this doesn’t come naturally to most managers because these circumstances have never existed before. They’ll need the support of their organizations to succeed.

 
What are the 3 Reasons Virtual Teams Fail?

Despite years of training in project management and great technological tools, virtual and remote teams still fail at an alarming rate. Here are 3 reasons why.
 

Reason 1: They don’t know what to do


This is not to imply that you have not hired highly competent people. In fact, experts in Human Performance Technology assure us that fewer than 10% of problems are due to someone being completely incapable of doing the task assigned them. No, what we mean when we say “they don’t know what to do” is some combination of the following situations:

 
• They are working (really hard and well) on outdated assumptions and data, which can result in blown assignments. Just ask Airbus—the work was brilliant, just completely useless in conjunction with the rest of the project.

 
• What they are doing is not aligned with the company’s vision. If you’re using temps or people from another company or division, they may have very different ways of working, expectations of quality or other paradigms that conflict with the team or its leaders.
 

• Because virtual team members frequently don’t know each other or don’t have experience with the team leader, they may not have a clear understanding of how to work together as a team. To some people no news is good news, to others it’s a black hole and a sign of poor communication. People must know how they are expected to work together. This doesn’t happen automatically, despite everyone’s good intentions.


Teams cannot form the short-hand communication they need to really function at a high level without a conscious effort to set standards for working, open communication channels and to develop real, trusting, human relationships (even through technology).

 
These problems can be solved through a mix of training, strategic communication and technology—including synchronous and asynchronous tools like webcams, blogs, wikis, file sharing and the telephone. It’s amazing how many managers won’t pick up the phone until a problem has reached crisis proportions.


The four scariest words to a project manager or team leader are “Oh, by the way….” Organizations that understand how to recognize and prepare for problems and then raise issues before they become costly stumbling blocks encounter fewer unpleasant surprises down the road.
 

Do your project leaders and managers know for certain that their team members have all the information they require to do great work?


Are you sure?


Reason 2: Systems don’t work—or leaders don’t know how to make them work


Just as people usually work hard and well—if sometimes at the wrong things—technology and workflow processes sometimes don’t work as well as they should for the project or task at hand.


For example, a major supplier of web-based meeting and presentation tools estimates that fewer than 25% of the managers who are supposed to use that tool actually use it to anything near its full capability (if at all). There’s an example of a system that is fully functional but isn’t working. Not using an available tool is as bad as not having it available at all.

 
Because remote and virtual teams are so dependent on technology, the team and its leadership must be conversant with not just what tools are available, but when to use which tool to achieve maximum impact.

 
A good project requires a mix of synchronous (people can talk at the same time) and asynchronous (people use them at different times) tools to be truly effective.
 

A team that communicates solely by email might save time “wasted” on social niceties, but will eventually bog down in misunderstanding. Managers who hate communicating over distance and save everything for the weekly conference call or webmeeting find themselves overwhelmed, and too little vital information gets shared.