Rules to Teamwork

The Challenges of Teamwork

Working on teams can normally prove very challenging, with all of the variations in personalities, strengths, and weaknesses, most of these issues are raised face to face with individuals, and can be resolved by finding a room to sit and talk them out. Working on virtual teams is more challenging, since there are a lot of things missing from the person-to- person contact, such as:

•Lack of visual cues to understanding context. Many people write email and talk on the telephone in a manner which is completely different than they would talk in person; things that are taken as insults could actually be jokes, or things that are taken as jokes could actually be insults.

•Lack of a communication mesh. Generally, teams work well when ‘cubicle to cubicle talk’ occurs; when people wander around asking questions. It’s difficult to wander from place to place all the time when your team is scattered all over the world. At the same time, virtual teams have some advantages. For instance, it’s easier to think through your response when writing an email than when talking in a meeting, which is a good and a bad thing. It’s harder to brainstorm when you aren’t willing to just throw out ideas (people are often afraid of saying things that make them look stupid in email, because they think about it before they send it). But it’s easier to have rational discussion when everyone can (not that they always do) let things sit for some time rather than replying in emotion.

Several things that came up in our discussion are that virtual teams are also like normal teams in many ways, so many of the normal team rules apply.

Web Research

Several links came up dealing with virtual teams when searching the Internet.