Guest Post: Hanae Timoulali

Hanae is one of Chris' Fall 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about virtual communication.

Context and Virtual Teams

Communication is a central aspect of our daily lives both on the personal and professional level. In fact, we all live to communicate by interacting with each other on a continuous basis and exchanging pieces of information. Today thanks to new technologies and innovations, communication became delocalized. We can now communicate with people in other cities, countries and continents instantaneously. Tools like email clients, instant messaging application and internet telephony clients have revolutionized the way we study, work and live. Organizations, in particular, have been transformed from being centralized to decentralized. Before the proliferation of communication technologies, companies were designed to have nine to five job positions and a workforce located in one central location. Nowadays, the emergence of new communication patterns allowed organizations to be dispersed in different location with flexible working hours and a diversified workforce. The work paradigm became more oriented towards group projects with people situated in different places. The ability to understand and use virtual communication became very crucial and has a great impact on the productivity of the employees.

As a result of this, a new type of teams emerged: virtual teams. They are a great way to enable teamwork while having people in different physical locations. Today, companies are able to cut travel and relocations costs by using virtual communication technologies. Teams use emails, teleconferences, virtual meetings and IP telephony to conduct their meetings. However, the success and effectiveness of virtual teams both depend on the nature of the work to be done, the people and the management style of the team.

Not all projects and assignments are suitable for virtual communication. Sequential or integrated tasks can be challenging due to their heavy reliance on real time exchange of tangible goods, for instance. In the case of manufacturing projects, people will often feel the need to gather around particular objects and products and analyze their tangible properties: shape, dimensions, weight… Thus, organizations have to evaluate the projects and decide whether or not they are suited to be run by virtual teams.

People have different performance levels when it comes to teamwork. Not everyone performs well in virtual team environments. Such types of teams require a lot of self motivation and ability to work independently. Because of the delocalization aspect, virtual team members need to be able to work effectively with little to no external control. In addition to this, people need to be able to present their outcomes clearly through the virtual communication channels. This is where communication skills come into play: everyone on the team should be able to communicate his/her ideas clearly and concisely especially when using channels restricting non-verbal cues such as phone calls and instant messaging.

The management style of the virtual teams is also very critical. Virtual teams, if not managed properly tend to lose focus or build up misunderstandings. Clear and simple communication rules could help alleviate these problems: little to no interruption during interactions and also complete focus on the meeting by minimizing the amount of distractions such as doing other tasks during the meeting. Clear rules and protocols need to be put in place to manage virtual teams. Also, building trust between team members is very critical. Because they are in different location and relying on virtual channels, team members might be skeptical to trusting others they might not have met physically. Thus, virtual teams should be prompted to use ice breakers and socializing techniques designed to be used in virtual communication such as sharing pictures, briefings, general socializing questions unrelated to the work being done… Putting more effort to building a healthy team and team dynamic will eventually payoff in terms of productivity.

Virtual teams are only one aspect of virtual communication. However, they are becoming more and more prevalent in many areas of our lives, which might prompt us to question whether relying on virtual communication is negatively affecting our communication styles and habits. We are continuously replacing physical and face to face communications with virtual ones out of practicality while hiding behind our modern busy lifestyles. Virtual communication has indeed revolutionized our lives, yet it has impeded its human side. As a social species, we should step back and decide on the extent to which we want our lives altered by virtual communication and the areas that we think should be kept intact from it.