I heard Karen Sobel Lojeski, a Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, speak at the Babson College Center for Information Management Studies yesterday. She introduced the concept of virtual distance and provided some good insights into how to manage virtual teams. I blogged about virtual distance a couple of years ago (see How 'Close' is Your Team?) Lojeski identified three factors that affect the distance among team members:
- Physical distance factors include how close the team members are located, how many time zones separate members, and how far apart the members are organizationally.
- Operational distance factors measure team size, the degree to which the team works face-to-face, the degree to which team members multitask, and the types of collaboration tools and technical support available to team members.
- Affinity distance factors measure the degree to which team members share cultural values, feel interdependent, have other relationships (through other projects or socially), and are at the same level within the organization.
She noted that teams with relatively low virtual distance were:
Profesoor Lojeski then noted that three management practices help reduce virtual distance. They are:
- Create context--help your team understand why they are doing what they're doing. As we grow I find myself spending mor eof my time creating context for our consultants and managers. The key for our team is understanding what work they should be performing for our clients. We do this formally every week and reinforce it informally throughout the week. I also report back on how we did against our expectations at the end of the week. Finally, I relate the work we did to our revenue and profit targets.
- Cultivate community--on-line tools can help to create community. We're big fans (no surprise) of the tools in SharePoint 2010 that let employees build My Sites, tag and rate documents, blog, wiki and micro-blog. These need to be supplemented by in-person events. At KMA, we do pot luck lunches, monthtly company meetings and informal Friday afternoon get togethers.
- Co-activate new leaders--as we grow, we need to train new leaders and teahc them how to create context and cultivate community. We combine leading by example with leadership training.
To learn more about this research, you can visit Professor Lojeski's company's website: http://virtualdistance.com/default.aspx.
- more likely to deliver a project on-time and on-budget
- more trusting
- more innovative
- had higher job satisfaction
- perceived that their leaders were more effective
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