When you have to do more with less, hiring virtual employees could be the perfect solution, just remember to Choose those virtual team members wisely. When you make the choice to open your doors to the virtual workforce you open yourself and your company to a whole new world of responsibility such as performance management for virtual employees, virtual team building and retaining virtual employees.
Keep in mind certain aspects you take for granted in managing and engaging your in house employees must be addressed, shifted and tweaked when hiring, managing and engaging with the virtual workforce. It is extremely important that you get it right in the beginning as more and more of your workforce will choose the virtual option and more and more companies are offering it.
Virtual team members carry more than just the burden of
remembering which time zone they’re working in. Business and Hiring Managers need to recognize
the different way that virtual team members experience signal and noise. In
order for a team with virtual members to work well, some effort needs to be
spent up front on team governance and organizing communication processes into a
tune with a good beat you can dance to.
This makes a lot of sense. If you work side by side with your teammates you get cues
all the time from them about how to work together. In fact, you’re receiving peer pressure, process pressure,
the persuasion of the team leader and company pressure all at once, all the
time. It’s like listening to a
symphony – notes and melody swirling around, but with somebody guiding them in
the same direction. Not much of a
surprise then that it’s relatively easy to get to a high level of team
commitment with all that conducting going on.
But put yourself in the shoes of the virtual team
member. Boy, what fun! You get all the interaction of your
local environment, but what you’re tasked with focusing on is something
invisible, unfamiliar and that doesn’t give much feedback. It reminds me of a pledge drive: I’m
trying to just drive the car and not to hit anything when the music stops and
the man asks me to pick up the phone.
We all know how well that works: I turn down the distraction and stay on
the road.
What I read in this article is that, in general, it’s hard
to focus in a noisy environment, and that people are really bad at thinking on
their feet when they’re under pressure.
I’ve always thought that it’s a good idea to have a protocol to follow
in the event of a surprise, so that you don’t have to actually think on
your feet. Fortunately, for
co-located team s these surprises and the resulting pressure are (usually)
infrequent events that occur and get resolved.
But in a virtual team, the members are always under
pressure. What they need is more like sheet music to guide from beginning to
end. And what the authors are
suggesting is that it’s that note by note guidance that makes it possible for
the team to get its work done at all.
The team’s sheet music helps keep everyone together so they can create a
soundtrack, not just background noise.
A pledge drive is easily turned down and ignored, but a good regular
four-four beat gets turned up and sung along to.
The team leader has to orchestrate those rhythmic processes
and clear relationships at the outset when he or she has the best chance of
being heard. That’s the time,
early on when an awful lot of us would likely be thinking about the schedule,
that we should be spending our energy on governance.
That’s when we should be setting up the relationships, performance management standards and processes that inform
how work actually gets done. After
all, a schedule tells me how long I can wait until my tasks go critical. But
what a virtual team needs early on is members zeroing in on their
responsibilities and understanding the process for communicating regularly to
the team that they’re on the beat.
It’s all about making it easy to do the right thing. The
world is full of distractions. The challenge for a virtual team is to systematically
make teamwork simple enough and regular enough to cut through the noise.
David Kershaw
Founder, eVisioner
MetaTeam :: Revolutionizing The Way Teams Work!