US firms have jumped onto the bandwagon of "virtual teams." Virtual teams offer irresistible opportunities to bring in specialists from anywhere in the world with no travel costs. With available information technologies (IT), we now can collaborate instantaneously with many others across any distance. Businesses can learn faster, bring products to market sooner, solve problems and create new value. Suddenly many of us participate in, or lead, a virtual team.

Like so many other things in the tumultuous marketplace, successful virtual teamwork is harder than it looks. Research consistently shows that teams succeed when everyone participates, feels a part of a cohesive group and project, has sufficient trust to act autonomously and communicates well on interdependent tasks. Factor in the distance between teammates and their dependence on IT, and even the simplest coordination or communication gets more complicated.

Virtual teams tend to be larger and much more diverse than traditional co-located teams - different functions, status, organizations, cultures and perhaps languages. Your team members do not know how to talk with people they do not know and cannot see. Virtual communications trigger misunderstandings and conflict more readily than face-to-face conversations. Then, these take longer to resolve. As team leader you can no longer rely on observing that someone is not working, falling hopelessly behind, or harboring resentment. Your problems jump out only when they're much bigger and harder to solve. And no one gets any compensation for this extra work.

Leading a team under these conditions demands new skills, lots of time, planning, communication, communication and communication. You are, after all, trying to induce people to collaborate who have neither the time nor the incentive to do it!

Everyone needs to feel that they belong on the team and the team values them and their contributions. Research shows that when people feel they are part of the team, they show more willingness to share their knowledge and collaborate. They also express more satisfaction with the team and with their employer. That is, more likely to stay with the company! How can you gain commitment and good will when your highly diverse team is not in the same room? How can everyone learn and acknowledge those differences, then work through the assumptions and problems the differences may signal?

Creating a truly inclusive virtual team demands action on many levels:

• Inclusiveness starts from the beginning - the team purpose statement and the strategy for realizing it. Insisting that the whole team creates and agrees on these says loud and clear that everyone has a voice in decision-making and contributes to the team's results. The strategic plan will include an essential agreement - roles and responsibilities in the team, including who depends on whom. That clarifies who works on which tasks on their own at what times and who collaborates with whom on what. People who cannot literally see who is working on what must have a written agreement that sets out dependencies and accountabilities. Without this, individuals will not know when they must involve others and will not have the confidence to take risks and to pursue things on their own.


• Create together a "Rules of Engagement" at the team's formation. These rules set the standard for behaviors. An important rule is how rapidly will the team respond to member emails. Virtual teams have "an intense need for response." Someone who does not respond for days (or at all) sends his teammates the message, "I don't care." "I'm too busy for you." Or "I think that's a dumb idea." Any of which can undermine individuals' confidence and willingness to risk knowledge-sharing. Then post these rules in an easy-to-find place on the team website.


• Another rule to write together is which medium best fits recurring team tasks. Matching the medium to the purpose and the recipient proves central in enabling people to contribute their best. At points of complicated hand-offs, synchronous conversations can make the difference between a success and a flop. The more ambiguous the situation, the more the team needs to talk together in real-time. Giving people feedback online means individuals read it in an email with a time lag and perhaps in a situation that prevents them from truly "hearing" it. Identify synchronous ways to offer each other feedback.


• And as a leader, you must recognize when individuals need face-to-face conversations. Take a team member out to dinner, a real dinner, so you can learn much more about a tricky problem and show you care about her and her professional development.


• Create a skills inventory at the beginning that helps everyone get to know one another and understand the capabilities of the team as a whole. The list also serves as a "go to" guide for everyone when they face a problem. Post the list on the team website. With photos!


• Get everyone around a real table early in the team's life, if possible. Teams that have face-to-face interactions early get to know one another and build trust quicker. As a result, they respond to questionable emails with more generosity, reducing potential triggers of conflict. The greater the diversity in the team, the more valuable the face-to-face experience. Team members recognize from the beginning the differences and can learn to value the differing capabilities everyone brings. Starting before Day One, the leader sets a climate of mutual respect and safety in expressing differences.

  If a face-to-face meeting is truly impossible, make time for people to get to know one another and recognize the potential value of these differences virtually.



• Build in processes that require inclusion. Set up procedures for every team member to sign off on important team documents that identify decisions or that go outside the team. Ask everyone to submit two sentences that state their view of a decision before you begin discussion of the problem. You can do this "go-round" online or in a digitally-mediated synchronous meeting environment as well as in a face-to-face meeting.


• Fight, if you have to, for the resources you'll need to enable everyone to spend the extra time that virtual planning, coordination, communication and taskwork require. Without that allowance in schedules and supervision, how will people do this work that slows down their individual performance (and frustrates their supervisors!)?

Without purposefully building inclusion and participation into your virtual team's processes and expectations, your team members may exclude critical people and information from decisions and tasks. They may refuse to "speak up" and acknowledge and learn from mistakes. If team members do not feel part of and valued by the team, they are also are far more likely to let "groupthink" dominate decision-making - going along in order not to call attention to different values and ideas. A frontline worker may not suggest an idea from the customers she serves because she knows the (higher status) professionals will not like it. Some may feel no commitment to the team or its work and effectively hide, letting others do the work.

All these slow down progress and hurt performance.

Your job is to help your team through the time-consuming, uncomfortable steps of changing well-practiced ways of doing things. This is not easy in traditional co-located work situations. Virtuality makes it more complicated. And this work continues and changes throughout the team's lifetime. A teams needs change as it works together. Teams require different structures, tools and activities as everyone gains experience and works toward team outcomes.

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