Helping Virtual Teams Succeed

Reference: Nunamaker, J.F., Jr., Reinig, B.A., and Briggs, R.O. (2009), Principles for effective virtual teamwork, Communications of the ACM 52:4, pp. 113-117.

This article is not so much a research article as a research-based guide to practice. Nevertheless, it resonates highly with me for reasons I’ll explain as I highlight the principles that the authors propose.

Principle 1: Realign reward structures for virtual teams. The theory is that in absence of physical proximity among members of a virtual team, non-verbal cues for appreciation and enthusiasm are lost and must be replaced with explicit rewards. Your virtual teammates cannot easily observe your level of commitment to your team and your project, reducing both their need to contribute and the praise that they might otherwise have offered and which would serve to keep you excited and involved. Also, a virtual teammate does not need to worry about being embarrassed by running into you in the hallway after being late on a deliverable or a promise. In a face-to-face collaboration, you could motivate a teammate who doesn’t seem to be involved by walking into his or her office and probing with simple technical or process questions. With a virtual teammate, an email reminder or question is more likely to engender resentment than encouragement. In the virtual environment, both the carrot and the stick are harder to apply.

As a knowledge worker rather than manager, I have little opportunity to modify the reward structures of my virtual teams. But, I have learned to form my teams in such a way as to maximize the rewards for collaboration. One such approach is to include a non-tenured faculty member on each team. These teammates have the greatest incentive to work hard, but they also engender hard work in the rest of the team, as nobody wants to be responsible for their failure to publish.

Among Web 2.0 advocates, the wiki has been evoked as an ideal medium for collaborative writing. A prime example is Wikipedia, a collaboratively written encyclopedia. My own experience with wikis has been mixed. I’ve found that my students will not use a wiki for collaborative writing unless there’s a specific penalty for failing to do so, or, somewhat less successfully, a reward for contributing to it. One of my colleagues has observed the same thing in his classes. Why does Wikipedia work, then, when there is no reward offered? The answer seems to be that some people feel an intrinsic pleasure in contributing. They enjoy seeing their words “in print” or feel great displeasure at seeing errors left uncorrected. This proportion is quite small, but enough people are exposed to Wikipedia that it succeeds despite the low percentage of those for whom the reward is intrinsic.

A colleague and I recently attempted to write a teaching case by wiki with an organization that was highly committed to the case. We thought that this novel approach would be ideal because it would convey the “voice” of the case subject rather than that of the case writer. Additionally, it would be a living case, in the sense that students could contribute to it and the case subjects could respond to the students. Ultimately, this effort failed. There were probably several reasons, including a less-than-friendly wiki interface; but the major reason for failure, in my opinion, was that we never created any incentives for the case subjects to participate.

This blog would be too long if I elaborated on each of the other principles for effective virtual work to the same degree as I elaborated on the first. For now, I will just list them. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to address them in a future blog:
2. Find new ways to focus attention on task
3. Design activities that cause people to get to know each other
4. Build a virtual presence
5. Agree on standards and terminology
6. Leverage anonymity when appropriate
7. Be more explicit
8. Train teams to self-facilitate
9. Embed collaboration technology into everyday work