This document discusses communication challenges for virtual teams compared to local teams. It outlines some key differences between virtual and local teams, such as geographic dispersion, use of technology, and less face time for virtual teams. The document then discusses some common challenges for virtual teams, such as barriers to team bonding, cultural differences, and time zone conflicts. It emphasizes that communication is key for virtual teams to overcome these challenges and succeed. It provides strategies for virtual teams related to communication, cultural awareness, and use of technology and media.

1. Virtual vs. Local Teams:
Communication Success
and Failure
Kathy Moore
STC Summit
May 22, 2012
©2012 K. Moore

2. Crashing into Virtuality
2

3. Preview
● Employers assign web-savvy workers to
virtual teams with no qualms
– Smooth communication is assumed
– Multiple factors at play on virtual teams
● Online ubiquity does not guarantee
communication success on virtual teams
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4. Agenda
1. Meet Kathy
2. Virtual team characteristics
3. Challenges and strategies
4. Communication is key
5. Social! media
6. Who is joining our teams?
7. Summary and bibliography
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5. Virtual and local teams
● (Local) Team: Group working together at
one site with a common objective
● Virtual team: Group of geographically,
organizationally and time dispersed
workers brought together by information
technologies to accomplish one or more
objectives of the organization*
– Many flavors; telecommuter; on-site + consultant;
multiple local offices; open source projects;
nonprofits; worldwide team. (Some in 1 time zone.)
5 * DeSanctis and Poole, 1997

6. Virtual team characteristics
● Virtual team defined by:
1. Purpose
2. Members
3. Connections
● Advantages
– Productivity; customer access; flexibility, cheap
● Disadvantages
– Mistrust; communication break downs; conflicts;
power struggles; and management issues
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7. Virtual team vs. Local team
Virtual Team Local Team
1. Geographic dispersion One site (approx.)
2. Time shifted One time zone/office
3. 24-hour cycle Time constraints
4. Increases diversity Accustomed diversity
5. Tech-dependent Usual platforms
6. Minimal face time Customary interaction
7. Flexible Corporate time ethic
8. Malleable definition Traditional “team”
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8. Comments from STC members*
Supportive Drawback
● Work from home, ● Inundated with emails
overcome disabilities ● Trouble understanding
● 24-hour turnaround accents
possible ● Very time consuming
● Minimizes distractions, ● Infrastructure issues
increases productivity ● Virtual team was
● Better than silos marginalized
● F2F important ● Success depends on
● Communicate! leader
● Upsets time routines
* Email responses from SIG members and TECHWR-L archives.
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9. Agenda
1. Meet Kathy
2. Virtual team characteristics
3. Challenges and strategies
4. Communication is key
5. Social! media
6. Who is joining our teams?
7. Summary and bibliography
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10. Geographic dispersion consequences
1. Barriers to team bonding
2. Time zones = time conflicts
3. Source of cultural diversity (challenges)
4. Difficulties in status monitoring,
management
5. Overdependence on technology
6. Imbalance between members
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11. Challenges and strategies
● Barriers to team bonding and trust:
– Face to face meetings
– Ongoing team activities
● Time spread:
– #1 issue for virtual team managers!
– Site awareness
– Rotate discomfort
– Personal policy
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12. Culture: Iceberg model
ABOVE Surface: 20%
Obvious like clothes,
language, dress, art,
etc.
AT Surface: 5%
Image Wikimedia Creative Commons
Subtle but
discernible: Personal
BELOW Surface: 75% space, hierarchies,
Obscured, table manners, etc.
subconscious, like
beliefs, prejudices,
time ordering, body
language, kinship,
etc.
• External culture (the tip) is easier to understand and change.
• Internal culture (underwater) is based on underlying beliefs and
thought patterns and is more difficult to change.
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13. Example: Cultural challenges
● Manager gives mildly worded instructions,
such as “Why don‟t you…”
● Team members elsewhere hear a mild
suggestion, not an order
– Chaos on team if orders are not received
– Resentment between manager and member
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14. Overcoming: Cultural diversity challenges
Culture is #2 challenge for vTeam leaders.
Nationality, regional, generational, religious,
socioeconomic, corporate
● Keep your mind open. Think before
(e-)speaking
● Learn about team members
● Be aware of your own cultural conditioning
● Study cultural effects
● Consider personality profiles (MBTI, etc.)
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15. Culture defines members‟ responses
● Individualist: Personal initiative, success,
advancement, independence, are valued.
● Collectivist: Group harmony, agreement,
cooperation, are valued; disagreement is
avoided.
● Gender Perception: Fluid or rigid roles
● Uncertainty factor: Accepting or avoiding
– From Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede*
* Geert-hofstede.com
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16. Collectivism in world cultures
Collectivism in world cultures. Yellow is low in collectivism, red is high.
From Chiao and Blizinsky 2009.
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17. Virtual team = Intensified team
V-teams (typically) require MORE
● Management
● Team building
● Project infrastructure
● Communication
● Cooperation
● Infrastructure / Technology
● Attention
● Time
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18. Agenda
1. Meet Kathy
2. Virtual team characteristics
3. Challenges and strategies
4. Communication is key
5. Social! media
6. Who is joining our teams?
7. Summary and bibliography
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19. Communication treats ills
● Communication is medicine for:
– Isolation
– Cultural differences
– Team status and administration
– Shortage of esprit de corps
● Improves:
– Quality of team’s work
– Day-to-day experience of members
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20. Nonverbal: Endangering virtual teams
● 70% of face to face communication is
nonverbal: Virtual teams at risk
● Overcommunicate
– Enunciate clearly, speak with energy
– Walk, gesture, aim voice at target or photo
– Be theatrical
● As the camera that adds 10 pounds, so the
electron muffles the message
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21. Define team communication protocols
● #1 complaint from virtual teams relates to
communication flaws
● Clearly define team communication
protocols, early
● Explicit discussion of email turnaround, cc
policy, out-of-office messages, etc.
● Team-building:
– Include communication exercises
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22. Virtual teams have extra issues
● On local teams, 70% avoiding a crucial
conversation
● Of 14 all-team issues, 13 much more
frequent with virtual teams
● Handled by:
1. Avoidance, screening calls, ignoring calls and
emails, leaving other out of the loop
2. Undermining by gossip, criticism, complaints
● Remote problems significantly more
difficult to solve and last longer
Long-Distance Loathing: The Hidden Dangers of Virtual Teams, March 2009
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23. Poor communication: NASA
● Loss of NASA Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999
● Two teams worked jointly on the orbiter
● Failed to realize: One used
metric units, one used
Imperial (English) units
● The routine project
communication and
oversight did not uncover
Image NASA
their assumptions
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24. Agenda
1. Meet Kathy
2. Virtual team characteristics
3. Challenges and strategies
4. Communication is key
5. Social! media
6. Who is joining our teams?
7. Summary and bibliography
24

25. New face of communication
● iPads and tablets
● Cell phones, androids, iPhones
● Facetime, WebEx, GoToMeeting, wikis,
blogs, forums, agile, crowd sourcing…
…These accumulate to a new nexus of work
interactions, empowering virtual teams
● Connections now “always on”
● Workers always “on demand”
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26. Control the medium, control the message
Hierarchy of other‟s proximity and
resignation of control in electronic media:
1 Text: Terse, ~synchronous in use, revisable
1 Chat: Wordier, emotions, revisable, ~synchronous
2 Email: Asynchronous but verbose; revisable
3 Cell call: Voice is human interface; often multi-
tasked and interrupted
4 Landline call: Tied down, reduces multi-tasking
and interruptions
5 Video call: Most vulnerable. Cannot multi-task,
emotions revealed
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27. Work, especially virtual, is influenced
● Texting, IM-ing, emailing, calling, chatting,
… preferences are molded in private life
● Impress upon work behavior too, especially
as virtual team lacks in-person
reinforcement
● The chatter chats, the IM-er IM‟s, the
emailer mails
– Clashes when “talking” to each other
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28. Flood of e‟s on virtual teams
● Communication is oxygen to virtual teams
● But flood of electrons is overwhelming
● Email fatigue degrades quality of questions
and responses
– Writing to medium, not to the issue
● Movement online to make email more
considerate and efficient
– Email Charter: emailcharter.org
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29. Meet my avatar
● Worker controls virtual persona
● Worker may control virtual personas
● Missing:
– Body language
– Serendipity of real life
– Negotiation and surrender of control
– Synchronicity
– Full attention
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30. Virtual teams are theatrical
● Virtual teams = writing, editing, revising:
Performance
● Harder to “know” the team members: as
people, as competencies, as potential, as
other than what they choose to present
● Easier to hide sub-optimum work
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31. Electronic media impinge on virtual work
“„It was almost surprising that no one
seemed to notice [how much time I spent
reading the site]. But you could say in a
sense it was cutting down my productivity,
because I could have been experimenting
with stuff and improving them a bit more. But
everything was working fine.‟ As Joseph
began to think of Slashdot as an addiction,
he began to think about his unrealized
potential. He was functioning „fine‟ at his real
job, but falling down on his idealized one.”
Chan, A.S. The Inner History of Devices 2008.
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32. Disconnecting?
● Some hyperconnected people crave “down
time” and sign off Facebook or chat
– Some try―yet fall back to their “old” ways
● Pulled away from real-life accomplishments
● Some find it easier to be unkind, rude, or
unethical to online connections, even
knowing this phenomenon is occurring
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33. Type a mile in whose thumbs?
● Study: Less empathy in college students
today vs. 1980s/1990s
● Therapists report more patients divorced
from bodies and unaware of basic
courtesies; “unaware of people around
them except to
passively see them
as tools.”
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34. Electronic media steal our control
“I went away to a cabin. And I left my cell
phone in the car. In the trunk. My idea was
that maybe I would check it once a day. I kept
walking out of the house to open the trunk
and check the phone. I felt like an addict, like
the people at work who huddle around the
outdoor smoking places they keep on
campus, the outdoor ashtray places. I kept
going to that trunk.”
Turkle, S., Alone Together 2011.
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35. Agenda
1. Meet Kathy
2. Virtual team characteristics
3. Challenges and strategies
4. Communication is key
5. Social! media
6. Who is joining our teams?
7. Summary and bibliography
35

36. Introverted wonks
● Classic head-down introvert embraces the
isolation of virtual team
● Quiet, overlooked in meetings
● Prefers working, own stuff to team
activities, socializing.
● Hides or is a lost voice in teleconferences
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37. Introversion, autism-spectrum increasing
● Temple Grandin of An Anthropologist on
Mars: “NASA is largest sheltered workshop
in the world”
● In California, 7 new cases of autism per day
● High-tech areas reproducing geeks, nerds,
dorks, introverts
● Geekier geeks enter the workforce
● We adapt to these traits on teams
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38. Welcoming the introverts
● Get good voice technology for low talkers
● Pause, query, rotate, roll call
● Discover introverts‟ personal goals,
hobbies: Weave into team doings
● Ping for their progress
● Actively, repeatedly seek their opinions
● …Or, leave them in their solitude and check
in as needed
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39. Welcoming Gen Y tsunami
● Gen Y workers (1980s - 90s) are flooding
into our teams
● Approximately 80 million Millennials
– 44 - 50 million Gen Xers (1965 - 1980)
– 76 million Baby Boomers (1946 - 1964)
● Teams likely to expand with Gen Y‟s
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40. Gen Y traits
● Confident but seeking feedback
● Self-absorbed but philanthropic
● Job-hopping entrepreneurs
● Collaborative crowd-sourcers
● Friendly to diversity and inclusion
● Techno-savvy data mining info-seekers
● Comfortable getting authority figures‟ tips
These are good traits for virtual teams
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41. Agenda
1. Meet Kathy
2. Virtual team characteristics
3. Challenges and strategies
4. Communication is key
5. Social! media
6. Who is joining our teams?
7. Summary and bibliography
41

42. Discussion
● Survey
– How did you react?
– Results
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43. Future
● Virtual tools are trending into the local
office
● Building our skills as virtual teammates will
make us more effective, efficient, humane
team members
● We can be the “just right” connected
colleague, prepared both to contribute and
to assist others
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44. Summary
● Virtual teams are intensified teams
● Communication is key
● New media are everywhere, everywhen
● Media can distance us from our teams
● Help your teammates by recognizing and
adapting to their quirks
● Know your own quirks; be adaptable
● Social changes may affect team make-up
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45. Bibliography
Arnison, L. and P. Miller (2002). Brown, M. K., B. Huettner, et al.
"Virtual teams: a virtue for the (2007). Managing virtual teams:
conventional team." Journal of getting the most from wikis,
Workplace Learning 14(4): 166- blogs, and other collaborative
173. tools. Sudbury, MA, Jones and
Brewer, P. E. (2010). Bartlett: 6327.
Communication and Economist Intelligence Unit
Miscommunication in Virtual (2009). Managing virtual teams:
Workplaces. Taking a more strategic
Brown, M. K. (2004). Building an approach.
Effective Multi-Site, Multicultural Email Charter. (2011). "Email
Team. Management SIG News, Charter." Retrieved February 12,
Society for Technical 2012, from emailcharter.net.
Communication. 8: 3-4. Fisher, K. and M. Fisher (2011).
Manager's Guide to Virtual
Teams. Briefcase Books. New
York, McGraw-Hill: 4412.
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46. Bibliography
Pongolini, M., J. Lundin, et al. TECHWR-L archives. (2002).
(2011). "Global Online Meetings in "Virtual Teams thread."
Virtual Teams - from Media Retrieved Feb. 17, 2012, from
Choice to Interaction http://www.techwr-
Negotiation." C&T'11(29 June - 2 l.com/archives/0201/techwhirl-
July 2011): 108-117. 0201-01172.html.
Skill Soft. (2008, Dec. 13, 2011). Turkle, S., Ed. (2008). Inner
"Leading Teams: Managing History of Devices. Cambridge
Virtual Teams" from MA, MIT Press.
http://learning.acm.org/courses/c Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together:
ourse_detail.cfm?course_id=1257 Why We Expect More From
22. Technology and Less From Each
Other. New York, Basic Books:
7517.
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47. Thank You
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