Viewpoint

Global Virtual Teams: Closing the Importance-Performance Gap

A revolution is going on in the workplace due to the intense driving forces of globalization and technology - new technologies including web, video and audio conferencing, wikis ,blogs, microblogging, groupware, and social media (such as Facebook and Linkedin).

Globalization has shaped the competitive landscape for many businesses, and determined the fitness requirements for success - the urgency to innovate continuously, the need to dramatically increase speed from concept to market, the necessity of developing responsiveness to diverse customers, and the profound need for agility in organizing work and leveraging worldwide resources. Technology is the enabler, and the outcome has been more and more responsibility being placed on virtual teams and remote employees for getting work done.

Anyone who has led or worked on these teams knows that if they are to be really successful they require more attention, greater discipline, and more effort. Unfortunately, there is often a gap between what we need and current reality. In a recent TMA World webinar (titled 'Can global virtual teams ever work?'), I asked the 98 participants to rate the Importance of global virtual teams to their organization's competitiveness, as well as the Performance of their current teams. The results were:

Ninety seven percent of respondents said global virtual teams were extremely or very important to their organization's competitiveness, but 82 percent said the current performance of those teams was only moderate or poor.

Working on or with global virtual teams for the past 15 years, I have found many lack a guidance system. They don't have a clear sense of what is important for their success. This is the main reason I developed the Six Cs of Global Collaboration. The Six Cs can act as a performance guidance system; a framework and set of measures for focusing team attention, and a means for developing discipline and guiding effort.

As part of the webinar, I asked participants to use the Six C framework to identify the top three developmental challenges for their existing teams, and here are their results:

It's interesting that the most significantly challenging areas are clearly in soft skill areas: Cooperation, Communication, and Cultural Intelligence. In the new workspace, one of the temptations is to see success as dependent on integrating the best new technology, having the most efficient processes, or using the most powerful collaboration tools. They are important, of course, but the true global virtual performance enablers are person-centered not technology-centered.

The real challenge is human connectivity not bandwidth.

Terence Brake is President - Americas of TMA World and the author of the recently published radical new instructional soap opera, 'Where in the World is my Team?' www.whereintheworldismyteam.com.

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