NEWS

Getting high performance with a globally dispersed team

With globalisation and remote teams becoming more commonplace, you'll be intersted in reading our suggestions on how to get the best from a team which is spread across different locations.

Does everyone in your team sit in the same office or are they spread across different locations? As business becomes more global, we've seen a significant increase in the number of teams that have members spread across different countries and timezones. Here are some of our thoughts on how to achieve high performance with a dispersed team.

The challenges in creating a high performing team with members spread across the world are no different from those facing any team and its development. Having the appropriate skills, mutual accountabilities, commitment to a common purpose and approach are all vital ingredients to a team achieving its business results.

However, a team's geographical dispersion provides both a greater challenge - by magnifying the issues involved and slowing down the team development process - and a greater opportunity - to solve the issues by creatively using the rich diversity inherent in the group members.

The specific challenge therefore becomes how to make the team high performing in the shortest possible time by establishing the most effective working processes and forums, and building its sense of unity and community to sustain it through long periods of no face to face contact.

Main Issues

It takes effort to get everyone aligned around a genuine, shared commitment to the team's purpose and goals
- real buy-in comes from deep understanding and sharing of each other's perspectives, needs and motivations, which is difficult to achieve remotely.

Trust and team spirit develop slowly
- mistakes are tolerated less and it takes longer to adjust to individual habits and ways of working with less personal contact.

Roles and responsibilities are hard to establish and maintain
- different local expectations, language definitions, systems and practises can hide duplicated effort and unclear boundaries.

Interpersonal difficulties are hard to resolve, conflicts go unresolved for longer
- difficult to give feedback without personal contact, so issues are not addressed
- assumptions and misunderstandings build, which are hard to resolve without personal contact, and mistrust develops.

Ignorance of local customs and protocols and local office cultures lead to unforeseen problems.

It is harder to achieve the intended impact of messages when writing, e-mailing, tele-conferencing or video-conferencing compared with direct face to face contact, and when working across cultures and countries.

Local work responsibilities can impact on a member's contribution, particularly if team membership is part-time.

Strategies for success

Hold an initial face to face meeting primarily focused on:
- clarifying purpose and objectives of the team
- setting up working procedures, decision-making processes, roles and responsibilities
- getting buy-in and developing trust, rapport and a sense of community through social activities
- understanding pressures of local responsibilities outside of the team and impact on contribution to team goals.

Establish the means of communications and a schedule of meetings:
- use face to face meetings for reaching team decisions; reviewing objectives, direction or strategy, discussing values or principles; reviewing and improving the way the group is working; building team relationships
- congregate in small sub-groups for video-conferences
- pay attention to special events for team members and use as opportunities for informal contact, creating the virtual "coffee machine chat"!
- agree what, how and when information will be shared and responded to.

Establish ways of surfacing assumptions and dealing with conflicts:
- allow side discussions in local languages to check mutual understanding
- encourage tolerance and interest around language and cultural differences
- legitimise asking for clarification and repetition
- regularly summarise, check understanding and check out assumptions
- explore different approaches to conflict and agree methods that work for the group.

Learn about different cultural norms and ways of doing business and respect diversity:
- use different meeting locations to learn about local culture and customs
- work with the complementary blends of similarities and differences
- work to resolve the unhelpful similarities and differences.

Establish interdependency among the team members:
- create tasks with joint accountability and needing complementary skills of different team members
- have shared goals and reward systems.

Advocate the need to create, maintain and develop good relationships and care for each other:
- support and encourage group working and intercultural skills, especially at the beginning
- learn basic phrases in other members' languages
- give recognition in different ways to match individual preferences
- develop communication, influence, knowledge management and technology skills and confidence.

When a team leader, be available to team members:
- provide clear focus, direction and purpose to help members see the bigger picture, rather than get sucked into the local environment.

Include team outcomes in individual members' performance evaluation.

Provide the right technology to support the team's operation - technology which is convenient and practical to use.

Questions to consider

How much emphasis do you place on making sure the processes and relationships are in the right state to support the task being achieved?

What stops you - either organisationally or personally - from investing the significant time needed to build and maintain the working relationships needed for high performing teams with remote membership?

What needs to change organisationally to fully support globally dispersed teams?

References

'The Wisdom of Teams' by Jon R Katzenbach & Douglas K Smith. 1993. ISBN 0875843670.

'Geographically Dispersed Teams' by Michael E Kossler & Sonya Prestridge, Centre for Creative Leadership. Issues & Observations. Volume 16, Number 2/3,1996.

'The Wires That Bind: Creating and Maintaining the Virtual Team' by Shirley Pickering, ASK Europe PLC.

'Creating a High Performance International Team' by Sue Canney Davidson. Journal of Management Development Vol. 13 No. 2 1994.

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