What do you do when the team you lead isn't all sitting in the same place at the same time?

For many managers today it's rare to have all the members of your team or group located in the same place (or even the same time zone).

Advances in technology and culture make remote and virtual teams more common.

Working in this way has many advantages:

Flexible collaboration

Bringing together complementary skills

Individuals can achieve a better work life balance (e.g. working from home).

It does also present some disadvantages or issues:

For the manager:

Maintaining direction and focus for the team / project

Keeping in contact - maintaining visibility - in all directions:

Becoming the absent leader

Having the invisible team

Creating a sense of team and collaboration vs. parcelling out work to individual "subcontractors"

Understanding individuals' contributions

Maintaining people's commitment, interest and motivation

Building "team spirit".

For the team member:

Risk of isolation - lack of contact with other team members and from the purpose and progress of the team

Can strain collaboration / inter-dependency - making people more independent and stand-alone

Maintaining personal commitment and energy to the purpose of the team.

How can managers gain the advantages and manage the implications?

Clear "contracting" - mutually understood agreements derived from discussion - understanding just "what the deal is".

In today's complex business world, having some clear "local rules" is invaluable.

Some of these contracts will be collective with the whole team, e.g. discussing and agreeing:
- Just what the team's purpose and focus is
- What we're aiming to achieve - results that include both tangible deliverables and intangible outcomes
- How we'll work together - what we collaborate on and what we do individually
- Inter-dependency in tasks
- Shared goals and reward
- How we'll communicate: sharing information, progress and just "how are we doing personally"
- How we'll make decisions
- How we'll resolve differences
Some of the contracts will be individual, e.g.
- Individual performance / contribution - including expected contribution to personal and team deliverables and outcomes, team focus, sharing info, learning and growth, personal objectives, preferred ways of working (helping to understand what motivates the person).
- Contracts may be three-way if you are managing a cross-functional or matrix team, where the discussions and agreements are likely to be between the line/function manager, team leader and the individual team member.

Attending to the relationships in the team

Relationships are essential to maintain the connection between people and things. It's the quality of relationships that ultimately drives an organisation's success.

Although relationships can be stretched by distance and time they can be built and maintained through every interaction.

In some teams, face-to-face time is rare, so use it primarily for the things it really helps:
- Mutual understanding - rapport
- Understanding differences of perspective
- Sense of the team
- Key decisions
- Feedback / performance reviews.
It can help to move the location for your team's face-to-face meetings around, so that all members of the team feel more included.

Getting a new team into the same room early in the project can be vital to setting off with a shared sense of purpose and commitment.

Other means of communication like phone, teleconference, videoconference, online discussions, e-mail are all useful in keeping in touch with the team and the team in touch with each other. It's important to understand the advantages and limitations of each method.

As a manager of remote or virtual teams one of the most vital things is to be available for contact.

Where people work on a multitude of projects simultaneously, it can be important to feel that you have a "home" group.

Regularly review against all aspects of the work

The most successful teams regularly review how things are going:
- Team progress and practice
- Individual contribution
- How are we doing - against the contract and personally?
- What are we learning?
- What do we need to change?

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