The Challenges of TeamworkWorking on teams can normally prove very challenging, with all of the variations inpersonalities, strengths, and weaknesses, most of these issues are raised face to face withindividuals, and can be resolved by finding a room to sit and talk them out. Working onvirtual teams is more challenging, since there are a lot of things missing from the person-to-person contact, such as:Lack of visual cues to understanding context. Many people write email and talkon the telephone in a manner which is completely different than they would talkin person; things that are taken as insults could actually be jokes, or things thatare taken as jokes could actually be insults. Lack of a communication mesh. Generally, teams work well when cubicle tocubicle talk’ occurs; when people wander around asking questions.
It’s difficult towander from place to place all the time when your team is scattered all over theworld. At the same time, virtual teams have some advantages. For instance, it’s easier to thinkthrough your response when writing an email than when talking in a meeting, which is agood and a bad thing. It’s harder to brainstorm when you aren’t willing to just throw outideas (people are often afraid of saying things that make them look stupid in email,because they think about it before they send it). But it’s easier to have rational discussionwhen everyone can (not that they always do) let things sit for some time rather thanreplying in emotion.
Several things that came up in our discussion are that virtual teams are also like normalteams in many ways, so many of the normal team rules apply. Web ResearchSeveral links came up dealing with virtual teams when searching the Internet. While eachof these has valuable information and suggestions on making a virtual team work, onlyone seemed to have strong content that was useful:http://www. courses. psu. edu/comm/comm488_amh13/eclassroom/tipeffective.
htmlRules for Virtual TeamsAfter some discussion, we came up with the suggested set of guidelines for workingwithin virtual teams. 1. Teams rely on the ability to ask questions and get answers freely. The teamshould , therefore, foster an environment in which there are no dumb questions. .
