The successful Virtual Team
The next talk up that afternoon, March 18th, as part of the project zone congress, is another one by Lars Sudmann, who already gave an inspirational keynote this morning. So worth going.
He was talking about ten ideas how to engage and manage virtual teams.
Co-Located teams are outperformed by virtual teams.
but … this needs specific arguments and measures to apply. Lars speaks about ideas to make that statement happen.
In the area of Virtual Management, the overall management of virtual teams working in a virtual environment can be brought down to the following 5 ‚ideas‘:
- Proactive interaction – by having virtual coffees for example. To plan and structure communication that usually happens as part of a coincident, in the coffee area for example.
- Reflect on your virtual image – How are you being perceived, are you eating, are you typing or otherwise distracted ?
- Over-sahre with your virtual team – Share more than you usually would.
- Performance Management – Measure the performance
- Virtual Team Building – for example yearbook yourself (a website where you can do that online and create your personal yearbook of your team, have virtual kick offs or christmas parties if you want to drive it to the extreme.
In the area of Virtual meetings, the following ideas yould apply according to Lars:
- Over Visualize – by using net meeting or other tools, draw pictures to support your message and share them, create your project logo together and so on.
- Make Mini Movies – Use state of the art technology to share stuff and information in a different format
- Speak like a Radio DJ – by standing up for example while you are in a telefon conference (higher your table, have a headset and speak free standing. You will realize that there will be a different attitude that you are getting across.
- Interact – aks questions to engage your team and draw pictures together
- Co-Create – whatever can be co-created have it co-created by the virtual team
and there is one final note he is giving:
Bring in the human side by ‚Sing Happy Birthday to Robert‘
All this can or could be applied to your virtual team to make them work together more efficiently and outpace the co-located workers. Go an enjoy if you have the opportunity.
and enjoy the sketch note for the stuff that resonated:
