Building Effective Virtual Workforces
The march toward virtual collaboration in today's workforce is inevitable as increasing volumes of work are being passed on to global partners who offer a cost advantage. Research shows, however, that diverse -- and dispersed -- teams can be less effective than homogeneous groups. It's time for HR to take the lead in developing the effective virtual and heterogeneous organizations needed to compete in this century.
By William Hills and Jan Gugliotti
Knowledge-based companies such as pharmaceuticals, software marketers, and cutting-edge defense contractors are forced into alliances to share critical intellectual property. Even within a company, specialists' jobs are typically time-sliced across a number of ongoing projects.
Vital as a collaborative capability is, research continues to show that diverse and dispersed teams can be less effective than homogeneous, co-located ones. Human patterning causes us to fall back into comfortable "we-they" and group think patterns of interaction.
But this doesn't have to be. It's time for human resource executives to take the lead in developing the effective virtual and heterogeneous organizations needed to compete in this century.
"No matter who you are, the smartest people work for someone else."
Bill Joy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems
What was evident to Joy in 1990 is exponentially truer today. Collaboration with people who don't work "here," however you want to define "here," is increasingly the way successful firms create breakthrough products, develop massive software products on time and under budget and operate 24/7 global operations.
A 2006 Frost and Sullivan survey credited 36 percent of an organization's positive performance to its collaborations. Yet other research shows that, when barriers to mixed, diverse teams are ignored or not effectively addressed, team performance suffers and employee burnout skyrockets.
Fortunately for human resource executives, both academic research and real-life experience are building a strong base of evidence on what the HR function should know and do to build a repeatable capability to tap into "the smartest people" no matter where they work.
First, let's acknowledge that working in a heterogeneous group, especially one that can't get together face-to-face and must rely on digital media to communicate, is not easy.
In Uniting the Virtual Workforce, Karen Sobel-Lojeski of Stony Brook University has
identified and created an equation
for measuring the three high-level factors that contribute to a team or organization's virtual distance.
Others researchers such as Anne Rutkowski (Tilburg University) and co-author Doug Vogel (City University of Hong Kong) add other barriers to committed collaboration, such as motivation, context preparation, technology barriers, team structure, effective process, national cultural background, and professional and educational background.
So, it's no surprise that Leslie DeChurch (University of Central Florida) and co-author Jessica Mesmer-Magnus (University of North Carolina) found that diverse teams can be less effective at arriving at optimal decisions.
As reported in the article "
The Problem with Diverse Teams
" published in June 2009 by HREOnlineTM, the researchers reviewed past studies of about 4,800 groups and 17,000 individuals. Not surprisingly, in such a large sample that is representative of "management as usual" -- no special coaching other than perhaps diversity training, no structured process, communication technology probably limited to e-mail -- they found that homogeneous teams outperformed diverse teams in reaching the best decisions.
But does that mean we're doomed to working with people who think, value and approach problems just like us, in a conference room in the midst of Cubicle City?
Fortunately, no. Volumes of research point to concepts that unite the ever-evolving set of digital communications media -- from social-networking sites to high-definition video telepresence and group software that can be configured for common problem-solving tasks -- to an understanding of group dynamics and how to make those dynamics work for your goal rather than against it.
In their Harvard Business Review article "
Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger
" (May, 2004), authors Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps report on a special collaboration between Boeing Inc. and Rocketdyne to build a new engine.
The team worked entirely virtually, with no face-to-face meetings. It was comprised of individuals from different disciplines, with unique product-design backgrounds, various organizations and distinct design practices, most of whom had never worked together before. Its ultimate design had to convince conservative Rocketdyne senior executives to agree to fund the design for final testing.
The result? The team reduced the number of parts for a critical component from about 1,200 to six. It cut manufacturing costs from a projected $7 million to $500,000. Predicted quality (failure rate) was less than 9 sigma, versus best practice in the industry of 6 sigma and typical 2 to 4 sigma. No member of the team dedicated more than 15 percent of his or her time to the effort. The project came in under budget after an elapsed time of 10 months versus the normal. The final design passed executive review with flying colors.
The specifics for how Boeing-Rocketdyne pulled off this feat are particular to the task it faced. But general lessons learned provide valuable insight:
* Provide context and motivation for participants;
* Choose a leader who believes in working virtually, across organizations;
* Provide the right technology and tools for communication -- in this case, simple audio conference plus access to a "shareable" PC whiteboard -- and a shared team space for managing all documentation, with edit privileges and version control;
* Use standard processes, templates and participant-led facilitation techniques for all planned interactions and post-meeting documentation, and rules of etiquette for impromptu discussions; and
* Minimize e-mail communication, which has been shown to be a leading contributor to failed communication, misunderstanding and lack of trust.
What does this all mean for the HR leaders? We draw these conclusions:
Training. Collaboration in a diverse, virtual organization is a complex effort involving knowledge in a number of areas. At a minimum, individuals who will be involved in non-traditional collaboration should be exposed to:
* The spectrum of electronic communication media involved and the pros and cons of each with respect to particular collaboration tasks.
For example, many collaboration efforts begin with a brainstorming phase. Research has shown that men are five times more likely to contribute the first ideas as well as the majority of ideas in a face-to-face or video conference meeting than women, but the gender playing field is equal in a text-based media where "turn taking" and social cues of approval/disapproval are absent.
* The basic process structure of a particular collaboration -- for example, divergent thinking, organization, prioritization and ranking, selection and consensus building -- and how to prepare in advance for each type of task.
* Meeting facilitation, and how to recognize and counter unwanted group behavior.
Grooming collaborative leadership. There is a significant role for HR and organization-development personnel to find and groom a new generation of leaders who are able to trust that team members working virtually and across multiple priorities can be at least as effective as team members they can physically monitor against a single priority.
Managers who have to see "their" people at work to trust them will subconsciously sabotage a virtual collaboration. In fact, most of today's knowledge worker jobs involve timeslicing employees' efforts across many competing priorities, a fact that makes the question of "who is my manager" difficult to answer.
Note that in the Boeing-Rocketdyne case, no employee allocated more than 15 percent of his/her time to the collaboration.
Traditional notions of span-of-control, co-location and employee-supervisor relationships are fading. Successful collaboration in today's environment requires a significant management belief shift and a concerted effort by HR to hire and/or develop individuals who are comfortable with virtuality.
Bridging cultural gaps. As global collaborations become more abundant, HR will play an equally critical role in finding and developing leaders who act effectively across global cultures where belief systems vary widely.
For example, most U.S. personnel accept and will follow a leader who brings depth of expertise to a project and who contributes to group outcome.
In Scandinavian countries, the concept of "lagom" or "no one is more important than any other one" means "superior competence" is at best an irrelevant quality in a leader, who instead must display egalitarian qualities.
In the United States, most people believe employees should be treated fairly. This is not an accepted belief in cultures that consciously treat employees in whatever way benefits the company.
The next generation of leaders has to be able to think outside its own cultural context to effectively lead global collaborations with (what may sometimes be) contradictory beliefs.
Creating new measures and incentives. A global virtual team is one that is assembled on an as-needed basis to accomplish a task and is staffed by members from different countries and organizations.
Finding metrics and rewards that are appropriate in a situation where "actual" managers have weak line of sight; goals vary from team to team; and compensation policies differ across organizations, national and state law, and union contract requirements can seem nightmarish.
Yet we know that motivation -- or lack of it -- is a key reason for the high failure rate of virtual collaboration. And we know that an effective, achievable reward system can be extremely motivating.
For this reason, HR leaders should be involved in the planning stage of every significant virtual collaboration to understand its goals, roles, skills and organizational composition and bring a set of metrics and performance-measurement-and-reward options to the table.
Ideally, HR should also be involved periodically with participants and leadership to understand what works and what doesn't.
We are seeing a dramatic shift in today's global working environment that requires us to change our fundamental assumptions about leadership, teamwork, and diversity. HR can drive leading organizations to equip people to collaborate effectively in a virtual world.
William Hills and Jan Gugliotti are co-founders of
Collaboration Age Associates
, which specializes in helping virtual organizations boost team and overall performance.
Bill Hills
has more than 25 years of consulting and industry experience working at the intersection of business-process optimization and technology application across a variety of industries. He has served as chief commercial officer for Virtual Distance International and co-founded the Collaborative Strategies Practice for VantagePoint Consulting Group.
Jan Gugliotti
has more than 25 years consulting experience with a wide variety of organizations to optimize business strategy and technology application. She holds an M.B.A. degree from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College and a B.A. from Michigan State University. Jan has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and contributed to scholarly books and white papers on business process and strategy.
October 16, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications
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