Endless Knots

Uptick in teleconferencing

Re: the volcano disrupting travel and thus promoting virtual working: One of many articles to come in the next few days, I'm certain, this, thanks to Amy Millman, "Stranded Travelers Turn to Teleconferencing," by Kevin O'Brien in the NY Times. My favorite anecdote:

In one case, a couple stranded in Dubai decided to televise their wedding vows over a Skype video conference to guests gathered for their wedding ceremony on Saturday in England, Ms. Milosevich said.

Saves on catering costs, never mind those costly centerpieces.

Iceland causes virtual teams to finally erupt

From Reuters/Ingolfur Juliusson, plasmastic

Quite a good post ("Eruptions") from Hugh Tonks at workshifting.com. Clever walk around his team looking at what the shutdown in air travel has meant to them. How many more volcanoes will it take before virtual teams gain some respect?

Inc. goes virtual - for a second

Those following the field know that Inc. magazine carried out an experiment in February: it sent everyone home to experience working virtually. Thanks to Virginia Adamson at Volvo IT, I just read Inc. Senior Writer Max Chafkin's very good article about it, "The Case, and the Plan, for the Virtual Company."

I've complained before about how thin most of the material about virtual working really is with the endless lists of "ten ways to" and "three things that you should do..."

Chafkin's article is thoughtful, extraordinarily well written for material in this field (admittedly dominated by techies not writers), and provocative. The set of things he comes up with are very important:

1. Crunch the numbers to figure out the savings and expenses associated with stashing everyone at home.
2. [For]Get the tech. He makes the argument so clearly. It really doesn't matter. Spend your time doing your work, not in training with new collaboration technology. While many people have advised us to change our old motto "90% people, 10% technology" to "80-20," I might go in the other direction after reading this: 95% people, 5% tech.
3. Settle in. Great stories about the tension of working at home. Reminds me of a family classic when our girls were little (we've worked at home since the dawn of internet time). Adorable little girls come into office to ask question/get a hug/aka interrupt. Immediate need met, I say, "Would you like to leave yourself or should I escort you out?" The older of the two says, "'Scort me out." She, btw, is now working two days a week from home with little people nearby who have quite limited vocabulary at the moment.
4. Master your emoticons and everything else about working online. Self-explanatory. Everyone interviewed for the piece, both within Inc. and outside, which is one of the great gifts of this story, struggled with isolation and loneliness even while benefiting from the ability to concentrate. This allows me to throw in another motto: "Isolate to concentrate; congregate to collaborate," which of course can be done at a distance or in-person.
5. Explain yourself. The publishing world, or at least a blogger at Columbia School of Journalism, interpreted Inc.'s experiment as the opening shot in its shutting down.
6. Consider your culture. Here's my beef with the piece, Mr. Chafkin. I don't agree that "going virtual means moving away from a culture of collaboration by a group of competent generalists and toward one based on specialists who are cheap, efficient, and good at meeting deadlines." Snope. Not at all. It's not the content/expertise of the collaborators that matters; it's the way they collaborate. Yes, you can limit virtual working to brain-picking for specific expertise; it's very effective. But the big mushies of collaboration can and do still take place virtually. In fact, generalists benefit from virtual working as they generally surf more. I have no data to back this up but think about it. The most interesting stuff I've picked up today has been on Facebook News Feed. I would not be seeing it if someone were looking over my shoulder. And, please, before you think I'm saying FB should replace real news...I'm not. Just an anecdote about how we spend "idle" time.

So...turns out that most of the Inc-ers wanted back to the office. (I failed to mention that they have 10,000 absolutely gorgeous square feet in downtown Manhattan. But then again, Inc. has always had great offices - I remember going to the waterfront in Boston when they were located here in '90s.) My read on this: of course. It was an experiment, not meant to last, with coming back together to reflect built into the test. Were Inc. to seriously go virtual, it would make a plan to address the tough stuff, to build a space-and-time spanning culture, to promote norms and perks that make it easier for people, and, most importantly, it would hire differently. Everyone in the experiment had been hired into a bricks-and-mortar position. Make that same position virtual and different people would apply.

I could argue a few more points but, geez, Inc., good for you. And really good for you, Max Chafkin. Very enlightening piece.

Interesting notion: Spend 3/4 of your time with those not co-located

It's not just because "Selling a Global Business: Teamwork Working Like Clockwork Around the Clock" quotes us (thanks) that I'm pulling out its virtual team guidelines. Click-worthy for the whole list of nine, I'm pulling out four that are particularly good:

Have explicit meeting preparation and management

It is more difficult to follow standard meeting processes over distant locations, cultures and time zones. Take the time to state the meeting preparation expectations for the project. Find the best time zones for the team and alternate between them. For example, in a recent client engagement involving a US company expanding in an Asian market, we had meetings every Tuesday, but alternated between 7 am and 7 pm US CST. We were all equally inconvenienced, and that is the only fair way to do it.

Repeat names during the meeting. Since you cannot see body language, proactively monitor meeting reactions and performance, and address problems promptly.

Rotate meeting leadership and scribe roles

To promote inclusion and participation, rotate leadership and scribe roles. Wake up the team by raising your expectations of them. Whoever takes the minutes should be the next meeting’s leader, since one prepares you for the other.

Spend 70-80% of time with team members that are NOT co-located

It is easy to stay in the pattern you are already in: building relationships, sharing information and spending time with those already in your location. Global virtual team leadership requires you to go beyond your comfort zone and not just reach out but to focus on those that you cannot easily communicate with. Schedule one on one conversations for feedback and focused conversations.

Assess team and leader skills, and design training to close gaps.

With a team that is in your location, you may have a better understanding of what the team’s skills are. With a team in another location, special effort needs to be made to understand the team’s skills, and where and how to improve them.

Virtual lunch, very noisy

This is from a longer post, "Seven habits for successful video meetings," on Virtual Teams Blog, run by Al Jury who did his Ph.D. in virtual team leadership. Critical issue here. Food at virtual meetings:

6. Be careful ordering food during the meeting:

In meetings where food is ordered it can be very disruptive to meetings. Most video meeting rooms have very sensitive microphones which pick up lots of noise from cutlery etc which can be very disruptive to meetings. I have also been in meetings where the majority of participants are in one location and only food is ordered for that location. So participants often have to sit through the meeting hungrily looking on at all the others eating their lunches. This doesn’t help feelings of inclusiveness. So either have food ordered for all participants irrespective of their locations or none at all.

Virtual teams poorly managed, say 1 in 3 execs in Economist study

Looks like some quite solid research from the Economist Intelligence Unit, "Managing virtual teams: Taking a more strategic approach." In the study, conducted in Fall 2009, a third of those executives surveyed said that their virtual teams were not well managed, yet most endorsed using them nonetheless. The major findings (go to link to download the study):

• Executives are generally positive about working in virtual teams. More than two out ofthree survey respondents believe that the advantages of working in a virtual team outweigh the disadvantages. Three out of every four respondents also state that they travel less as a result of working virtually.

• The single most common challenge, selected by 56% of executives polled, relates to the misunderstandings that emerge as a result of cultural and language differences from teams operating globally. Just one in 20 executives say they have never experienced any difficulty in managing a virtual team.

• More than one-half of executives say that their virtual teams use video conferencing on a regular basis. This rises to about two-thirds (64%) for the largest firms (those with annual revenue in excess of US$10bn), prompted in part by significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets over the past two years. But visual communication does not always equate to better communication. Both cultural and gender-based differences need to be taken into account when choosing methods of communication. Research suggests that that men find eye contact threatening, while East Asians are more comfortable using other approaches, such as instant messaging (my bolding not theirs).

• One in three companies has set up virtual working so that they can tap into the global talent pool. One of the most significant benefits of being able to use technology to collaborate globally is the ability to draw on a much deeper pool of skills, without being constrained by geographical location. Yet the majority of survey respondents say that virtual team members are recruited by local managers (58%), suggesting that most companies only recruit in locations where they have an office, thereby severely curtailing the size of the talent pool on which they can draw. Also, relatively few managers embrace the actual technologies they use to communicate in their virtual teams as the method for meeting and interviewing new prospects.

Virtual Team Intelligence - webcast now posted

Thanks, Tom Heck, president and founder of the International Association of Team Facilitators, for inviting me to participate in your virtual team series and for posting this interview, with the vaunted title, "90% People, 10% Technology - Virtual Team Intelligence."

I particularly enjoyed this event because Tom posed questions I'm not normally asked -- and because we used a new audio conferencing service that is very cleverly designed, allowing the presenters to do quick polls, see who's listening, and chat in a back-channel all effortlessly.

UPDATE: Having now listened to the webcast in which I seem to be talking extremely fast, even for me, I learned from Tom that there was a download/compression problem. If I sound too much like a crazy person, come back in a week or so and it will be fixed, Tom tells me.

Is anyone listening? Conference calls yet again

Suite101 has published my "Five Secrets to Great Conference Calls." I've covered this ground in different ways here but in the event that you've just come off a call where people didn't play by the rules, you can throw this at them.

Clicking on collaboration -- Bloomberg BusinessWeek TV

BusinessWeek TV, which, like its print publication, is now owned by Bloomberg, has posted "Collaboration with Confidence Across Companies" (you have to register to view it), the webcast that Jeff Stamps (online expert) and Bill Hills and I (live talent) participated in on Dec 3 and which I mentioned here. Cisco sponsors these shows; this one includes an intro from Cisco VP of Global Operations, Kevin Harrington.

These things are so much fun to do. Like "Boosting Productivity with Virtual Collaboration," which I participated in last February (and, which, like this one, was set in motion by producer Alex Cohen), took place at the NASDAQ studio in Times Square.

Let me walk you through the experience.

Studio wall that we look at from our "anchor desks"

Looking out of NASDAQ studio onto the street

Where we sit, with Times Square just outside

 

Bill Hills, the other panelist, and moi just before show begins

 

Jim Ellis, the host, with his teleprompter behind him

David Coffin, show's producer, in "green room" after show

Olivia Basu, Linda Kuehn, Marissa Ferrao from BusinessWeek staff

Took a long walk across town after the show; Christmas Tree just up at Rockefeller Center

Virtual Team Intelligence - I'll try my best at this webcast

Busy at 3 PM ET (GMT-5) on Wed, December 9? If not, please join me for "90% People, 10% Technology - Virtual Team Intelligence," a webcast sponsored by International Association of Team Facilitators.

Tom Heck, president and founder of IATF, is producing "Virtual Team Leader Virtual Conference," a four-session audio webcast using a new conference call facility that I've never tried before - always fun to test-drive this stuff.

I'm the guest speaker for this session, focusing on the practices that allow virtual teams to excel.

The particulars:

TIME: Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 3 pm ET for 60 minutes

WHAT TO EXPECT: "Come to the call ready to participate in small group discussions, share ideas and resources, ask questions, answer quick polls, and be fully engaged"

COST: Free for all subscribers of the IATF free e-newsletter.

CLICK HERE to register.

Recorded and posted in the IATF members only area.