But what if the four people who would best accomplish the task are working in different geographic locations?  The old way was to fly all the participants to the same city/facility (usually company HQ), house them in motels, have a meeting, then fly them home to work on their plan>  Then do them same thing again next month.  This works but it is expensive.  Expensive in dollars but also expensive in lost employee resources.

Teleconferencing works but, pre-Internet, was less than satisfactory because the technology was either jokingly crude or very expensive to implement.  The Internet, company intranets, and extranets, have changed that forever and led to more and more companies and organizations to create what are called Virtual Teams to accomplish real work at a resonable cost.

Virtual teams (groups of people who work together electronically) are being used for a myriad of purposes:

· Tetra Pak Converting Technologies AB, Boston, MA, part of one of the biggest packaging manufacturers in the world, uses virtual teams to focus their entire organization on customer needs. Groups of employees have set aside their traditional focus on function (finance, engineering, sales) to form “wired” teams around customer-focused projects.

· Buckman Labs, Memphis, TN, connects every one of their 1200 “colleagues” through a “knowledge transfer” system which allows everyone to participate in setting the direction of their company.
· Eastman Chemical Company, Kingsport, TN bases its “pizza pie” organization chart on virtual teams, which form and dissolve as projects come into being and are completed.  Over eight hundred interlocking teams criss-cross the country and can include suppliers and customers.
 

While the experiences of these organizations and others are just now being shared through presentations and publications, such as Lipnack and Stamps’ Virtual Teams (John Wiley and Sons, $28), a pattern of success is starting to emerge. 

How Virtual Teams Work
Virtual teams are so new, it is hard to talk about a “typical” example. However, here is a composite portrait of how a virtual team might start, develop, and end.

Let’s say you are the product development manager for Acme Financial Services. You have this great idea for a new service that Acme could offer, but your marketing and technical support people are spread out all over the country. You want to get all of your support people on board and involve them in the whole development process-from inception to rollout. First, you talk to an executive sponsor who gives you the go-ahead to draw on the resources of people from inside and outside your department.  Next, you talk to or e-mail people throughout your organization to get recommendations for possible team members. Ten names are recommended to you and you e-mail an invitation to each one: “I have this great idea, and I would really like to have you on my team.” Five people agree to participate. Next, you set up a teleconference to allow as much personal contact as possible in the early stages of the development of your team.  You’ve heard that it’s really important that a bond of trust develop between team members early in the team growth process. You send out a well-planned agenda for your meeting, well in advance. 

Your team meets by teleconference, and, after introductions, you dig in on a mission/purpose statement for your team, a directory of all the ways your team members can contact each other, and you clarify the roles and ground rules for how you will work. Because you and your teammates have been through some training in how this initial meeting should go, everything goes really smoothly. 

Your team agrees on the key steps in the project process, who will be responsible for leading each of the steps, and the best technological way to get each step accomplished.  This is where everyone sees the big difference between electronic collaboration and face-to-face collaboration. With face-to-face teaming, you just assume that most of the work will be done in meetings. With electronic collaboration, some of the work might be done through e-mail, some through teleconferencing, some through a new “chat room” that’s been set up on your system. The important thing is that each step in the project is carefully thought through and assigned an appropriate technology.  >From here, your project might progress through these steps:
 

Project Step	Purpose	Technology
Step  1	Get Acquainted Meeting	Teleconference

Cover these important items:

• Mission statement
• Key Performance Indicators (What needs to be done, when, and at what level of quality?)
• Team location (Where will the team be located physically and electronically?)
• Key People List (Who will help launch the team? At what levels of involvement will these key people work with the team? )
• Communication Channels (How will team members communicate with each other: e-mail, phone, fax, teleconference, videoconference?)

 
Good News! You Can Use Technology You Normally Use
The good news for many organizations about electronic collaboration is they don’t have to buy a lot of expensive new technology to do it. Electronic collaboration can be done with the simplest of tools- a telephone, a fax machine, and a good quality computer linked to the Internet. The important point is that people need to be taught how to configure their tools to meet their needs. With all the tools that are so readily available to almost anyone in their home or office, the question is not, “Can I collaborate electronically with others?” The question now is “What’s the best way to collaborate electronically?” Once people learn how to look at a task and ask themselves, “What’s the best way to accomplish this task? E-mail? Fax? Teleconference?” then they will experience the synergy that can be realized from using all of these tools.

As people and organizations gain greater experience and confidence with electronic collaboration tools, they certainly can move to higher levels of sophistication.  They can start to add “smart classrooms,” containing video and audio equipment linked through an intranet to other similarly equipped rooms in other facilities, so that training can be economically distributed. Organizations can develop “wired” conference rooms in which their virtual teams can meet and effortlessly move from one medium of communication to another. “Chat rooms” can be set up so teams can dialogue on-line.

However, it’s important to remember the words of Bob Buckman, former Chairman of the Board at Buckman Labs: “It’s 90 percent culture change and 10 percent technology.  You cannot drive this change through technology and technology budgets. It’s people who bring about the change.” 

Making It Happen In Your Organization 
If you want to start using electronic collaboration in your organization, here are some steps that will help you get up and running.

Step. 1. Laying the Foundation. 
Introducing a new way of doing things- electronic collaboration- requires education from the top down. In the case of virtual teams, key decision-makers should hear how organizations, including competitors, are using virtual teams. They should hear lots of examples of how organizations are realizing competitive advantage by sharing information with teams of people who are not “collocated.” Linking this technology to critical, immediate business problems is the key. Decision-makers need to hear how virtual teams will help them in reality, not in theory. They want to know how virtual teams will help them now. The good news coming from organizations actively using electronic collaboration is that virtual teams can be set up using technology they were already using. They did not have to invest large sums of money is sophisticated new hardware.

Step 2. Plan Your Work. 
Once a foundation is laid for the team, the purpose of the team needs to be broken down into specific tasks. Once again, the quality of these task statements plays a significant role in the success of the team. The more specific, the better. In addition, the team must identify how each task is best accomplished: individually, by a small group, or by the team as a whole. This leads to decisions about what media will be used to accomplish each task. Responsibility for accomplishing each task needs to be assigned at this time. Leadership responsibilities must also be assigned. Team members must consider the specific knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to accomplish each of the tasks, and what resources each team member has. A PERT Chart can be a very useful tool for a team at this time in the team’s life. TeamFlow, a product of CFM, Inc. Bedford, MA (www.teamflow.com) is an excellent resource for creating a flow chart specifically tailored to the needs of virtual teams.

Step 3. Work Your Plan. 
Virtual teams experience some of the same kinds of human relations challenges other teams face, and some unique challenges. Face-to-face teams frequently go through four stages of development- “form,” “ storm,” “norm,” and “perform.” The first step of the virtual teaming process is “forming”- setting the boundaries in place for a successful team. Inevitably, effective teams will “storm”- disagree about issues. Virtual teams need to develop groundrules about how they will handle this storming. A unique challenge for virtual teams is “side conversations.” Face-to-face teams often set a groundrule of “no side conversations while someone else is talking.” Virtual teams may need to set a groundrule that “all email must be made available to all team members.” This groundrule may be necessary to establish an atmosphere of trust. After the team has been through their “shakedown cruise,” they’re ready for “norming”- establishing consensus-based methods of operating. This sets the stage for “performing”- when the team really hums.

Virtual teams are growing at a phenomenal rate. Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Communities, estimates that it will take just two to five years for these new organization structures to become wide spread in all aspects of life- business, education, non-profits, even religion. Virtual team members, and their executive sponsors, can use this three-step process for launching their virtual teams.
iBiz

BIOGRAPHY
Paul O. Hardt, Ed.D. has over twenty-five years of experience in the human development field. He has been a teacher, training manager, consultant, and developer of volunteers.  Through his consulting practice, Creative Work Systems, he teaches organizations how to create competitive advantage through employee involvement. He has published in the Human Resource Development Quarterly and Performance Improvement. Currently, he has an article in press for publication by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) in their “In Action” series. He conducted a study of eleven companies, which had received recognition from the Minnesota Council for Quality for their “world class” quality efforts. The study resulted in the identification of eight critical competencies of leaders in “high involvement” organizations. Hardt has been a frequent speaker at local, regional, and national training events, including national conferences on computer-based training, conferences for the ASTD, and the Programming, Analysis, and Computer Training Council (PACT). Most recently, he presented papers at two annual conferences of the Academy of Human Resource Development. He can be contacted at: creative.works@eudoramail.com.

Dr Hardt will be writing on these topics:

• Leadership and the Virtual Team
• Teaming Technology- Choosing the Right Stuff
• How to Manage a Virtual Team
• Performance Management and the Virtual Team- Hiring, Training, and Evaluating Virtual Team Members