Elance has grown pretty dramatically over the past few years, as more and more jobs move online and work becomes more virtual. To provide more value to its users, the company wants to do more than just connect employers and contractors. That’s why it has a virtual workroom that enables collaborative work and communications tools between them.

In their virtual workrooms, contractors can send messages, submit invoices, respond to to-do lists and other features. And now, Elance has added a new video chat feature to enable more “face-to-face” contact between collaborators, without users having to enter a whole different application to connect.

According to Elance VP of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Ved Sinha, the addition of video chat to the virtual workroom will reduce the friction that comes when employers and contractors work together. While many had previously interfaced through other applications, building the chat window directly into a contractor’s dashboard enables instant communication with the click of a button.

To do this, Elance uses Tokbox’s OpenTok video chat client, which enables businesses to embed video chat into their websites. While there are plenty of video chat offerings available on the market today, Sinha told me by phone that OpenTok was the only solution that allowed Elance to build video chat directly and seamlessly into the virtual workroom.

That was a big advantage for Elance, which wanted to ensure its users didn’t have to open a different client or application to get in touch with one another. And for its clients, the feature should enable better coordination and more productivity.

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Shared to-do lists

• Wunderlist. Wunderlist is a simple task manager that works on the web or your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. Your list follows you and stays synced across all your devices, and you can even share your to-do list with the Wunderlist via URL or Twitter.

Project management

• Reverb. Reverb is a project and task manager that allows you to collaborate with your team and stay organized. Similar to Basecamp and other popular project management solutions, Reverb offers the ability to upload files, host discussions, and manage tasks within one interface.
• Splendid Bacon. Splendid Bacon is a stripped-down version of project management that lets you see, at a glance, what’s going on with your projects. Don’t expect elaborate functionality or a complex interface; Splendid Bacon is straightforward and concentrates on one main area of project management, status updates. Post short, Twitter-style status reports to let team members and clients know where you are with a project, and use the simple dashboard and timeline to see which projects are moving forward and which are on hold.
• Client Stat.us. If you like Splendid Bacon’s Twitter-style approach to project communication, another option is Client Stat.us, and this one doesn’t even require log-ins or passwords. Just share a link to the project status page, and your clients stay in the loop. I love the simplicity of this interface that takes the intimidation factor out of client updates; just post what task is in progress and brief (140 characters or less) updates as you move the task forward.

Online meetings and conferencing

• Vyew. Vyew is an online meeting room application that allows you to collaborate with your team visually and in real time. You can upload images, files, and videos into your meeting room, and up to ten participants can access the room and contribute. Conferencing features include a whiteboard, video conferencing, screen sharing, and VoIP. You can even add text or voice comments to the pages of your room, so the interactive features make for truly dynamic presentations and meetings.

Collaborative social media

• CoTweet. CoTweet allows business teams to engage in social media as a group in a unified way. Team members can publish updates to Twitter (and Facebook with an Enterprise account), collaborate on responses, track engagement, and analyze campaigns. All conversations are combined into a single, unified inbox. Work groups can be formed in order to focus on a specific brand or product within the company. Plus, there’s the ability to create and control roles and permissions within the company so that team members are allowed specific access within social media accounts.

Mobile communication

• Mobiola Headset. Mobiola Headset is an iPhone/iPod/iPad app that both records calls and also acts as a headset for your PC or Mac. It works with a variety of VoIP applications, including MSN/Windows Live, Google Talk, AOL IM, and Skype, and you simply use the screen to control recording or playing back conversations.
• IM+ Talk. IM+ Talk allows you to make Skype calls from your smartphone. Depending on your phone, you can receive calls to your SkypeIn number, see who is online and chat with other Skype users, and make free VoIP calls in half-duplex mode (similar to a walkie-talkie).
• Smart Scanner. Smart Scanner is an iPhone app that captures and recognizes scanned information, such as articles from magazines, notes, or other printed information. Once you scan it, you can copy and edit the text, access email or make a call, and open URLs within the text. The application recognizes phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses and QR codes, and it works in five languages.

As tools and technology evolve, communication among distributed teams is becoming easier and easier, making it possible to work from anywhere, literally from the touch of a button.

What online tools and applications have most helped with your communications?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Pixel Addict

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So where do we go from here? Many of us who work with virtual teams have tried adopting collaboration and communication systems that are more fully integrated and where the conversations are archived and searchable. These tools combine email capabilities (receiving and sending emails that post into the system), message boards or forums where topic-specific conversations can take place, and in some cases, IM-like, or even Twitter-like, functions. These systems also often include document uploading, sharing and collaboration, task management, and project management tools. But none of the tools I’ve experimented with try to re-imagine the way we communicate online. Enter Talkwheel, which positions itself as an integrated communications tool for enterprises and offers a novel way to capture, visualize and follow conversations.

Rethink our collaborative communications

I have to be honest; it has taken me a long time to “get” Talkwheel, and even though now I “get it,” it still doesn’t appeal to me. But it does present an interesting way of rethinking how we communicate and collaborate and what happens to our conversations in different places that are inter-related but not inter-linked.

Talkwheel’s premise is that if you install and use the platform with your team, all of the conversations you have — both in real-time and asynchronously — will be captured and organized in a way that lets you visualize them. You can form Talkwheel Groups to bring together specific groupings of people with whom you are communicating, such as a group for a specific project or a group for a particular department. When you bring people into a group, they are set up with Talkwheel accounts (you can also use Facebook to bring in your Facebook friends) and any subsequent messaging amongst group members will show up in several ways: as threaded and nested messages on the right side of the interface, and around the “talkwheel” on the left.

The wheel is meant to represent a round table, while the people in the group are represented by their icons around the wheel. Each person’s comments are symbolized by color-colored dots and the connections between the comments are illustrated as lines connecting those dots. As a very visual thinker, I want to fall in love with that wheel, but it really falls flat for me and feels unnecessary. Part of this feeling may be coming from the fairly primitive interface; it feels like somebody’s hand-drawn image of what they’d like this platform to become, rather than an elegant user interface that illustrates the idea of a “conversation wheel.”

Harness disparate conversations

Despite the shortcomings in user experience, the premise of Talkwheel is an interesting one: Bringing the different ways we are communicating into a single platform so conversations aren’t lost, and connections between conversations are made and are more explicit. But, despite its novel visual interface, Talkwheel isn’t the first to tackle this communications challenge and is up against social business tools Yammer, Salesforce Chatter and Socialtext, collaboration platforms like Glasscubes and Huddle, and perhaps even the new “Circles” feature in Google+.

What is more exciting about Talkwheel, however, are the analytical tools the company is rolling out. Right now, you can measure Sentiment of conversations. In the same way that you might want to know the positive, negative and neutral sentiments of conversations taking place on blogs, social networks and the like, Talkwheel lets you measure the sentiment of your internal and external team conversations. As more and more virtual teams form and subtle cues of in-person conversation are lost, being able to “take the emotional temperature” of a group conversation will have a lot of value for the manager of virtual teams.

Even though we are all in the habit of flitting between our emails, which may or may not e integrated with our collaboration tools and then our IMs and then message boards, we probably know deep down inside that this isn’t efficient; we’re just used to doing it. Talkwheel offers a solution, but it’s only a matter of time before we know if any of us are willing to break our bad communications habit and get a better grip on our collaborative conversations.

How are you harnessing your emails, IMs and message board posts as you collaborate with your team?

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Here are the skills that I think, irrespective of specific industry, provide the best ground upon which to build remote work success. It’s a short list, and obviously the more of these a candidate has, the better, but there’s one in particular I think stands out above all the rest.

1. Wide-ranging technical knowledge and experience. Someone who works remotely will be doing much of their job online, and just as the best photographer has used a variety of cameras and equipment, the best remote worker will have used many platforms, operating systems and devices. Remote workers don’t need to be experts in many fields, it’s more important that they have experimented early and often with a range of technological areas. The key is that they understand fundamentals well enough that if they are thrown into a brand new computing environment with unfamiliar hardware or software, they can hit the ground running and quickly get up to speed. The best tool is the one you have with you, and the best handyman is the one who can wield any tool.
2. Independently motivated. If you want to work remotely, you had better be able to provide our own motivation to get things done. Many people perceive that there’s a considerable chance that if they worked from home, they’d have a hard time getting anything done, and that can definitely be true if you are used to strong external guidance at a traditional workplace. In many remote work situations, the only taskmaster you’ll have will be yourself, so if you’re good at digging in and getting stuff done, it’s your time to shine.
3. Excellent communication skills. If you have an employee in-house and you don’t hear from them for three months, they’re probably either on vacation or playing some serious hooky. With remote workers, large gaps in communication can be all too common. That’s why you should focus on finding remote work assets that put considerable stock in talking to and being talked to by home base. But just finding a chatterbox isn’t enough. You need to find employees that can communicate effectively in a variety of electronic media without becoming a productivity drag by unnecessarily requesting too much attention. It’s a surprisingly thin line to tread.

For me, the most important asset to have is no. 3. Breakdowns in communication result in the biggest mistakes, and lead to productivity-killing mop up. What’s at the top of your list?

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Bad listeners rarely realize they suffer this limitation. But there are some common tip-offs:

• You often find you’re involved in miscommunications
• You find the same colleagues ask you the same questions repeatedly
• You often reply to emails without reading them, or their attachments, in full
• You skip meetings, arguing that the minutes will keep you up-to-date.

As humans, we need to filter and prioritize the information we attend to, but bad listeners can have a detrimental effect on team output, especially if they’re gatekeepers in the production process, or have quality control responsibilities.

Becoming a better listener in the online space isn’t difficult, but it does take discipline. Here are some tactics to help develop better listening skills.

Chunk written comprehension tasks

We’re often more likely to skim-read emails, reports, and other documentation if we’re trying to fit it in around “real work.” Of course, understanding the information we receive is usually critical to that real work. It needs our attention.

Try setting aside chunks of time to do background reading and the communication it prompts. This can help you mentally to validate these comprehension tasks themselves as a priority, and give you a clear space in which to focus. Allot space in your schedule to the tasks you see as distractions, and attend to them in that timeframe. You’ll be more likely to get something useful out of that information in a dedicated space.

Miss a meeting? Ask for details

Competing priorities may necessitate your missing a meeting occasionally. But rather than simply glancing over the minutes when they arrive in your inbox, try speaking to a colleague who did attend about what took place.

Think about which of the attendees will have attended to the information that’s relevant to you; perhaps ask a couple of people to get a composite picture. This way, your understanding of what took place won’t suffer because your colleague answered a call halfway through the meeting and missed ten minutes of discussion.

Also, try to ask specific questions. “Anything happen in the meeting yesterday?” will solicit a shrug of the shoulders more often than not. Unless you indicate to your colleague the general topics or items from the agenda that interest you, they’re unlikely to know what to mention. Their minds will likely drift to the items that were top priorities for them, or the things with which they feel most comfortable, or are most interested in.

Respond in full

Good listening is about good communication. Unless you respond to queries in full, and address all of the concerns your colleagues raise, those issues will just keep hanging around. What you don’t attend to today will be back to haunt you tomorrow — unless your colleague gives up, and makes their own executive decision. And if they’re asking you for direction, they probably don’t feel equipped to make the call themselves.

If you can chunk tasks like email, progress reporting, and status phone calls and conversations, you should find that you have both the time and focus needed to respond to queries in full. As you do so, you may well find that some questions are based on assumptions or misunderstandings that you can clear up on the spot.

Make sure they understand

No matter how clear or succinct your communication, it pays to ask the person you’re speaking to if they understand what you’ve told them. Finish all your emails with the line “Let me know if you have any questions,” and you’ll be surprised how many come back needing clarification — and that goes for video chat, IM, and presentations too.

Asking if your colleagues understand what you’re saying is important not just for getting things done, but also for understanding where and how your communication is missing the mark. What makes sense to one colleague will bewilder another, so asking if they understand will help you tailor your communication to individuals, and avoid time-consuming misunderstandings.

Work to your strengths

Maybe you like to check task status face-to-face with your team members periodically throughout the day. Or maybe you prefer them to update their shared task lists with their tasks’ status at the end of each day. Each of us has our own preferences for the way we receive and respond to information, and of course we all need to adapt to each others’ preferences, at least to some degree.

Take a long, hard look at the ways you prefer to handle communications. Consider everything — from whether you’re a visual or auditory person, to whether you prefer IMing a colleague rather than stopping by their desk and interrupting them.

Understanding your preferences for communication will let you find commonalities with your team members — areas where communication is easy — and identify the points of difference — areas where you’ll know you really need to pay attention if you’re to get and communicate the required information effectively.

These are five easy way to become a better listener in your team. What advice can you add from your own experience?

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A total of 71 percent of those responding to the survey said that they are OK with being interrupted while on their summer vacations. That percentage included:

• 32 percent who said that email is the best way to reach them,
• 20 percent preferred to be contacted by phone, and
• 18 percent preferred text messages.

Interestingly, of the 29 percent who said it is never appropriate to contact them while on vacation, more than 7 out of 10 are over the age of 45.

Eighty-seven percent of those responding to the survey also preferred email for communicating with coworkers and business contacts while in the office. Of those responding, 31 percent said that voicemail is their least favorite mode of communication, followed by instant messaging (29 percent), and texting (26 percent).

The survey was conducted online from May 12-16, 2011 among 2,398 U.S. adults. Respondents were full- and part-time employed adults in the U.S. who have colleagues.

How accessible will you be on your next vacation?

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Businesses approaching a market will consider the audience’s media usage, and the message they’re communicating, before they choose a communications tool. But in distributed teams, we may choose collaboration tools for their own sake — their features — rather than their suitability to the tasks we actually need them to perform, or the team we need them to support.

The Limits of a Tool-Driven Approach

Tools are not the process, nor are they the work. Tools are there to make complex tasks easier or more efficient for your team. On paper, that differentiation seems clear, but in practice, it can quickly become muddied.

For example, a considerable influence on the way teams choose tools is, often, how they hope those tools may be able to change team members’ behavior or communications, rather than because they suit the team’s current or preferred ways of collaborating. We might also choose tools we feel will alter the actual process we’re using in some crucial way.

The problem with this approach is that it can be difficult to separate the tool’s problems (or benefits) from the process’ problems (or benefits), and that has the potential to mire the team in confusion and error when things go wrong.

Similarly, you may inadvertently diminish the benefits of either the tool or the process by discarding one, but sticking with the other on the misunderstanding that it’s that part of the equation that’s delivering the benefit.

Riskier still, using a tool-driven approach to actually evolve work processes puts the responsibility for the robustness and longevity of your business processes at the feet of third-party software developers who may never have heard of your organization, and — who knows? — may no longer be developing their product in six months’ time.

Taking a Tools-Last Approach

For these reasons, it is more sound to develop processes around your people — who, after all, you need to do the work — and the outcomes you desire. Then, you can identify the formats in which you need those outcomes, and finally, search for tools that will deliver outcomes in those formats.

In finding starting points for the tools you want to consider, why not look at the tools your team’s already using, and balance those against the project’s individual requirements and characteristics? Looking at what’s working now, and how your team functions now, can give you clear ideas about what your people need to get their jobs done well and happily.

In particular, consider:

• The learning curve and usability of a tool. Choosing tools that are already used by some team members, and have good usability in and of themselves, will reduce the cost to the business of the tool’s adoption. That cost isn’t only apparent in the days following the tools’ inception within a team, and it doesn’t always relate directly to a time-cost. Errors relating to tool adoption can damage everything from data to brand, and may arise months after the tool’s adoption.
• The re-usability of the information you put into it. Getting team members to put information into the tool you’ve chosen is only one part of the equation; the other is getting that information out. Consider the possible scenarios in which you might need to do this — for reporting purposes, if you switched to use a different tool or changed the process in future, to create a project output, and so on — and assess how manageable the job would be. The trend toward smaller, lighter solutions that produce output quickly may not be right for you, if your requirements are demanding, so it’s important to consider the realities of your needs, rather than simply getting caught up in the latest-tool hype.
• Its cost versus its adaptability to other projects or teams. The adoption cost of a tool — in terms of subscription fees as well as the time-cost of its uptake by your team members — would, ideally, be offset by its adaptability to other projects your team might be working on, or to other teams within your organization. Be careful when you’re making this assessment, though: it can be a fast-track to misappropriation if you don’t consider for each possibility of adaptation the points we’ve discussed above.

How do you go about choosing tools for your team? Do you select tools in the hopes that they’ll benefit your process, or do you build your process first, and choose tools to suit it?

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Here’s a list of five big reasons companies won’t pull the trigger on remote working, and some explanation about why those fears are mostly unfounded.

1. Productivity Will Drop

According to a recent study, remote workers work harder than their office-based counterparts. Whether it’s because they feel a sense of gratitude at being able to enjoy a flexible arrangement, or because they have fewer unnecessary meetings and distractions to deal with, or just because working from home is more fun, distributed teams tend to put in more hours, and do more with the time they spend on work-related activities.

2. Communication Will Suffer

Many people assume that remote team members will communicate less with one another. It may be true that, overall, time spent communicating will go down, but that doesn’t mean communication will suffer. In fact, my experience has been that communication is often better in a remote work environment, because unnecessary interaction is generally removed from the equation. And because communicating can be achieved only through tools, I often find that remote workers have a better understanding of those tools and how to use them, and which are most appropriate for each type of communication, unlike their office-based counterparts. It’s crucial to support remote workers with the proper communication strategy, but once that’s in place, you’ll find it’s nowhere near the problem you were expecting.

3. Costs Will Increase

Because there can be a significant initial spend when it comes to setting up a remote work trial, some companies assume those costs will continue throughout the life of the program. However, that isn’t the case. Remote working should actually reduce overheads significantly over time. Lowered facilities costs, combined with reductions to other things like transportation allowances, make the cost benefits of remote working one of its most attractive features.

4. Company Culture Will Evaporate

I’ve heard that some fear losing their company’s culture or “personality,” or at least the quirks that make the workplace feel human, when they switch to a remote setup. In my experience, that’s far from the case; I’ve gotten along better with remote workers, and felt that I’ve grown to know them better as people than I ever did with office-mates. So long as communication remains open and frequent, your distributed team members will be able to gain a sense of camaraderie that should shine through in interactions with clients and other third-parties.

5. Security Will Be Weakened

One of the major concerns surrounding remote working is that it endangers company security; data will leave the network from time to time, and employees are largely unsupervised. Sensitive information does seem more vulnerable in such settings, but there’s yet to be very much accumulated evidence proving that companies do indeed actually take on increased liability in this regard by moving to a remote work setup. Motivated individuals will leak or steal info regardless of whether you have remote working measures in place or not. The smart course of action is to prepare for the unique vulnerabilities brought about by remote working.

There are many good reasons to question whether or not a remote working arrangement will work at your company, but the reasons above are not among them. They’re just misconceptions that hang around because they seem to make sense intuitively. If you’re considering a remote work program, do yourself a favor and focus on real challenges, instead of challenges of perception.

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One of the biggest obstacles for a distributed workforce is the lack of personal connection, and while there are several ways to build stronger relationships with your team, the effects of the initial disconnect can have a lasting impact on the success of your company.

Here are just a few of the challenges of working remotely, along with ways to address them while you work to build a deeper understanding and commitment from your employees.

Challenge #1: No “Buy In”

In any relationship, it takes a while to get to know and understand the other person. The same is true for the people on your team. Your staff need time to adjust to one another (working styles and preferences, communication styles, etc.), so it can take a while to develop the relationships that will make your company culture thrive. It can also take a while for new team members to understand the mission and inner workings of your company as a whole, which can make it hard for them to “buy in” to what you’re doing at the beginning.

One solution: Have regular accountability calls with the people on your team. Use a service like iMeet to have face-to-face interactions that incorporate live video streaming with voice so that you can start putting faces and voices to names. Have calls every two weeks so that they’re not too demanding time-wise, and stick to a strict agenda and time frame for each call. Start by letting the person know how things have been going for the company overall, and then let the employee share what he or she has accomplished over the last two weeks, as well as what’s on the list to do over the coming two weeks. Make sure to reiterate what the person’s primary focus should be (and why) so that he or she understands how his or her job impacts the company as a whole.

Challenge #2: Clock-Focused Thinking

In almost any working arrangement, it’s easy for employees to focus solely on the clock, instead of on results or the overall vision of the company. Rather than keeping a constant pulse on how a given activity or task relates to the bottom line, employees more commonly monitor how much time it takes to complete, which can lead to a lot of wasted time on trivial tasks that don’t add real value.

One solution: Give employees a single metric to watch that isn’t time-related. Revenue, expenses, leads captured, new clients signed, or website visitors are all metrics that can be influenced up or down based on an employee’s activities, and by tying his or her efforts to one of those numbers, it’s far more likely that he or she will focus on activities that more directly impact it. Be sure to concentrate on that one key metric during your accountability calls, too, so that the person begins to see that that’s how you’re measuring his or her success overall, not by how many hours he or she clocks in a given week.

Challenge #3: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

One thing I’ve experienced within my own business is that, when there’s a lull on the client’s end, I’m tempted to take advantage of the downtime to focus on other areas of my business, making it possible for days or weeks to go by with no contact between myself and the client. This can lead to a breakdown in communication and to lost momentum within a given project, so when working with members of your own team, it’s important to maintain communication, even when things might be going a little more slowly than usual.

One solution: At the start of each day, send a quick email to team members to let them know where you are with things, what you’re waiting for (whether on your end or theirs), and what the next step will be as soon as that “waiting for” item is in hand. This keeps everyone on the same page and connected overall so that there’s no loss in momentum or communication.

In the end, regular communication and feedback helps to ensure that most of these problems are averted and that you and your team remain on the same page and moving forward with the goals and mission of the company.

What problems have you experienced with working remotely, and how did you fix them?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Y0$HIMI

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Hear the word negotiation, for instance, and most of us will usually think of a few folks with their sleeves rolled up hashing out a contentious issue around a table. But psychologists say that negotiation conducted at a distance can actually reduce conflict and improve outcomes.

To test a theory that negotiating at a distance boosts participants’ abstract thinking and helps them better conceive of others’ motives, Marlone Henderson, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, asked two groups of study participants to negotiate the price of a motorcycle or the division of a prize. One group was told their negotiating partner was one floor downstairs and the other that their partner was located across town. The British Psychological Society Research Digest reports the results:

The negotiating pairs who thought their partners were located further away… tended to reach more mutually agreeable terms. To test if this benefit was to do with thinking about one’s priorities more abstractly… Henderson conducted a further study in which some of the negotiating pairs were explicitly instructed to reflect on the motives underlying their negotiation goals. Receiving these instructions led participants who thought their partner was nearby to negotiate just as successfully as participants who thought their partner was on the other side of town, consistent with the idea that the perception of physical distance exerts its usual benefit by encouraging more reflective and abstract thought about negotiation goals.

Is it just negotiations that tend to get more productive with distance? According to Frans Johannson, author of The Medici Effect (via a quote on the blog of Marc Andreessen), research also reveals that virtual brainstorming beats the old-fashioned variety where participants are gathered in one place. Studies find that, “virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.”

Results out of a Harvard Business School study concur that when asked to share ideas, virtual “team members felt freer to contribute–especially outside their established areas of expertise.”

Is it time to stop worrying about the downsides of virtual communication, and start focusing on the advantages instead?

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First, the form of communication that remote teams use most frequently is text-based — whether it’s through email, instant messaging, or discussions within a project management app. Misunderstandings are common; we might think we’re good at interpreting text-based messages, but research shows we get it wrong half the time, so it’s surprising that remote teams don’t experience conflict more often.

Another challenge is time zone differences. Colleagues aren’t always available whenever you need them, and scheduling a phone call, conference or other real-time conversation can require some planning.

Given that conflict is inevitable, especially for remote teams, what can we do to minimize the damage?

#1 Unreliable Technology

One cause of conflict is unreliable technology. Unexpected downtime and equipment problems will always occur, though we can have backup plans that can help us continue working with little interruption. But interruptions do happen and are, at times, expected. Conflict can occur when these technological malfunctions become excuses to not do the work.

In a study about communication and trust in virtual teams, researchers found that in teams with low trust, it was common practice to blame technology for tardiness or inability to accomplish tasks. This fueled an already existing feeling that the technology was unreliable.

On the other hand, teams with high trust levels found workarounds to technological problems. They notified each other when they’d be available for work, even if there were time zone differences.

If the unreliability of technology is an issue, especially if it’s imagined or exaggerated, it helps to implement a group-wide strategy for dealing with it so that tech failure can no longer be uses as an excuse. Does everyone on the team have a backup Internet connection, for example? If not, are there nearby venues with affordable or free Internet access? If they’re without an Internet connection, should the team send SMS updates via Twitter or a similar service? Or should they send a text message to the project coordinator directly? By having an established system in place, team members can have multiple means of contact that aren’t dependent on a single technology or service.

#2 Loafers

We’ve all been part of a group where at least one person did not contribute much, or at all, during a project. These people are often called free riders or loafers, and their lack of participation can have a negative effect on the team’s performance. But these non-contributing members are rarely malicious or lazy; often, there are barriers that are preventing them from making a proper contribution. For example,  in a study of employee participation at Caterpillar Inc. , employees failed to contribute because of fear of criticism, or the feeling that their contributions are irrelevant or insignificant.

If team members are failing to contribute, ask them privately about their barriers and find ways to remove them. If they feel their work is unimportant, highlight the team’s objective and how crucial each individual’s role is. If the barrier is fear of criticism, then the team should learn how to provide constructive feedback (something we’ll also discuss to in the next section).

The worst things you can do about non-participating members are to accept their lack of participation, or to single them out in front of the group. According to the study on communication and trust mentioned earlier, many low trust teams merely accepted or ignored free riders, giving the impression that a lack of participation wasn’t wrong. Pointing out an individual’s lack of participation in front of the group is also a bad idea, since the team will see this as a betrayal and this may lessen overall trust.

#3 Negative Feedback

Harsh criticism can be a source of major conflict within a remote team, especially if carried out in a text-based medium like email or instant messaging. Two characteristics are present in constructive feedback:

• The message should be substantial. Even if you’re conveying something positive about another person’s work, vague responses like “it’s OK” aren’t helpful. Praise must also be specific, so that individuals can identify the improvements they’ve made and also receive recognition for their successes.
• Any disagreement should be indirect. Instead of flat-out disagreeing with a person or a point, high trust teams tend to offer alternatives, together with explanations as to why they may be preferable. This approach may lessen the fear of criticism, since the target of the feedback is distanced from the person receiving it.

What conflicts have you experienced when working with remote teams? How did you prevent or resolve them?

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What remote teams actually experience is known as “swift trust“, which happens when you don’t have the time or means to build trust through multiple interactions. Also, you often don’t have prior experience with your colleagues to determine their trustworthiness. You act as if you trust each other from the beginning. While this type of trust cultivates easily, it’s also very fragile. Since all you have are your communication tools — email, phone, instant messaging, video conferencing, etc. — how can you establish and maintain trust using these channels?

Setting the Tone

Your team’s first few messages are crucial to maintaining and developing this “swift trust” into something more sustainable. In a study published in Organization Science, the researchers noted that “The first messages on the team appeared to set the tone for how the team interrelated.” Just as in face-to-face meetings, first impressions count. As much as possible, remote workers should make the effort to make their initial messages positive. You can do this is through expressing encouragement and motivation.

A study published by the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) demonstrated that high trust teams were expressive about their enthusiasm for the project and gave ample encouragement and compliments to their colleagues. The Organization Science study backs this up. In teams with high initial trust, opening messages saying “I’m excited to work with this team” or “Looking forward to working with you all” were common. Teams with low initial trust lacked this enthusiasm.

High trust teams also gave positive motivation, focusing on what their team could accomplish if they performed well. Low trust teams, on the other hand, focused on what they could lose if they didn’t perform well.

Though first impressions are important, establishing a positive tone mid-project can still improve trust. The study included some teams showing low initial trust, but they moved on to high trust as they expressed more enthusiasm later on.

Task-oriented Communication

Typically, there are three types of communication that take place in virtual teams:

• Social communication. This includes discussions on topics unrelated to the project, such as messages about one’s hobbies, weekend activities and family.
• Procedure-oriented communication. This type of communication is based on setting rules and processes relevant to the task, including discussions on how often to check email, how to monitor work progress, and what the workflow should be like.
• Task-oriented communication. When you share your work with the team, request feedback or directly talk about the task at hand, you are engaging in task-oriented (or task-focused) communication.

In the Organization Science study, social exchanges helped facilitate early trust, but this proved to be insufficient in maintaining trust in the long run. Also, while procedure-oriented communication is important, a team must be able to move beyond it to get things done. Over-discussing work procedures and rules may appear productive, but they can be a way to escape responsibility and waste time while waiting for other people to start the work.

Both studies show that to maintain or create trust, your team must have the ability to move quickly from social and procedural communication to task-oriented communication. Even teams low on initial trust were able to develop more trust this way, and were eventually unaffected by negative feedback and non-contributing members. In high trust teams, communication became exclusively task-oriented and there were rarely any social exchanges. Still, members displayed empathy and support when discussing each other’s work.

Making Communication Predictable

One of the studies also emphasized predictability as an essential aspect of trust-building. Regular, predictable communication was more important than the quantity of communication for maintaining trust. In other words, sending messages often isn’t as important as sending them in a regular schedule or pattern. This means sending daily or weekly reports, acknowledging incoming contributions and informing others of your schedule.

Low trust teams often had unpredictable communication and no forewarning of member absences. High trust teams, on the other hand, informed each other of when they’d be available for work and sent each other prompt messages saying that they received and evaluated a member’s latest contribution. In the JMIS study, high trust teams were also more aware of time zone differences and scheduled their work in such a way that downtime was managed as effectively as possible.

With remote teams, we must know how to communicate effectively if we want to build long-term trust in our working relationships. We can do this by increasing our efforts in expressing our enthusiasm at the start of the project, keeping messages in a positive tone, staying focused on the task, and establishing a regular pattern of communication.

How do you encourage trust in your remote teams? What actions or incidents causes you to trust your colleagues less?

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Here are some tips for ensuring that your written communications are as clear as possible.

1. Use precise language. Don’t suggest “doing the thing to the stuff” or anything similar — in fact, removing words like “stuff” and “thing” from your vocabulary entirely is a good plan. Vague words are just an opportunity for problems to creep in. That’s true of jargon and abbreviations, too.
2. Keep your sentences short. It’s important to remember that the longer the sentence, the more likely that the reader will lose track. When in doubt, err on the side of short, plain sentences.
3. Reread what you’ve written. Spell check certainly isn’t infallible, and can’t spot if you’ve used a correctly spelled yet wrong word. In fact, it may be better in some cases not to run spell check at all. Look for problems yourself before letting your computer try to solve them, and pay attention to any automated processes your word processor or email client tries to inflict on your writing.
4. Ask for feedback. If someone isn’t entirely clear on what message you’re trying to send them, make sure that they can easily come back and ask questions. Incorporate that feedback into your writing, as well. If you’ve got the time, rewrite your message to correct the issues it had, if only to make sure that you don’t have the same problems next time. If you’re working on a big document, write up clean versions that make use of feedback, rather than relying on a string of comments, updates or responses that you can’t guarantee anyone will read.
5. Read messages out loud to yourself. Reading your message out loud to yourself is a good way to check whether what you’ve written makes sense. If you notice yourself gesturing or changing your tone of voice as you read, stop and think about whether you need to add a few more words to convey whatever meaning you were gesturing. If it’s a particularly important message, you might run it by someone else, as well.

The ability to write clearly is becoming more and more important, especially in organizations that work primarily online. Whether you’re using an IM client to plan projects, a robust piece of project management software to keep up-to-date or email just to stay in touch, clear writing will speed up the process and minimize problems.

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“We found that the collocated people formed an in-group, excluding the isolates. But, surprisingly, the isolates also formed an in-group, mainly because the collocated people ignored them and they responded to each other.”

Note that the on-site workers’ tendency to ignore the remote workers wasn’t intentional. It was just an effect of their physical proximity to each other and the greater inconvenience of contacting the remote workers. As a result, the remote workers were more responsive to each other, even though they couldn’t tell which participants worked on-site or remotely.

An earlier study, looking at Lucent Technologies’ software development department, supports these findings. At the time of the study, Lucent had teams working in the UK, Germany and India. The researchers found that employees interacted with local team members significantly more often than they did with remote team members.

Given the tendency of on site workers to ignore remote workers , how does one encourage unity in a mixed group? One way is to make communication between on-site and remote workers as easy as possible. This will minimize any difficulty for on-site workers to reach remote workers, and vice versa. You can do this by selecting communication channels that are easily accessible to everyone on the team. Whether it’s email, instant messaging, or a collaborative app, make sure that members can send and receive messages without compromising clarity. This is especially true with channels that are dependent on speed and signal quality, such as audio or video chat.

But it’s not just the quality of the tools and the speed of the Internet connection that matters. The speed of the replies and collaborative support among team members is also important. According to the Lucent Technologies study, multi-site groups have a tendency toward “a significant slowdown of work that spans sites, as compared to work involving the same people that does not cross sites.” Your team needs to understand that important remote requests require prompt responses to avoid this slowdown.

There are no shortage of tools to facilitate this kind of efficient communication. There are now hundreds of available communication and collaboration tools for teams to choose from, both in the form of hardware and software. Despite the broad choice of tools, however, it’s still best to stick to using as few of them as possible. This ensures that all the data, discussions, and content will be centralized and accessible in one place. So even if your people are not found in the same site, all the necessary information is.

When it comes to real-time communication, it may also help to establish cues that show whether a person welcomes incoming communication or not. Bos’ paper suggests that the lack of these cues may hinder successful communication, “Without contextual information it is difficult to know when someone is available or interruptible. Furthermore, people worry about appearing rude, so [they] do not initiate contact.” One way to use these cues would be type of presence status notification (the “Available”, “Busy”, and “Away” symbols) featured in most instant messaging apps. Make these cues consistent and enforced throughout the entire team.

But if you want to take a more radical step, why not encourage your entire team to work remotely — even if many of them live in the same city? A few years ago, Om interviewed Jason Fried of 37signals, who said that a distributed workforce was good for his company. Fried said that he believed people are more productive when they’re working apart. Even though (at the time) five members of the team lived in Chicago, they still worked apart. Since that interview, entire teams working remotely has become even more commonplace.

If you’d like to learn more about how to successfully manage remote teams, it’s one of the topics that we’ll be discussing in depth at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9. Register here.

Do you work with a distributed, multi-site team? What are the challenges you’ve faced?

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I’ve written a few posts recently about effectively processing email, so now let’s talk more about the other side. When was the last time you took a hard look at the emails you send to other people? Web workers must communicate very well over email if we want to get our work done efficiently, but are your emails helping or hindering your progress? Here are a few simple tips for sending better email messages.

Do I Need to Send this Email?

Most of us get too much email, and the people you communicate with are no exception. Before you send an email to some other busy person, ask yourself a few questions:

• Would some other method be better? Maybe you should contact them via IM, social media, a phone call or some other channel instead.
• Can you get your information online? If you are asking someone a question, make sure that you do your research  to see if you can find all or part of your answer elsewhere.
• Do they really want the information you are sending? If you are sending information, does everyone you are sending it to really need it? Think about trimming your recipient list to the people who really want to see your email.
• Can you post all or part of it online to reduce the size? If you are sending information, think about whether you can post that large attachment or lengthy explanation online. Sending a link instead of a multiple megabyte attachment or pages and pages of text might be appreciated.

Write Great Subject Lines

Yes, this is in every list of tips for sending great email, but that’s because the subject line is critical. It’s the first thing that someone sees, and it can make the difference between an email that gets opened right away and one that stays unread or gets dumped right into the trash. Here are some subject line tips:

• Be precise and clear. Your subject line should accurately reflect the content of your message and be easy for people to understand. Example: Community metrics for October
• Use keywords. I sometimes preface the subject line with a keyword so that people can see at a glance why it is important. Examples: Lightning talks: next steps or Project X: scheduling a post mortem
• Include critical due dates. If you really need something done by Tuesday, include it in the subject line so that people understand when they need to respond. This should be used sparingly. Example: Need approval for project X by Tuesday at Noon
• Use people’s names in subject lines for urgent requests. Again, this should be used sparingly, but it does help get people’s attention. Example: Joe – can you present in the 2pm staff meeting?
• Keep it short. Most mail programs only show the first part of the subject line anyway, so anything at the end is unlikely to seen anyway.

Here are a few “wall of shame” subject lines taken right from my inbox as examples of what not to do:

• There you go
• Wiki
• Next steps

Make Your Point Concisely

Now that you have a great subject line, you need to actually write the rest of the email. Long email messages are often mostly unread email messages, so you should try to make your point as quickly and concisely as possible. Any excessive rambling is likely to result in half-read or skimmed email messages, and people might miss your point entirely if they decide not to wade all the way to the bottom of your too-long email. You might even want to keep your email short and offer to send more information if they are interested.

Don’t Bury Critical Information

I always assume that people will only read my first paragraph or first few lines of my email messages, so I make sure that any important information can be found right at the top. Here are some important items that should be in the first few lines and never be buried:

• Due dates. If you need something by a certain time, tell people what you need and when you need it very early in the email.
• Any requests. This can sound counter-intuitive, but you need to tell people what you need from them before you explain it. Let them know that you need them to do x, y, z in the first part of the email, and include the details of what and why later. Trust me on this one, you don’t want to bury your request below a lengthy explanation. Even when they might not fully understand the request at the beginning, by making it early, you encourage them to continue reading to get to the explanation.
• Your point. You want to make your point early even if people might not fully understand it until they read a little more. A simple one sentence summary of the point you are trying to make can help people understand the context and the importance of your email early in the process even if they don’t read all of your supporting detail. At least this way, they won’t miss your point entirely.

Ending Your Email

Here are a few things to think about as you close your email:

• Summary. Include a short, concise summary at the end of your email to remind people about any due dates, requests or to point them to additional information.
• Signatures. People have done whole blog posts on how to / how not to use email signatures (and even what our email sign-offs say about us). My advice is to omit them entirely if you don’t have a real need for one or to keep them very short (one or two lines) with only a few pieces of critical information. Keep in mind that one of those lines can be a link to a web page with full contact details.

What are your favorite email tips or horror stories?

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