GigaOM » Yosh Beier

Tips for virtual team leaders: Teach your employees to manage up

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:02:17 +0000

Managing a virtual team is like managing a traditional team on steroids. If miscommunications and blurry understandings of responsibility will hurt you in an office-based team, they’ll torpedo your work if your team is hundreds of miles away. (On the upside, research indicates that you’re less likely to be irked by the human foibles and political intrigues of your co-workers when you’re not forced into close daily proximity.)

Which means that while tried-and-true management practices like setting measurable goals, holding people to account and praising success continue to hold in a virtual team setting, other aspects of being a boss need to be beefed up and refined for the specific case of remote teams. What are these essential tweaks for managing virtually? Blog Workshifting recently came up with a list of seven.

Old standbys, like providing your team with the proper tools, are solid reminders but probably won’t come as an eye-opener to most — however, one tip in particular may have never occurred to managers of remote teams in quite the way Workshifting puts it. The blog suggests:

Tell them how to manage up. Telework team members aren’t in the office all the time learning how you work. Instead of making your team members figure out the best time to get your attention – tell them. Let them know the best topics to cover via email and the ones they should call about. Also inform them of those things they can just handle and never tell you. Or the ones they can handle and tell you after the fact.

As managers, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the right ways to direct employees, to coach their performance and to recognize them properly. Why not also let employees know how they should deal with you as their manager? It would save a lot of time and frustration.

This is in line with advice from communication coach Yosh Beier, who stressed in an earlier interview with WebWorkerDaily that teams that aren’t physically present in the same space need to talk not just about the ‘what’ of their work but also the ‘how,’ delving into the process and guidelines that the team will use to reach its goals and communicate. How are we making decisions? How do we give each other feedback? How do we want to deal with conflict? These are the sorts of questions Beier suggested teams discuss.

Of course, most teams are busy, and Beier acknowledged that in the rush of everyday work and under the pressure of deadlines, it can seem like a waste of time to have these seemingly touchy-feely chats. But Workshifting has another tip that may help you use your communication time more effectively, making space to discuss the hows as well as the whys.

Communicate instead of checking in. Managers should regularly communicate with the team – both individually as well as in a group. But it’s important to use that time productively. If employees are meeting their deadlines and delivering quality, don’t use the time for “status reports”. There’s nothing more boring than a “Let’s go around the room and have everyone tell us what they’re working on” meeting.

Do you find you have to be more explicit about how to communicate when you’re managing a virtual team?

Image courtesy of Flickr user nOnick.

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Why do some teams gel while others fail at collaboration?

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:03:28 +0000

Healthy collaboration is a target many aim for but many miss. Why? It’s far easier to say you want your team to work smoothly together without too much stress than it is to actually accomplish the open sharing and feeling of unity, trust and purpose that demands.

Just knowing that collaboration is easy to screw up isn’t of much use though. What would be truly helpful would be a specific taxonomy of the mistakes that frequently hobble teams, including the emotional and irrational complexities that can bedevil collaboration, as well as a benchmark survey of how the best teams manage to get everyone working together well. Handily, that’s just what a new study by Collaborative Coaching and Resonance Strategies aims to find out.

Through two small pilot studies the partners have developed a survey that digs down into what separates mere team members from true team players by asking participants to detail the differences between their ideal team and their actual experiences working in supposedly collaborative groups. Participants also signal their emotional impressions of teamwork by choosing from an array of sketched facial expressions. “These facial expressions are true in all cultures,” explains Yosh Beier, co-founder of Collaborative Coaching. The word disgust, say, may carry different resonance n India and Indiana, so using pictures takes away the danger that differences in culture or language could skew the results.

And even after examining a small sample of just over a hundred responses, Beier explains, he and his research partners are starting to see intriguing patterns emerge, including generational differences, common complaints about the current reality of teams (lack of recognition and excessive workload prominent among them) and similar notions of what moves a team from bearable to exciting.

What we find is there is a certain amount of results that people want to accomplish, so if a team doesn’t even manage to achieve its goals then that is very frustrating and dominates the experience. But it’s a little bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The moment teams reach a critical amount of ability to really produce results then results aren’t that important any more and other factors dominate such as connection and cohesion. People wonder: Do I see purpose? Is this meaningful for me? How much of a challenge is this?

There is also a generational theme. So far, the younger the respondents, the less happy they are with the current state of affairs on their teams.

It’s too early yet to determine if the youngest team members are the most frustrated simply because they have the highest expectations, Beier says, and an insufficient number of remote workers have so far taken the survey to conclusively determine if being virtual changes teams’ interactions or expectations. So the researchers are rolling out the survey to a number of firms, including consultancy W.L. Gore, and are also making it available online to anyone interested in participating. The only criterion for eligibility is experience working collaboratively. So if you feel like aiding an investigation of how to make teams truly gel and explore your own feelings about collaboration, 15 minutes is all you need to complete it. We’ll keep you posted on the results.

In your experience, what are the key factors that make a team really click so they can be effective collaborators?

Image courtesy of Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

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Virtual offices vs. virtual selves: overcoming isolation in a wired future

Jessica Stillman — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 14:59:43 +0000

There’s a tension at the heart of web working. Technology allows us to do our jobs nearly anywhere, and there’s plenty of appetite for the flexibility of location independence. GigaOM Pro research (subscription required) found that 34 percent of those whose business allows telecommuting opt to spend time at home, out in the community or with customers.

But while workers want autonomy and flexibility, they also want social connection. In an interview, Yosh Beier of Collaborative Coaching summed this up, saying, “people want to have control over the where and when of their work experience, but they don’t necessarily want to isolate themselves.” How will this tension be resolved in the future?

Many point to technology to keep people connected across physical distance, tools “that will make the remote less remote,” in Beier’s words. He points to the mania for Foursquare in the consumer space as an example of people who are physically distant but use tech to “locate themselves.” The same is true for Facebook, which provides a virtual social connection and is a bit like a remote social gathering. Beier sees this trend of using tech to overcome the social isolation of web-enabled distance moving from consumers to web workers:

People actually get a kick out of locating themselves. They want to know where their colleagues are. There will be more programs like Sococo. The idea is to have a virtual office on your screen. You see your virtual coworkers located in their “office” room, can “walk” to their room, when in the same room the mics let you talk and listen seamlessly, you have conference rooms with whiteboards, water coolers and tea kitchens for those in need of small talk, etc. People’s real location doesn’t matter, but they choose to locate themselves in respect to the virtual office so the team cohesion is supported.

But instead of substituting virtual spaces for real ones (the Matrix model), some folks are focusing on substituting virtual selves for physical presence and meeting in real spaces (the Avatar model). Just look at our recent piece on robot avatars you can send to work or events in your stead and control over the Internet. Commenters on the post were skeptical, but Trevor Blackwell, CEO of Anybots (he’s also a partner in Y Combinator), which makes the robo-avatars pictured above, insisted in an interview that the idea wasn’t science fiction:

The thing that’s far-fetched is robots with their own intelligence. Who knows if general purpose A.I. is ever going to happen? But robots that can move around in an office and be used as communication devices isn’t science fiction at all. Now we’re getting to the point where you can do it over a much larger distance because you can just do it over the internet, and the cost is low enough and reliability is high enough that it makes sense to do every day in an office.

Our goal is to have 100,000 of these out there in five years.

Of course, both technologies boil down to an extension of video conferencing, with the likes of Sococo adding the possibility of spontaneity and easy initiation of contact, and robot avatars offering mobility and the ability to inspect locations. Still, whichever technological future you favor, there will still be a screen between you and your fellow humans.

Will these technologies help us balance our desire for flexibility and autonomy with our need for social connection?

Image courtesy Flickr user Robert Scoble

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