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Dynamics of a Distributed Workforce: Managing Time, Talk, and
Talent in a Multi-National Team
By Erica Grieder
When people think of virtual reality, they usually think of the Matrix movies or video games. But virtual teams—teams with members around the world who may never meet face-to-face—are increasingly common in the business world, especially because offshoring and outsourcing continue at a feverish pace.
From a theoretical perspective, the advantages of having a virtual team overwhelm the drawbacks. If you’re willing to hire remote workers, you can access a larger, yet less expensive, talent pool. Telecommuters don’t take up office space, either.
But the members of a virtual team face a spectrum of significant challenges. Working 10 time zones away from half of your team can create logistical hassles, for example, and a virtual team’s lack of a virtual water cooler can cause team members to feel isolated and alienated from one another.
According to Ed Anderson, associate professor of management at the McCombs School of Business, these problems can be minimized if virtual team managers take care to build trust and establish good communication between team members.
Along with Alison Davis-Blake, a management professor and the McCombs School’s senior associate dean for academic affairs, and Geoffrey Parker of Tulane University, Anderson has studied outsourced product development and manufacturing for years. In 2003, the team won a grant from the National Science Foundation to support their investigations.
While their research is still underway, Anderson can already identify several tips on how to manage your virtual team.
Tip No. 1: Put It In Perspective
An American executive assigned to manage a virtual team of software developers in India may have anxiety from the outset. If so, it’s important to keep in mind that although the experience may be new, the issues that arise are not.
Miscommunication, for one, can happen even if everyone speaks the same language, if they have different assumptions.
“I’ve seen it happen in the United States between automotive companies and electronics companies,” says Anderson, who worked as an engineer for both Ford and GM before pursuing his doctorate. “They have an awful time. The automotive company will assume that the electronics company is going to work to the quality standards of an automotive supplier—and they will, if those standards are spelled out.
“But it shouldn’t be an automatic assumption,” he continues, “that ‘good enough’ quality means the same thing to both parties, because ‘good enough’ in the electronics industry usually means using 99 percent good parts—whereas in the automotive industry, it means using 99.99 percent good parts.”
A subtle difference, unless you’re in the market for a new car.
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Tip No. 2: Meet Face-to-Face
Of course, communication is harder if teams are separated by geography and culture as well as education and experience. Differences in languages, societal mores, and corporate cultures can derail even the best-intentioned global team.
Because effective communication is crucial to helping a team work well across borders, creating a communications plan is an important first step. And in meeting the first step of that plan, you might pick up some frequent-flyer miles, according to Leslie Jarmon.
A community engagement coordinator and lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, Jarmon organized a four-day professional development seminar about global management for the Plus Program in 2003. She agrees with Anderson’s findings about the importance of communication.
“That gives everybody a sense of the humanness of the team players,” Jarmon says.
Tip No. 3: Get It In Writing
Once those initial connections have been made, subsequent technology-aided meetings may not seem as remote, although they will still not be ideal.
While technology can help facilitate international communication, geography thwarts it. “Most of the places being outsourced to are between 10 and 14 hours away,” Anderson says. “Somebody’s going to be sleepy on one end or the other. And it’s hard to arrange the calls.”
Jarmon concurs: “Even though the technology lets us speak at the same time, it doesn’t solve any of the other problems that keep talking from being a productive activity to engage in.”
The difficulty of coordinating phone calls encourages workers to turn to e-mail, as does the language barrier. “If people don’t speak English fluently, a lot of times they feel more comfortable writing an e-mail in English than speaking in English,” Anderson says.
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But, Anderson notes, e-mail communication has its disadvantages as well: “Because it’s not direct contact, you don’t get any sense of whether the other person understands you. And since the feedback loop is really long, if there’s a misunderstanding, it might be 24 hours before you can do anything about it.”
That’s why it’s important to set norms for team communication early in the process. Establishing the expectation of frequent (e.g., weekly rather than monthly conference calls) and regular (e.g., each Friday morning at 10 a.m. EST) conversations helps keep everyone in the loop.
“The team might even agree on a turnaround time for e-mails,” Jarmon suggests. “It just holds everybody to a common standard, so you’re not left wondering, ‘Did my e-mail fail?’”
“If you can communicate your expectations in writing, that’s helpful,” Anderson says. “You’re going to be doing a lot more of this with a virtual team than you do when you’re working within your own firm, because you can’t just walk around and see what’s going on.”
Tip No. 4: Understand assumptions
Even on paper, information is subject to interpretation. Accordingly, members of successful virtual teams must understand each other’s culture.
To give just one example of why culture matters, Anderson points out that if a company can choose between outsourcing to Singapore or to China, they may be more likely to choose Singapore. The issue is not language—Mandarin dominates in both countries. But Singapore’s business culture mirrors our own more closely than that of China.
“Because it was a British Colony, Singapore still has business traditions and a legal structure that are based on the British system,” Anderson said. As a result, “a lot of the same assumptions exist there that would be in a Western business.”
Similar traditions make understanding one another easier, but not automatic. “When you’ve got two different firms in two different countries,” Anderson continued, “standard operating procedures are probably not going to bear a whole lot of relationship to one another.”
Here again, virtual team managers can draw insight from their analogous experiences in the United States. Even in the same industry and same country, different companies often have very different strategic goals and standard operating procedures.
“When I was at Ford, I knew that my number one job was to keep the fixed costs down,” Anderson says. “And at General Motors, they were worried about total costs. They didn’t worry about raising fixed costs as long as they could reduce variable costs. It’s a big difference. That’s why GM went for much more automation a lot earlier than Ford did.”
If your competitor has a different standard operating procedure than you do, that’s an interesting piece of information. But if half of the people on your team have a different standard operating procedure than you do, that’s a problem.
Tip No. 5: Build relationships
When a team’s members are separated by language, geography, and culture, skills in negotiation and conflict mediation are particularly important.
“You’ve got to find people that are good at managing relationships,” says Anderson.
Many members of outsourced teams are engineers, who are not traditionally trained to manage relationships. However, an astute hiring manager can pick up on certain clues that someone may have a knack for building relationships.
“If somebody spent a semester overseas, or if they learned a second language, or have some sort of background in the humanities—those are good hints that he or she might be good at managing this sort of team,” Anderson says. “Those qualities aren’t enough in themselves, but if a person has them in addition to solid technical skills, it indicates that they’re probably curious about things, and curiosity is not a bad thing.”
Training can help bridge some cultural gaps, but keeping an open mind is always useful when entering an international working environment. You will fare better on foreign soil if you’re willing to admit that your expectations about work and assumptions about culture may be vastly different from those of the people you meet.
“The first and most important lesson, and the hardest to learn, is, ‘I really don’t know,’” Jarmon says. “The next step is to find a way, within the new culture, to gracefully be the novice without jeopardizing the status of your management level.”
Tip No. 6: Hold on to your teams
Once you find effective virtual team players, Anderson has one piece of advice: “Try to keep them.”
To do so, companies should be willing to cough up—even though the primary reason companies offshore is to cut their costs.
Since workers with technical skills and managerial acumen are in chronically short supply, some companies have attempted to plaster over holes in their employees’ soft skills sets with training programs.
This approach may backfire. After conducting detailed surveys on outsourced projects, Anderson found something that surprised him initially: “If engineers get training in negotiation or team leadership or mediation, it tends to have a negative effect on the project.”
After the initial surprise wore off, Anderson says, his colleague, Alison Davis-Blake, began to make sense of it.
“Take a used-car salesman,” Anderson says. “If you send a used-car salesman to learn some advanced techniques about selling cars well, that will probably be very helpful. But if you send a used-car salesman to a three-day class in understanding automotive engineering, it may not be very helpful. It may screw things up.
“A little bit of knowledge,” he adds, “is a very dangerous thing. People often come away from brief training programs with a couple of oversimplified points that they apply to all situations.”
A “reasonable” amount of knowledge, on the other hand, is not dangerous at all. Most of the engineers he’s interviewed, Anderson clarifies, are not MBAs: “None of them had semester-long classes in managing human capital or in negotiation that the students at McCombs have, for example.
“If I were going to be a manager of international projects,” Anderson adds, “I would take courses in international business or managing human capital or negotiations in school, where I could really get extended feedback and practice and not a two- or three-day class.”
Tip No. 7: Trust takes time
Managing or working across borders requires patience, but the process should become easier over time.
“If you can keep the same people on both ends working with each other, team learning goes on,” says Anderson. Over time, members of a virtual team will acquire a kind of collective institutional memory.
And they will also come to trust one another, provided the essential ingredient—communication—is handled well at all stages, from beginning to end.
“How do you create trust?” Anderson muses. “Basically you try to keep your word, even when it’s not necessarily good for your firm in the short run. Follow through with your commitments even if it might be disadvantageous for your firm and the project—up to a point.
“Be open and honest with them,” adds Anderson, “and reward their being open and honest with you.”
