On The Smarter Office blog this week, I wrote about three keys to being effective with virtual teams:

“What do you call a team of people who always meet face-to-face around a meeting table and whiteboard? Adjectives such as minority, rarity, and old-school spring to my mind. As I showed in the Working Remotely infographic in my last post, the proportion of employees working at a distance from their fellow team members has been increasing year-on-year for a decade, and many organizations expect it to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. Most of us, if not all of us, are involved to some degree in projects that include team members from other time zones, countries, organizations, and cultures. This is the new reality, and some people are even saying that because it’s so common, the distinction between “virtual teams” and “face-to-face teams” should be done away with entirely. Before we embrace such a step, though, we need to ensure we have a clear picture of what it takes to be successful in virtual teams.“

Here’s the three keys:
– 1. Use Virtual Teams When There is a Clear Benefit to be Gained
– 2. Mitigate the Problems Caused by Crossing Boundaries
– 3. Make the Details of Collaborative Work More Explicit