Martin White from Intranet Focus is talking about being effective with virtual teams.

Key points:
– Martin has been running virtual teams since 1977. Has made all the mistakes.
– Many organizations have virtual teams, but few provide training for being on a virtual team.
– The Challenger disaster – basically a virtual team that went very wrong. Eg., silence was taken as agreement, documents arrived late and in the wrong order, few decision making rights.
– Need training in how to run virtual meetings.
– There's a lot of research been done on virtual teams.
– See the work of Geert Hofstede. Eg., if you want feedback from the Chinese, don't try it over a teleconference.
– Three dimensions of virtual teams – organizational culture and language, calendars and time, and geographic and spatial location.
– Building virtual teams – (a) how is the team staffed, and (b) have they been trained in virtual teams.
– Language – social language is different to other forms of language. Much more context is needed in non-social language.
– With English being the "corporate" language, need to remember that non-English-as-first-language speakers will struggle.
– … Most commentators on social intranets and collaboration choose to ignore the topic and the challenges.
– … See Jane McConnell's report on the digital workplace. Recent research – 10% of organizations have culture and language issues in collaborative work.
– … See the spoken language competence chart, from the Common European Framework on language.
– Time – different working weeks, holidays, public holidays, regional holidays, etc.
– next action – read some of the great books available on virtual teams.
– next action 2 – see Martin's report, "Managing Virtual Teams."