Virtual teams going global

by Steve Alexander

December 12, 2000 —

WHEN ROGER RODRIGUEZ goes to work at BakBone Software, in San Diego, he may be
dealing with customer support problems that were passed on to him by colleagues in
Lanham, Md., or in the city of Poole in the United Kingdom. As his work day ends,
Rodriguez, a client service senior engineer, may hand off other support problems to
teammates in Tokyo.

Rodriguez has never met most of these co-workers face-to-face, and he probably
never will. But they are his daily working companions on a virtual team whose members
are spread across three continents to provide "follow the sun" customer support for
storage management software firm BakBone.

Rodriguez is one of many IT workers and managers who are part of the new corporate
reality -- a centralized company with a decentralized employee base. These virtual
teams manage to function despite being separated by distance, multiple time zones, and
sometimes differing national cultures. Part of what makes it work is communications
technology. But increasingly the teams function well because management and workers are
adapting to the idea that they needn't work in the same office for the team to function
smoothly.

"Virtual teams have been around long enough now that people are beginning to
recognize them as a fundamental shift in the way people work," says Andy Campbell, a
virtual teams consultant for Applied Knowledge Group, in Reston, Va. "What virtual
teams begin to get at is a better fit in the way humans organize for work, and in the
way information technology dispenses information."

Dispersed need and recruitment

You can ascribe two main reasons to why virtual IT teams are being created today:
necessity and recruitment. As global companies create geographically dispersed
technical support centers, they need IT staff to function around the clock. Hiring over
a wider geographic area and accommodating the desires of workers can help companies
deal with the technical labor shortage.

"Virtual teams are driven by the lack of skilled people for the jobs that are
needed," Campbell says. "You have the ability to reach out quickly and pull a subject
matter expert into the team, all without having to put people on airplanes or
relocating them."

Tim Miller, director of client services at BakBone Software agrees. "One of the
reasons we went to virtual teams in our support centers is that it's difficult to
attract the caliber of people you want who are willing to work at 2:00 and 3:00 in the
morning on Saturday and Sunday. Virtual teaming is the alternative to having a massive
staff in one location," Miller says.

Miller's staff of 13 technical support representatives, many with computer science
degrees, is spread over four call centers in San Diego, Lanham, Md., Poole, England,
and Tokyo. "Virtual teams also allow you to draw from a more diverse talent pool
because you're hiring in different geographic locations," Miller says.<

Regular and accurate communication becomes overwhelmingly important for global
teams. For example, Rodriguez stays in touch with others via telephone, e-mail, and a
company-wide database that tracks actions taken on specific customer problems.

Rodriguez also has learned to express himself clearly and concisely, because a co-
worker thousands of miles away can't ask him in the middle of San Diego's night to
clarify his last message. "Passing off information to another virtual team member
requires a certain level of discipline. We have to summarize the issues in an
analytical engineering fashion. We have to be clear," Rodriguez says.

Diane Orzechowski, a program manager on a virtual team in Nortel's network
engineering group in Raleigh, N.C., agrees. "Everything you say and do must be clear,
because there is no room for confusion," says Orzechowski, who acts as a liaison
between engineering and business people. She is a member of several functional teams,
including individual teams for LAN engineers, WAN engineers, network management,
contracts, and business metrics. Although the teams, which include members based in the
United States, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Central and South America, total about 400
people, on any given day she deals with anywhere from half a dozen to 20 people.

Managed reluctance

Not everyone embraces the virtual team work model. Even the information technology
industry, like many traditional hierarchies, has some managers and employees who prefer
co-location. The boss may like having workers in the office because, in traditional
thinking, it's easier to monitor employees' work habits that way.

"Many of us were raised at time when you measured people by the amount of activity
they were engaged in," Applied Knowledge's Campbell says. "Conventional managers still
base a lot of their assumptions of an employee's effectiveness on observations such
as, 'Do they look like they are working?' The idea is that if people appear to be
working, then they must be, even though we know that is not necessarily true."

Campbell says that virtual teams hold out a promise that employees will be judged
more on what they actually do than on what they appear to be doing. "If you do virtual
teams right, the chances are much higher that you'll get an evaluation that is not
influenced by other things."

Not all employees are suited to work on virtual teams. Some prefer a traditional
office situation because it provides camaraderie and a work routine that may not
require much independent action.Virtual teams, by their very nature, require
independent action, such as proactive discussion initiated by team members.

The success of a virtual team also depends on the ability of individual members to
be self-starters. Employees working in remote locations must be able to set goals and
accomplish tasks even though the boss isn't peering over their shoulders. "People who
don't like to open up to other people and who need artificial deadlines are not going
to do well on virtual teams," Campbell says.

Cross-cultural communication

Miller says virtual teams work well at BakBone Software because considerable
attention has been devoted to communication and information sharing with his 13 team
members, all of whom have programming backgrounds in C or C++. In addition to
communicating via the shared database of customer support information, he favors
regular conference-call meetings.

Such communications need to be carefully managed to take into account the cultural
differences among team members, Miller says. For the moment, team conference calls are
limited to the native English speaking employees.

"It's more difficult to do conference calls with the Japanese because, even if they
speak flawless English, they think their English isn't all that good. As a result,
they tend to be a little more quiet," Miller says. For now, conference calls with the
Japanese team members are handled separately.

Rodriguez says being a virtual team member at BakBone taught him how to carefully
ask his Japanese co-workers questions. The reason for his care is that questions to his
Japanese counterparts may elicit different answers than from his English-speaking
colleagues. His state-side teamies will usually say what they mean. In Japan, a yes-or-
no question almost always results in a "yes" answer -- even if it shouldn't.

Such savvy communications skills are the key to making the virtual team work across
cultural boundaries, says Craig Gardiner, BakBone's U.K. support manager in Poole.
Gardiner works with Rodriguez on Miller's geographically dispersed team. "The rule of
thumb is to be precise in what you want and how you ask for it. Due to the time zone
differences, if you don't ask for the right information at the right time, you could be
a day behind in getting something done," Gardiner says.

But despite the cultural and time differences, the virtual team works well because
the people on it know each other via continuous interaction, Gardiner says. "Obviously,
with the various problems we encounter as a team, we deal with each other frequently,"
he says. "We know who all the people are and what skills they have. Just because you
don't see someone face-to-face doesn't mean you don't know that person."

Another IT person trying to bridge the cultural gap on a virtual team is Ori
Eizenberg, executive vice president and chief operating officer of ItemField, a New
York-based b-to-b (business-to-business) software developer with a 15-person IT shop in
Israel. The firm's U.S. and Israeli members are on a virtual team that faces both a
seven-hour time difference and cultural issues. The company tries to overcome obstacles
via e-mail, a shared Web server, conference calls, and soon will incorporate
videoconferencing to their communications tools.

Such efforts can bridge cultural differences. For example, Israeli team members who
develop software don't work on Friday, thereby putting them out of synch with U.S. team
members. To compensate for the cultural difference in work schedules, new hires in
Israel are told they must be on-call on Fridays to support the U.S. sales force and
customers, Eizenberg says

Team downtime

If something is missing on a virtual team, it's informal conversation time,
BakBone's Rodriguez says. "You don't have the time for open-ended conversation. You
can't informally brainstorm with someone."

Eizenberg agrees. "I think virtual teams are less productive in the sense that
you're missing out on those corridor talks between the sales and technical people that
sometimes bring about very good results. We're trying to overcome this by sending our
technical people in Israel to visit the U.S. office, but it's not as perfect as having
everybody sit in the same building." Eizenberg says

Jessica Lipnack has another take on dispersed teams' productivity. She believes
that virtual teams can be more effective than traditional ones. Lipnack is co-author of
the book Virtual Teams: People working across boundaries with technology, and co-
founder of Virtualteams.com, a software firm in West Newton, Mass.

"The virtual team is smarter than the traditional team because most of its
communication is digitally encoded and there is a repository of shared information--
postings to Web sites, e-mails, documents. Because the team is working almost
exclusively in a digital environment, information is not getting lost," Lipnack
says.

Keith Parks, senior manager of ASP business delivery at Nortel Networks in Raleigh,
N.C., has been on virtual teams, or running them, for four years, and beelieves they
work well. His team of 20 includes IT workers. "I feel like virtual teams are more
productive than working in an office. There's increased employee satisfaction, and it
saves the company money in real estate and facilities costs," Parks says.

Those who run virtual teams also believe they can manage employees effectively
without seeing them every day. BakBone's Miller is not worried about evaluating
employee performance because, in a support center, he can measure the time it takes
workers to solve problems. He also visits the four support sites periodically.

Nortel's Parks, too, is not concerned about not seeing his team members frequently
enough to keep close tabs on their work. "I don't think you can get hung up on exactly
what people are doing day-to-day or hour-to-hour to achieve their objectives. You have
to focus on the objectives themselves and see what's measurable."

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