4.2 Remote Teams

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Do curso por University of Pennsylvania

Building High-Performing Teams

47 classificações

University of Pennsylvania

Building High-Performing Teams

47 classificações

Curso 2 de 5 em Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building

Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course helps you understand the problems that hurt productivity, and gives you tools for creating positive change. This course also guides you through creating the ground rules and structure needed to set your team up for success. You gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

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Managing Common Team Types

In this last module, we will look at common types of teams like global teams and committees. We will discuss the challenges that each one is most likely to face and give you some tips for how to combat and overcome those challenges. We will also hear practical insights on managing startup teams from Anthony Maher, an entrepreneur, former professional soccer player, and a co-founder of Benjamin’s desk, which is the largest co-working community in Philadelphia.

4.1 Overview2:46

4.2 Remote Teams4:50

4.3 Startup Teams4:55

4.4 Product Development Teams5:24

4.5 IDEO’s Research Methods for Product Development Teams4:25

4.6 Committees4:20

4.7 Norm Setting for Committees4:13

Interview with Anthony Maher12:44

Conheça os instrutores

Derek Newberry, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Organizational Dynamics
Dr. Aviva Legatt
Affiliated Faculty
Organizational Dynamics

It used to be that telecommuting was a novelty concept that stood as

the exception to the norm for most employees.

Now remote working is a way of life to the point where there's even been a backlash

by companies like Yahoo that had so many employees working from home

they decided to push them back toward working in the office.

Even for those of us who don't really consider ourselves telecommuters, less and

less of our teamwork involves face to face contact with coworkers.

A recent study showed that half of US managers spend about half of their

time on the road.

And the phenomenon is not special to the US, in an era of globalization,

where many of us might be working closely with people in different countries,

who we rarely or never see in person.

These remote teams amplify the challenges around good communication that

even teams based in the same work space can already face.

When you have to work with people who you mainly know as a voice on a conference

line, it’s easier to miscommunicate and it’s much harder to build trust.

On remote teams or on any team where communication is the biggest barrier,

there’s some special strategies you can use to improve performance.

The first strategy is to have a face to face meeting as soon as possible, and

to schedule them regularly.

This is the approach taken by businesses like GitHub,

which is a tech company that offers customers a software development platform.

Now GitHub is headquartered in San Francisco, but

that almost seems like a technicality for

a business where most of its 600 employees are spread all over the world.

To keep teams in tact even when they're thousands of miles apart,

GitHub has events like an annual in person meeting and a requirement that all new

employees spend a week at the company headquarters before heading out.

Getting teams together for a face to face meeting early on

helps them establish a rapport and adjust to each others communication styles.

That way when they have to communicate remotely and

can't read each others body language or hear their tone,

they still have a pretty good sense of each others attitudes and feelings.

They can read them a little better and that’s really crucial for

keeping team members aligned.

In general, the more remote team members understand each others preferred

communication styles, the less opportunity there is going to be for

misunderstandings over email or phone.

Another strategy to use is to create time for

discussion where you have each person talk openly about their styles.

To understand why this is important take an example of a more aggressive

communicator interacting with a more passive communicator.

Now to the passive person the really aggressive communicator can

come off as hostile,

where the aggressive communicator might think that they're just acting normally.

In fact, they might even interpret the other person's passiveness as

an unwillingness to be honest and upfront about their opinions.

If these two team members just sit down and

have a discussion about their preferred styles, they'll know in the future that

these reactions might just be misjudgments of the other person's intentions.

It's best to have these discussions during team chartering

when your group is really first coming together.

As a conversation starter you might use a communication styles assessment

like the DISC Survey or the Persuasion Styles Assessment created by my colleagues

Richard Shell and Mario Moussa in their book the Art of Woo.

This will help each person reflect on their own style, so

that they can have a better group discussion.

A third strategy is to find creative ways to do what I call

building the water cooler.

Now, many of those are familiar with the concept of the office water cooler as

a place where people informally gather to take a break, make small talk and

share ideas.

It might seem like unproductive time, but

the water cooler serves an important social function.

The informal rapport building team members engage in here

helps them communicate more effectively in more formal work settings.

The challenge with a remote team is that there may

be no natural spontaneous place for them to gather.

That means that you have to be proactive about creating what you can think of as

a digital water cooler, where you recreate that space in a virtual setting.

If your team uses a chat application like Gchat or Facebook Chat,

you might create a separate section or thread where team

members can post about their families or sports or the last movie they saw.

You can also create this space by unofficially dedicating the first few

minutes of meetings for social time.

With any of these strategies the goal is to be

even more intentional about creating an environment of good communication,

because remote teams have fewer natural opportunities to do this.

Having face time and water cooler discussions might seem like an unnecessary

by-product of office life, but they're essential to getting the most

out of your team, especially when they're scattered around the country or the globe.

The more you can recreate that social function on a remote team,

the more unified they'll be.

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