”Whatever happens, make sure you don’t break the connection”

(Global leader, Global Leadership Academy-seminar, November 2016)

The global workplace places demands on the ability of companies and leaders to coordinate activities across national borders. For the global leader, it is often a fact of life that their staff are dispersed in terms of geography, time zones and organization units. In theory, all members of the team could be working in every possible location and at all possible times of the day. Neither employees nor managers necessarily need to come in to a fixed address; they can work from airports, summer cottages, private homes or different company addresses. In practice this means that a significant part of the communication within the team has to be conducted via electronic media, mobile phones, video-conferencing etc. – what is nowadays called virtual collaboration. This is contrast to traditional collaboration and leadership where the manager and all of the team members are gathered in the same geographical location, work at the same times of day and can communicate directly with each other.

The global workplace can cause the individual employee to lose the sense of ”belonging”. There is also a risk of staff who are managed remotely, as opposed to employees who are in daily contact with their manager or colleagues, feeling that they have to find meaning in their work themselves, which places great demands on their ability to motivate themselves. For the global leader, it is then absolutely crucial to reduce this feeling of isolation and maintain a high level of motivation in every member of the team. In other words, the global leader needs to compensate for the deficits that arise when the team, including the leader, do not meet physically on a daily basis.

With all of the challenges that go with working in virtual teams, we may well ask why companies are practising this on a wider and wider scale. There are typically two general arguments in favour. First, virtual collaboration makes it possible to assemble (project) teams with a broad range of skills and cultural backgrounds. Globalization provides companies with access to a bigger pool of talent, and there can be many benefits in creating very diverse teams, as this helps to improve the quality of the solutions produced by the team. This assumes that the team is working well, and if the members of the team are spread across different locations, a special effort is required.

Secondly, there may be financial incentives to work in virtual teams. Every time a virtual meeting is held, the company saves money on air tickets and hotel accommodation for the attendees, as well as the time the participants spend travelling. If we look at these factors alone, there is every reason to hold all meetings virtually. However, this will quickly produce a management dilemma, as we also know that physical meetings are particularly effective in building trust within the team. Virtual collaboration may not necessarily replace the normal physical meetings, so a major task for the global leader is to strike a balance between physical and virtual meetings.

In practice, leaders who work virtually have to do the same job as managers who work in the same physical location as the rest of the team. Targets have to be defined and followed up, people have to be motivated, development advanced and priorities set. These activities can be challenging in themselves, but for the virtual leader, the geographical distance and time difference will increase the complexity of the leadership tasks. And this complexity will be all the greater if there are cultural differences between the members of the team.

Separation in time and space will simply mean that clear agreements, structure and discipline are even more important for collaboration than when we work in the same physical setting and at the same times. To address this, the global leader should lay down clear guidelines for practical collaboration. For example, there could be guidelines for response times in virtual working, clear agreements on how and when it is OK to contact each other outside normal working hours, and so on.

One way of maintaining motivation in the individual employee is for all team members to be invited to provide input to the guidelines to be laid down, and wherever possible, the wishes and needs expressed by every member of the team should be taken into account. In practice, however, it may be difficult if not impossible to accommodate all wishes and needs, so it is essential for the leader to communicate actively on the decisions taken when the framework for virtual collaboration is established.

To address the feeling of isolation and motivate every member of the team, global leaders of virtual teams should try to create a kind of global presence. This can be done with a leadership style which sets great store by detailed knowledge of the team’s work, setting clear objectives and holding a reasonable number of face-to-face meetings. The global virtual environment necessitates a flexible and proactive leadership style in order to accommodate the employees’ differing cultural backgrounds and overcome the geographical distance. Clear agreements should be made on how and when the leaders can be contacted, and the targets for the team as a whole and for the individual employees should be clear and transparent. If the virtual team is made up of people from different cultures, it is especially important for the leader to have an open and patient approach combined with strong cultural awareness.

There follows an overview of some of the challenges associated with working displaced from others in time and space, with suggestions for how these challenges can be addressed in terms of leadership:

The technological challenges in virtual collaboration may be crucial to the ability of the team to produce the expected results. This makes it an aspect to be considered and handled alongside the other issues in virtual leadership and collaboration. In this connection, it is worth noting that training in the use of technological aids and developing the required skills are often underrated.

The virtual environment has a tendency to magnify the challenges arising out of differences in national culture. This makes it especially important for global leaders working virtually to foster understanding of the differences that exist within a team made up of people of different nationalities. Experience shows that performance and satisfaction in teams which have decided that everyone should speak the same language at all times are higher than in teams working in many different languages.

Cultural differences affect the styles of communication used by the staff and the leader, and may also have a negative impact on the effectiveness of virtual teams if there is a lack of mutual respect and understanding of these differences. Cultural differences between team members can be addressed by giving training in cultural awareness and e.g. focusing on how the different cultures combine to affect the way in which we use and communicate in different media. Language difficulties are often more noticeable in phone calls because of differences in accent and vocabulary. This last can be addressed by increasing awareness of the relationship between language differences and the media used, and by providing language training.