A virtual team has become the new human capital trend that has taken many industries by storm. The idea of having a team working remotely seems unorthodox and difficult to handle, especially if your business is fast-paced. As your business owner, you might be worried about how to manage virtual team productivity.
However, a virtual team consists of colleagues working from different locations working together as one team and towards the same goal.
Through insourcing, many companies have grown their teams substantially and have seen the cost-benefit of having a virtual team. Insourcing incorporates a selection of professional minds from anywhere around the globe at the lowest possible investment.
Read more: Insourcing vs Outsourcing
With cloud computing becoming prevalent, the idea of virtual assistants has slowly risen and become more apparent, because companies are finding new ways of expanding and entering new territories. As your team grows, you will need to find apparent ways to keep everyone motivated and ready to work efficiently.
Productivity within the organization is determined by numerous factors. Identifying a lack of productivity usually begins by noticing goals that haven’t been met, low team morale and seeing a shift in the work systems.
What causes low virtual team productivity?
- Lack of clarity and direction
- Poor communication
- Difficulty with delegation
How to ensure that your virtual team productive and motivated?
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Plan
Having a detailed route or way of executing tasks is very important.
A team with no direction will never be able to achieve its goals. Your virtual team understands the importance of time and the essence of getting tasks completed rightfully. One way of planning is defining a working system that allows you to plan ahead and have a forecast of what your virtual team is meant to do. This will help your team understand the work process.
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Communicate
Communication is the lifeline of any team to survive your team and you need to have seamless communication.
The best way of having a good communication system is to understand your team member’s abilities, weaknesses, and strengths, so you can see which way of communicating is more effective.
Even though communication is vital for remote teams, information overload can quickly become a problem. Endless emails, project management system updates and non-stop messages combine to create a backlog of correspondence for people to sort through.
It’s a must for information to shared freely in virtual teams, but no one should be forced to go through messages that don’t apply to them or their work.
It’s critical that virtual team members highlight their preferred means of communication and make it clear when they’re busy or otherwise unavailable.
Productivity and clarity in communication go hand in hand, keeping lines of communication as clean as possible ensures that team members will be focused on their work.
A virtual team is non-traditional, which means how you communicate is definitely different from how you would team members you share an office with.
Effective communication makes it possible to get the best out of your team. Making a wise investment in modern technological tools that simplify the communication process allows you to have a seamless line of communication.
Virtual communication technology refers to any technology used to communicate with each other when they can’t be face to face. It favors the ability to see and hear one another in real-time, simulating the experience of a physical visit. Through tools such as Zoom and Skype, teams are able to always be in touch regardless of time differences or other geographical factors.
According to Techwalla, Video conferencing uses a similar VoIP protocol with audio and video applications to allow companies to conduct virtual meetings. With video conferencing, employees from anywhere in the world can sit in on a single meeting and interact visually and verbally with their coworkers.
This technology can save companies millions of dollars in travel and productivity costs. Developments in collaborative technologies ranging from shared workspaces to multi-point video conferencing unquestionably are making virtual teaming easier.
Develop a charter that establishes acceptable behavior when participating in virtual meetings, such as limiting background noise and side conversations, talking clearly and at a reasonable pace, listening attentively and not dominating the conversation. The charter also should include guidelines on which communication modes to use in which circumstances, for example when to reply via email versus picking up the phone versus taking the time to create and share a document.
With numerous ways of communication aforementioned, people often choose a communication tool according to how convenient it is, but in some cases, certain tasks are more aligned to particular tools, and if a wrong tool is chosen then tasks may take longer to be done.
According to the Sloan Review, the purpose of communication should determine the delivery mechanism.
Again, clarity is the foundation of any form of communication. Make intentions clear, leave no room for assumptions or personal interpretations. Prioritize keeping everyone in the loop. Maintain constant communication with your Virtual Team.
For your team to feel noticed and to be productive, be responsive and supportive. Trustworthiness equals to openness, which allows for transparency. Virtual Teams are likely to have members from different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. Creating communication systems that are inclusive and open allows for productivity and understanding.
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Have a systematic work process
Lack of systems in place, a virtual team can fall apart very quickly. While virtual team members will all have their own set of work habits, the team must have a standardized approach to make decisions, share information, and solve problems.
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Remember the Big Picture
Working in Silos is always an issue. Isolation can often cause remote workers to lose sight of the team’s overall goals. It becomes easy to focus on a specific task sitting before them rather than thinking about how their work affects the rest of the team. Virtual team productivity is a key piece to the big picture.
Communicating goals and highlighting accomplishments that push the team closer to those objectives are important not just for raising awareness, but also for reminding team members that they are there to support one another.
Regular virtual meetings, as well as the occasional in-person meeting, constantly remind team members that they are all working together to accomplish something meaningful. taking proactive steps to boost team member engagement, companies can leverage high-functioning virtual teams to deliver results.
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Nurture Virtual friendships
Your team are human beings wired to connect with others.
People can get connected from outside of work but it’s great to fill some of this need at work as well, much more in a virtual team. Just like on the third tier of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as humans a sense of love belonging is needed, so building friendships allows for this to take place.
Having a virtual team means having to compromise in order to get things done in the right way. Some emotional intelligence goes a long way, this means that understanding how people deal with things emotionally helps your business grow and your work environment becomes conducive.
Mastering Virtual Team Productivity
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At Global BP Solutions, we believe that growing a business requires hiring people that are motivated and skilled enough to help you build and maintain this growth. Managing your remote assistant and ensuring that he os she is productive can be made easy because by using platforms designed to work with virtual teams.
Furthermore, your team works according to your schedule and time zone. As a result, you are able to scale efficiently.
Recruiting qualified virtual assistants enables business owners to focus time and resources on other key business development areas.
We offer a wide range of customizable services, that include virtual customer service, graphic design, insurance verification, digital marketing, bookkeeping and accounting to mention but a few.