Virtual Team = Project Disaster? (Part 2)

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Talent Management   Teams  

In the first part of this article, I suggested that a lot of the challenges around the management of virtual teams came down to communication difficulties and I offered a five-step approach to help overcome those difficulties. We looked at the first of those steps--building a strong sense of team--in that article, and now we are going to look at the remaining four steps.

Break down the barriers
It’s impossible to avoid communication barriers when you have virtual teams--physical distances remove the option of face-to-face communications, time differences may limit options for telephone conversations and language barriers may make direct communication virtually impossible. However, those barriers don’t need to create problems for the team, and I always work on the premise that it is the responsibility of the person initiating the communication to ensure that the barriers don’t prevent understanding of the message.

We do this all of the time in our daily lives--we talk to our children differently than we talk to our spouses, we speak differently with friends than with colleagues, we use different styles in formal versus informal communications, etc. With virtual teams, we need to apply this same approach to our colleagues, consciously attempting to provide messages in a format that the recipient will be able to understand with the minimum of “…

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