Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are one of the most difficult challenges of the global workplace. Creating and managing effective multicultural virtual teams is even more difficult.  The challenge of virtual communication, that is, the loss of the greater “bandwidth” associated with face-to-face communication, is compounded by different cultural communication styles and by differences in other cultural dimensions such as individualism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance.  These differences, unless identified, addressed, and managed by the virtual team, necessarily and sometimes dramatically decrease the effectiveness of the virtual team.

IOR’s Virtual Team training programs focus on three goals:

• Providing a framework to illustrate the different cultural value preferences represented in the group
• Illustrating the impact of these differences on intra-team communication and collaboration
• Exploring strategies for creating a common team culture in which the driving values converge and the desired behaviors of critical functions are agreed to and clearly specified

The first goal can be achieved in several ways, but we prefer to employ an online assessment tool which provides graphical illustrations of average team values compared to specific country averages on four dimensions as well as a comparison of individual team member’s values (identity is not revealed).

We achieve the second goal through the analysis of actual team “critical incidents” and the presentation and discussion of pertinent scenarios and case studies, often including video segments.  Finally, we prioritize team cultural challenges and assign the most important to small groups for discussion and suggestions for solution, which are then presented for large group discussion.  The team leaves the training with next steps delineated for the management of the team culture.