In the Yahoo news group on virtual communities, Cynthia Typaldos pointed to a newly released paper from the Harvard Business Review about Can absence make a team grow stronger?. It's eight pages and costs $6 (buy it from HBR here). The summary she got from HBR was:
Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually. The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity.
I went and purchased a digital PDF copy of the document. It's a very easy document to read and it is built up around cases from companies using virtual collaboration spaces. The authors found three principles for virtual working: "the first one deals with how teams are composed (example they use is Rocketdyne), the second with how they used technology to coordinate their efforts (Shell Chemicals) and the third on how team leaders induced a collection of strangers with little in common to function as a mutually supportive group (Unilever)".
For further reading about the Shell Chemicals check out the book (PDF) from Lipnack and Stamps (2000) about Virtual Teamworking. Tom Kunz from Shell US tells his story in there as well.
In any case, worth spending your $6 (or €5) on.
This happened at 5:40:41 PM or
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