Virtual Teams: How Do You Successfully Manage and Connect Across Distances?

When we work in geographic locations, we work in virtual teams. How do we manage them? They are not as coherent as the team who works around us. What do we do differently to manage them?

Managing Virtual Teams

Here's an article that shares how to manage a virtual team. The best part is a reminder, as in our virtual mode, we often miss being real!

Focusing on roles, formalizing and setting limits to the responsibilities, managing trust, and communicating appropriately are the areas that we face on a daily basis. If these are the same situations that you have to manage, tell us how you do it differently?

http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/19/vir...operation.html

Here's a detailed study, as published on MIT Sloan Review titled "Managing Virtual Teams." You can access the article at MIT Sloan Review.

Here's some guidelines on managing an online sales force effectively.

Managing a Virtual Sales Force: Strategies to Consider

"It all comes down to the leader," says Richard Lepsinger. When you're managing a virtual sales force, it's not enough to merely expect that your team will deliver results. If you're leading a team, you'll need to set the tone for not only how employees interact with potential customers but also amongst each other. From the very beginning, the leader must identify the boundaries and enforce them constantly.

Before you launch a virtual sales team, Kroth and Clemons urge that it's necessary to have the communication technology built into the company culture. Employees should understand how and when to get in touch and how often they're expected to check-in. In Managing the Mobile Workforce, Kroth and Clemons present these seven tips to consider when your sales force is deployed.

1. Center of Excellence: Build a leadership that understands the challenges of virtual working.
2. Integrate mobile practices and technology into existing systems.
3. Keep policies straightforward and technology simple to use.
4. Define roles and expectations.
5. Collaborate.
6. Train, learn, and improve.
7. Support mobile workers as if they were customers.

The corrections include addressing spelling and grammar errors, ensuring proper paragraph formatting, and preserving the original meaning of the text.

Few Online Work Arrangements

Manage sharing documents through collaboration tools such as MS SharePoint, Qontext, and online storage like SkyDrive, even Google Docs.

Apart from these, here are a few online freelance companies as shared in the article "Working with Talent Markets – oDesk, Elance, Freelancer, Guru, vWorker."

oDesk

oDesk is the leader by volume, a VC-funded, Silicon Valley operation. oDesk pioneered hourly payments and handles the most hourly deals. They also introduced the idea of time-tracking software that takes a picture of the worker's desktop every 10 minutes. This innovation has been controversial, and some people see it and other rules as overly controlling. However, it does help oDesk guarantee payment to workers who track time this way. They have a lot of "affiliates" - individuals who work for outsourcing companies.

Elance

Elance is another VC-funded, Silicon Valley operation with state-of-the-art software and Web UI. They have attracted a big following of outsourcing companies that use Elance to find and bid on jobs. Outsourcers have not been the best source of talent in Assembla's tests, but if you are looking for more of a packaged experience, Elance providers can deliver it. Traditionally, their jobs were fixed-price, but Elance now matches oDesk with hourly time tracking and payment. Elance offers an API and a low $750 buyout price, so there are now more ways to use them effectively.

Guru

Guru is unique because it has a lot of US-based providers. The other exchanges specialize in lower-cost "offshore" workers. Guru has more providers in non-coding categories like design, writing, and business consulting. They have more individual contributors, which have been better in our tests. If you want to work with individuals in the United States, you should look at Guru. On the other hand, their contracting is primitive and limits the ways that you can integrate team members. They only offer fixed-price jobs with no buyout option.

vWorker

I have been using vWorker (formerly Rentacoder) for ten years, and I used it to find several of our core team members, including our chief architect, who is now a partner in the business. It is still mostly a site for small, fixed-price jobs. The strength of vWorker is the huge community of individual contractors, many of them "offshore," who are available to try out on small jobs. vWorker does not have a buyout option, and their communication rules are restrictive, so in the past, I usually used it just for advertising, an obscure option that they called a "bulletin board" ad. However, with the new hourly payment option, it can fit into our qualification process.

Freelancer

I like Freelancer (formerly GetaFreelancer) because of their unbundling. They don't force you into any particular business model. You can get a fixed price, hourly, or just buy an advertisement, which they call a full-time project. Freelancer is a business from Australia that has been quite aggressive about adding new sites and features. They claim to have 1.9 million registered workers. Freelancer does not seem to offer any protection for workers.

A comparative snapshot as shared in the article:
[img]http://blog.assembla.com/Portals/365/images/Chart%20FINAL.jpg[/img]