The+good,+the+bad+and+the+ugly+of+Virtual+Teaming+-+our+experiences

In mid 2013 I worked as part of a virtual team on a specific project to be delivered in the Gulf. We were a team of five, located in Jakarta, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Dublin and New York. Prior to the team's formation I knew only one of the other four team members. We were fortunate to have use of Microsoft Office 365, which had a number of intergrated file sharing and conference call features, which allowed us to discuss and amend word, excel and power point documents in a live forum. The positives from the experience included the opportunity to learn from others, some of whom had incredibly interesting experiences, to feel appreciated for my views and experiences, and to work for an outcome from which we would all benefit. A real 'band of brothers' mentality evolved, we each drove each other to fully extend ourselves and we all greatly enjoyed the experience. The downsides included frustration as we tried to come to terms with the task at hand, agreeing on the delegation of elements of the work and trying to ensure everyone stuck to delivery commitments. I am certain face-to-face meetings would have eliminated much of these tensions and frustrations. Other downsides included trying to agree (& stick) to meeting and deadline times across four time zones, trying to overcome differences in language expression and not being able to guage team members' reactions in terms of facial expressions and body language. Overall I would say our virtual team was a success, and when we finally met in Dubai it felt like we had known each other for years, and not weeks as was the case!
 * Brendan (2014).**

Due to the geographical area covered by my organisation we communicate a lot by e-mail and conference calls. We have a daily conference call to discuss performance, because this call became routine people stopped taking it seriously and would log in late causing several delays, to stop this the call is now locked after 2 minutes which means if you are late you can no longer get through. The call now runs more smoothly, people log in on time and pay more attention which means the call takes less time.
 * Linda (2014)**

My organization functions as a network of independent firms, due to this we usually have partners or experts located in other regions (Romania, Russia, Poland, Czech Republic). To get us all together we quite usually use conference calls or video calls. Due to the security reasons we use our internally approved software. We can not use Skype, it was not approved by our risk management and IT people. I find these video of call conferences quite effective and efficient. They are effective since the we could organize a proper meeting in a real time. And they are efficient since they save enormous amounts of time and money for travel, otherwise people would have to flight all over the region for a 1 or 2 hours meetings. The main drawbacks of email I would mentions, that sometimes it get overwhelming, you can step out for one hour and get a dozen of emails to reply, or people may be sitting next to each-other and write emails for communication.
 * Constantin (2014)**

One time that stands out for me was when I was in China in 2011. I was working with a distributor in Beijing and the whole of the rest of the group were based all around China and dialling in. The majority of the calls were audio only which caused a few issues as a lot of the people on the call could obviously only hear what was happening. Prior to the meeting I believed I was just demonstrating the instrument to a room of people and didn't realise until I arrived that it was a conference call. This created a few issues in that I had prepared a presentation and bought an instrument to demonstrate with, the other issue was that as I spoke I had a translator translating for me, some of which was quite technical. The issue was that if people didn't understand the technical part I had to use the flip chart to show visually what was happening. This then meant that the translator had to understand what I was showing and then had to translate it and explain it to all of the others who were of varying technical ability. This caused quite a few problems and turned what was supposed to be a two hour meeting into something much longer. During the course of the call the connections were not the best and a number of times listeners dropped out and had to reconnect. All of this time I had to try and understand what was going on. Some of these issues were resolved as the meeting went on by people sending out my presentation and also by photographing the flip chart and sending it to others. There were also a number of video cameras from varying angles in the room and as I talked and presented I had to keep moving so that the different angles of view could see what I was attempting to show. In this instance the meeting had to be carried out this way but there were a number of issues that could have made the process much easier. For example, prior warning that it would be a conference call, asking for the presentation prior to the meeting and transmitting the agenda to all involved
 * Matthew (Nov 2014)**

One morning when I reported for work, my boss gave me a contract document to go through and informed me that I have been included in a project team. The team was built with individuals from north America and west Africa with French and English speaking. I had no experience in working in virtual teams. The first thing that came into mind was how to deal with cultural diversity, language differences and different time zone. It was agreed that English will be the mode of communication. We communicated through e-mail, fax, text messaging and telephone. At the start of the project, members were more focused on getting their tasks done as each individual appeared to be trying to represent their organization's better. Then tension developed; some members were moving faster than others resulting into conflicts. As we move along, relationship started building up with members starting to communicate and accommodate each other style of work. Building and maintaining trust through integrity and work ethics was the pivot - for example, keeping your word (when you promise to make a call tomorrow 10:00 am, make sure you do it); prompt respond to e-mail or requests; giving members full attention; and sending regular updates. Towards the end of the project, you can hardly tell which team member was working for which organization. The things that stand out for me was how to manage emotion and conflict within the team. For over two years now, I have not met half of the team members.
 * Ibrahim (2014)**