Individual blog Reflection
———Tami LIN from Battery Team
As a virtual
collaboration team, we morning team and evening team are trying to make an
effective cooperation to reach the mutual goal. The two girls from the evening
team are major in information management. We three who are from the morning
team are in organizational management.
Team Practice
Our communication
is built on the tencent chat group since week9, in the period of brainstorming,
we just communicate for once a week since in the cooperation of the mutual
project, and we met online for twice a week. Each meeting we have a discussion
leader and a recorder by turns and after the meeting recorder will send the
meeting draft and newest plan and process of the project to each team member.
However, because of some misleading or misunderstanding, we always have some
doubts or questions after the meeting. Sometimes refer to the same question,
different member has different perspectives and explanation so that it hampered
our team work in some extend.
As this is a new
virtual team work, we have both opportunities and challenges in the
collaboration. Because virtual team can use a diverse group of team members,
often they are a powerful means for fueling creativity and originality. In our
team, our team members are majored in different areas including accounting,
human resource management, and logistics and engineering information. However,
virtual team also carries some challenges. First, a lack of technological
knowledge related to virtual teaming can slow the adoption of the technical
resources needed to facilitate dispersed teams. Like our first meeting, some of
us had a problem with the microphone and there was no voice insert. It took us
two hours to finish the whole meeting with no virtual conclusion. Second, the
organization environment may be a poor fit for virtual teaming and some members
may not be suited for working virtually. For example, sometimes we are eager to
get touch in the team members while they had no time to stay online and
sometimes in an online chatting some member will keep silent and did no
contribution to the team work.
In terms of our
communication platform, we use tencent group to communicate with other team
members since every member get used to QQ chat software so that we can get
touch in each other as soon as possible. We have an online chat once a week as
usual by tencent group voice; this is the only time for us to communicate
together synchronously and make some crucial decisions and milestones. However,
sometimes we will find some problems when handling the project in practice
afterwards. Only we can do is to leave the message on the group discussion
board until other members saw it to resolve the problem. This asynchronous
communication media has some extend ineffective for the whole project and it
couldn’t integrate all members’ idea to reach an agreement.
Groups always go
through five stages of development: forming, storming, norming, performing and
adjourning. During the first stage— forming a team, we made an ice-breaking by
introducing ourselves and coming to an agreement that each team create a
brainstorming idea without any discussion.
After the
presentation of each team’s idea, both of us are not doing very well and we are
forced to come up with a new idea. While at this time, our leader Bill still
stuck to his previous idea about vehicle battery with some small revision. The
two girls from evening team disagreed with his proposal and generate a new idea
about combining the early childhood education with Animation Company. This is
the first conflict in our virtual collaboration. As we know, virtual teams are
more different from the face-to-face team as it is more difficult to manage
conflict, make decisions and express opinions, especially in the storming stage
of a team. It should be noted that the team member who find virtual
communication most challenging come from culture where people are more indirect
in how they communicate and where they rely on body language and facial
expressions.
In order to
resolve the conflict problem, it has response alternatives including
confronting, avoiding, accommodating and compromising. Finally, considering
about the limited time, we persuaded Bill to give up his idea and accepted the
evening team’s project. And Bill also has a collaborating attitude to follow
the team’s mutual agreement. Then we listened to the girl’s description about
the new project and then we went into the further discussion about the details.
This is the norming stage of our team, and the team cohesion is more and more
vivid while we had some more interactions and started to know how to control
the virtual team work with different people.
Team Process
In our team, we
have the same goal that we are creating win-win virtual collaboration in this
project. Like in our project, we are an early childhood educational
organization while the evening team is an animation company. Our mutual goal is
to provide a unique and satisfying teaching service for
children and their parents by the most effective virtual team work. Thus at the
beginning, we all realized that no matter which team member had difficulty in
the project, other members are ready to help with each other to solve the
problem. Besides that, we are also encouraging the existence of some quantities
of task conflict as some creative ideas will come from the positive conflicts.
A same commitment
will take an important part in a virtual team work. At the first meeting, all
of us had accepted this perspective and we established the ground rules
including the frequency of meeting, who is responsible for organizing the
meeting discussion, who is responsible for updating the project’s schedule.
This is also helpful to discuss procedures for dealing with conflicts and
promote trust and engagement. Besides that, the mutual commitment also required
each member to nurture a self-management in the project. And this is based on
the clear direction and goals from all members’ anticipation so that it allows
the team to become self-regulating, and as team members we can evaluate our own
performance through self-generated feedback and monitoring our performance.
We have the common
sense that to keep the commitment is necessary to build the trust among team
members.
In the start, our
team is lack of trust. Since trust is the most important component of many
interpersonal relationship and interactions, including face-to-face and virtual
team. As we know, virtual teams with low levels of initial trust and no actions
that affirmed the trust were left to operate in a low-trust environment, which
would be a handicap in a team. While in our cooperation, there is no doubt that
we will be suspicious of the other team, and each team would like to get more
advantage or profit from the collaboration. At the beginning, we took this
problem as granted and ignored it. However, gradually we found that our
discussion atmosphere is full of some extend collision and restricts. It hid
behind the mutual strange talking tone and emotion expression.
In order to create
the task-based trust, it necessary to make every member responsible
to their own job
duty based on the team collaboration. Thus we divide the work and each member
will be charge of one part of the project so that everyone will engage the team
cohesion. Team members who are responsive to team communications, follow
through, and take responsibility for results help build task-based trust, which
would enhance the team’s performance. During this performing stage of the team,
although we have some conflicts between two groups, yet we found the suitable
ways to resolve as soon as possible.
From our own
experience in this virtual collaboration, I have found that it is not easy to
handle a virtual team especially for a well establsihed collaboration life-cycle which is containing of awareness, engagement, reflection, motivation etc. Thus it needs several critical skills for us to
work together within life cycle collaboration which are we believe to influence an effective
collaboration.
1. Creating
a team charter.
This charter
includes team objective, expectations, and ground rules and processed for
making decisions. This charter is decided in the first meeting and a good
charter is a foundation to prevent pitfalls common to virtual team.
2. Knowing
and being known.
Team member needs
to both know and understand the unique strengths and skills each team member
brings to the team. This helps to build mutual respect. Like in our team, every
member has different major with distinct capability. Bing recognized member’s
characteristic is beneficial for our task distribution.
3. Building
Trust.
To earn people’s
trust is to do what you said you would do, within the time you said you would
do it. Each team member must learn the value of developing a positive track
record with their teammates in order to earn their trust. It also owes to trust
basis can we engage all members into the project and achieve mutual goals
eventually.
4.
Creating
Team Values.
Developing a set
of common core values from the start that include being proactive, caring,
forgiving and being tolerant of one another, is especially vital to a team’s
ability to stay the course.
Reference:
- The challenges of working in virtual teams, Virtual team’s survey report, 2012.
- Golnaz Sadri& John Condia. Managing the virtual world, Industry Management,2012.
- Jessica Lipnack, & Jeffrey Stamps. Virtual teams: The new way to work. Strategy & Leadership . 27(1), 14-19. Retrieved November 2, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global.
- Virtual Team Building: Six Critical Skills for becoming a Successful Virtual Team.
