A Webinar to Learn Team Building Strategies for Virtual Teams
This week I was interviewed about virtual team building strategies by David Zinger (Canada), Founder of Employee Engagement Network. During our engaging conversation, key principles, practices and team building strategies to guide virtual project team managers were discussed. I presented several team building strategies for virtual teams along with Rules of the Road for effective virtual team behaviors and a Roadmap for effectively building a virtual team and enabling the human connection in the evolving global workplace. We also discussed the most important virtual project team challenges and leadership opportunities.
This recording is available for you to watch and listen below. Enjoy!
Yael’s Highlights from the Webinar:
Clip 1 (0:47- 1:37)
Throughout my career, I have always worked with teams. I’ve always liked the whole dynamics; how does the human connection happen in the team environment? How do we produce things? How do we engage? More recently, in the past decade or a little more than that, I’ve started working with virtual teams and realize that they’ve got some real interesting challenges as the world is becoming fast global and technical. Even if we have some glitches here or there, we are still able to pull this off virtually with many people in different locations using team building strategies. So the concept of teams working together hasn’t changed but the concept of how we enable the human connection virtually has. That’s what keeps me passionate and interested.
Clip 2 (1:54-2:20)
What engages me is trying to help teams and leaders, global organizations to develop team building strategies to become more effective in how they set up their virtual teams, how they run them more effectively, and how they manage them. The concept of leadership has shifted. I am hoping to be the guide and helping to support some of those changes and keep that human connection alive.
Clip 3 (2:56-4:27)
I set out to interview over 100; the final number was 150 virtual members, virtual managers, leaders, and teams. The whole idea was to make sure this book was practical and written to the manager and it’s not just my perspective or my experience, but based on real people’s experiences, their stories, their dynamics, their challenges. It includes those elements that you said. But common to all virtual teams, there are four things that constantly come across all virtual teams.
One is how do you create context communication when you cannot see each other? The second is how do you build that trust and accountability virtually? The third is how do you handle misunderstandings or conflict if they occur? The fourth is how do you get deliverables out the door?
The concept of a road trip or a journey is something that I’ve used in some of my training work. We are all familiar with riding the car; there are different kinds of cars, different kinds of rules of the road in different parts of the world. But the concept is familiar. The journey through elements of starting it up, which I call setup, setting up your team, following through, getting through the trip or road, and refreshing, refueling and stopping every now and again to do things is also refreshing your team.
Clip 4 (6:04-6:27)
Many virtual team members, in terms of conflict or the issues when conflict arises, you would think that people would hide behind their screens. The more successful teams actually use team building strategies that approach the conflict or handle the conflict. The number one way to handle it in the virtual environment is through virtual mediation.
Clip 5 (23:10-23:30)
When things are not working or when things fall apart, you got to perform CPR. CPR stands for communication, people, and risk management. When you perform CPR and you see the team is not operating as well, it will help to realign it and move it in the right direction to get the results as the slide says.
