Better team building part two June 25, 2006
One of the podcasts I was listening to mentioned in my earlier post is “For Immediate Release“. One of the hosts of the show was involved in a second life conference and links to the transcript of the event.
Now the event is about marketing online in a virtual world. However some of the points they cover relate directly to working teams; Combining real life with a virtual online presence, co-creation, and above all, the whole event is an example of the space for communication I was discussing in my last post.
Technorati Tags: Business, co-collaboration, Communication, Marketing, Productivity, Psychology
Build team trust for better results
Listening to a few different podcasts and interviews recently that all have me thinking about the global workforce. I have worked in disperse teams, sometime across different floors, other times across the world. It can sometimes be lonely working in a team where you only speak to other members for a few minutes a day and never see their face. The reasons for talking in these situations is usually only when there is a business need. There is often very little rapport or team building that can be done during those times.
When listening to Joi Ito talk about how his World of Warcraft guild stay together, build their own community, rapport and trust with each other, it got me thinking to how to do the same thing with a geographical diverse team. Voice over IP being as cheap as it is, and most companies having their own company wide network, it would be easy to open some audio space for a team to ‘hang out’. Think of a constant conference call. Instead of email or direct 1 to 1 phone calls, questions and queries can be answered faster and trust can be build more strongly.
Some of the companies I’ve worked in had some tools to help bring a diverse team together – such tools as instant messaging clients (MSN, Aim, IRC etc), web forums, email etc. They were all almost entirely text based. Some more recent exciting developments that companies are just starting to explore are Wiki’s, blogs, RSS feeds and more. While text is good, it leaves much to be desired when communicating anything other than bare facts. (On a somewhat different track, I’ve been thinking of the viability and usefulness of communicating accent (Eg, English upper class, American southern drawn, Australian twang) within text based communication). These tools keep the team (somewhat) working together, with the same
information. However, the tools rarely assist the team to build trust with each other. Even rarer allow for effective skills transfer because they can easily transfer information, but transfer zero experience…
Create a place where a team can communicate, even better with video, about anything. Like the water cooler or kitchen when the team is in the same office. Somewhere where they can share their experience with a difficult client, a place to be joyous about their latest success. No need or reason to pick up a phone and dial – as that implies trust is already there (you don’t call strangers and tell them about your family, for example).
Additionally, with text based communication the reader fills in the gaps in communication – tone, gestures, facial expressions and everything else. This can lead to horrible mis-communications where something written in jest is taken as serious, or something serious taken in jest. And these mis-communications are just the tip of the iceberg that just might sink your team’s trust or even company.
In setting up a space like this for the group to get together and bond will bring other issues, sure. It won’t be effective for every team or group, and there will be times when the costs outweigh benefits. Yet, if you want to give a dispersed team the best chance to build into cohesive and trusting team, I can think of no better way … yet…
Technorati Tags: Change, Communication, Companies, Learning, Policy, Productivity, Psychology, Stress, Trust, World of Warcraft