Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

10 Ways to Use Virtual Teams

There is a lot of talk about virtual teams, virtual offices, virtual storage and virtual worlds these days. What is meant when we use the term “virtual”? Answers.com defines it as:

Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name: the virtual extinction of the buffalo.

So if we can achieve something that has an effect that is similar in quality to the “actual” entity, we call it virtual. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud represents computing power and storage that doesn’t actually reside in your office, but which you can access to run your applications. Second Life is a virtual world which doesn’t actually exist in the physical world, but simulates a lot of what can happen in the physical world.

Similarly, a Virtual Team is one in which the participants don’t actually reside in your actual, physical office. A Virtual Team consists of two or more people collaborating on a project on behalf of another person or company. As someone who designs and builds virtual teams for Internet Startups, I thought it might be helpful to outline some of the key components you should know about Virtual Teams.

1) A Virtual Team is NOT another word for one or more freelancers grouped together. Freelancers might be part of a Virtual Team and are a great source of raw talent. There are load of sources for finding Freelancers and Virtual Assistants today. Some of my favorites are MyParttimePro, Guru and Craigslist. A Virtual Team is more than a group of freelancers in that it has a micro-culture of its own, an operating rhythm, a common mission and a clear set of inter-related roles and responsibilities.

2) Virtual Teams can be productivity boosters. They can save time and money by employing the cycles of part-time or under-utilized workers with skill sets that match full-time professionals. An effective Virtual Team can help accelerate your business growth by delivering execution capabilities across finance, marketing, sales, technology, management and legal areas of your business.

3) Virtual Teams are brought to you by the Web. This approach to human team creation just didn’t exist 20 years ago. I built my first Virtual Team in 1995 to help create one of the first online banking systems. Using a team of four or five talented software developers, we helped a large bank launch their first retail banking foray on America Online. I didn’t have the overhead of a payroll, insurance, office space, etc. of an actual team. I only paid my virtual team for the time that they worked. We learned that we built the system for about 1/10^th the cost of the Bank’s marketing budget for the same project. The virtual teams of 2008 are even more powerful and effective because of the tools available and the changing mindset of the workforce.

4) An effective Virtual Team needs good infrastructure. We use a collaborative environment called Huddle to help our teams coordinate around client projects. We use Google Calendar to coordinate our schedules. We use webcams and Acrobat Connect for meetings and desktop sharing. In working with virtual teams, we found it helpful to have standard pricing worksheets, service agreements and work order formats. Common meeting formats can help facilitate sales conversations, kickoff meetings and lessons learned. Having documented standard operating procedures for the most common forms of work that you perform will allow new virtual team members to get up and running quickly. All of these elements are examples of infrastructure used by virtual teams to be more effective, cost-effective, and nimble.

5) Effective Virtual Teams are tricky to create. Pay attention to human factors like cultural fit. Ask yourself and potential team members – how do you define value? You want to ensure that the team members will resonate with you and with the rest of the team. For example, there is nothing more frustrating to a gun-slinging code-writer than a slow, methodical project manager. That same project manager will be terrified when things show up on the Web site in the middle of the night without specs or testing. You need to decide on your team’s objectives and recruit to fill a culture that best fulfills those objectives.

6) Create Good Screening Criteria. If you plan to use Virtual Teams over and over, like we do, then I suggest you invest time in developing some good screening criteria. For example, when we are seeking to have specialists join our team, a favorite question is, “What can you deliver of value for under $1000?” The ones who run for the hills were never cut out for our teams. You might also want to ask about their infrastructure, their working hours, their availability or their preference for the kinds of people they enjoy working with. What are the things that will set your best virtual team members apart?

7) Have a Virtual Team Architecture. Think carefully about the structure of your Virtual Team. We like the power of the pyramid. Our specialists are used in a very select manner, targeted to client needs. Our project and marketing managers glue the project together and we use interns, stay-at-home moms and entrepreneurs to provide affordable muscle. This structure allows for the most cost-effective and efficient allocation of your manpower.

Create an Operating Rhythm for your Team. Your Virtual Team needs to have regular check-ins, periodic brainstorming sessions and Lessons Learned sessions after a new endeavor. The regularity of these sessions helps to compensate for the geographic distance between the team members and it allows everyone to be on the same page. In addition, it also gives everyone the chance to discuss ways they can improve their process.

9) Some top uses for a Virtual Team. We use Virtual Teams for a whole range of activities including competitive assessments, marketing list building, online marketing, buzz building through social media, Web site development, software development, investor preparation. If you plan to run the Virtual Team, you need to make sure that you have the domain knowledge and project management skills to make it work. For example, don’t create your own Virtual Team to develop software if you aren’t a software project manager. You’ll have to hire someone else’s team… and that might be a virtual one. You can even create a Virtual Team to screen other teams (for example, getting help to decide among numerous technical project responses to a project job board like Guru.com).

10) Focus on what you love. Consider using Virtual Teams to run Virtual Offices. As your office infrastructure becomes virtualized through tools like Quickbooks or the more comprehensive Netbooks, the possibility of having your business operations run mostly by a virtual team is now a reality. Imagine if you could outsource all of the pesky work you don’t like in finance, marketing, inventory management, etc. so you could focus on what you really love most. While we provide virtual teams tailored to running your office, services like Bookminders help provide Virtual Team members who focus on one aspect of the task (book-keeping).

We hope this sparked your imagination for how you can utilize Virtual Teams in your business. In the comments below, please share your stories and questions around Virtual Team use – the good, bad and ugly.

Skip Shuda is Chief Leverage Officer with Team and a Dream.  Team and a Dream helps to accelerate the launch of web businesses.

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Keeping it in the Family

John R. Ingrisano

It can be tough having to deal with a partner in business. It can be even tougher when that partner is your spouse. The result can be pure craziness or total bliss. It all depends on whether you take the time to carefully structure your business relationship.

There are distinct drawbacks to husbands and wives working together. The biggest is that trouble at home can easily spill over into the business, eventually, resulting in failure and the loss of jobs and money. Worse, if the couple splits, the business generally becomes a pawn in the “great divide” known as divorce. That’s because it’s often the single greatest asset in the marriage. In this respect, working together can be a detriment to both the business and to the marriage.

Still, the benefits can far outweigh the potential disadvantages. Couples who know how to work closely together share a unique dedication and loyalty to their business’s success. And let’s face it, it’s also fun to be able to work shoulder to shoulder every day with your life partner in a common purpose. That’s why, best of all, husbands and wives who are successful in business together tend to enjoy peace and harmony in their personal lives as well.

If you’re part of a husband and wife business partnership, here are a few suggestions to help ensure that both the business and the marriage continue to prosper:

• Divvy up responsibilities. Maintain clear and separate areas of responsibility. Write down job descriptions. Then leave each other alone. Perhaps she heads up marketing and sales, while he focuses on product development. This division of labor is crucial for maintaining the working relationship. Otherwise, you will literally be stepping all over each other. It will only be a matter of time before problems develop and resentments build.

• Keep your personal lives out of the conference room. Conduct yourselves professionally at all times while on company time. Public displays of affection, personal conversations or other signs of intimacy can embarrass and alienate other workers. Worse, they can disrupt the smooth flow of business.

• Keep business out of the bedroom, or anywhere else in the house, for that matter. If you are so busy all day that you don’t have much time to talk about business, take half an hour or so after hours to catch up, unwind together and make the transition from business partners to marriage partners. Then put business away for the day. The idea is to strike a healthy balance between your business life and your personal life.

• Get away with each other. Plan work-free vacations and get-away weekends so you don’t ever forget that you’re much more than business partners.

• Get away from each other. It’s unrealistic to believe that you can be side by side 24 hours a day and still maintain a healthy outlook and attitude. Develop outside interests in things that belong strictly to you.

• Capitalize on the benefits of being in business together. Maybe one of you works just 20 hours a week or splits hours between home and the business. As business owners, you have the luxury of setting your own hours and planning your own schedules.

The bottom line: If you and your spouse are in business together, you know that it is both challenging and invigorating. By carrying out the above suggestions, you can make it even more rewarding. You may even have fun together.

Related Topics: Business, Employee Relations, Entrepreneurship, Leadership    No Comments