Lisa Kimball and I talked a bit about virtual teams and what can accost them to make them go off track. Lisa founded Group Jazz in 2000 - her focus has been on how to create effective teams and communities online and offline. Lisa will be heading up two very interesting groups at the Collaborative Techhnologies Conference. One session will be a tutorial on effective virtual teams, the other will be a shorter speech on the same topic.

What is a virtual team? Simply, it just means people who are in different locations or companies that must work together. Lisa made the point to clarify that virtual teams really are just teams - same challenges, problems, needs, and dynamics. The only difference is that these teams, versus co-located teams, perhaps suffer from more, and earlier, team dysfunction than do non-virtual teams. Virtual teams are not just distributed across time and space, they are also often made up of people from different functions, departments or organizations. Toss in the fact that people may be on more than one team, that your team expands and contracts at irregular points and that your boss may not be everyone's boss. Sounds complex, doesn't it?

Without face-to-face interaction, problems tend to show up earlier and corrections are much more difficult to make on the fly. Before you know it, you may have taken a wrong turn in your project or your team dynamic and it will be harder to turn back the longer you leave it unchecked. With virtual teams, you cannot read people in the same way - body language, tone of voice and all of these important things are lost. Assumptions we don't know we make are suddenly taken out of the equation. The problems that can occur more frequently and/or earlier with virtual teams range from breaking the ice to trust to sustaining forward momentum and shared vision. We need to solve these team issues with more than technology. We need to processes to help manage these complicated social networks, to help foster communication, and make sure the team creates value as a whole.

What are the top three reasons virtual teams fail? According to Lisa, these are:

1. People lose the sense of the whole. They only see what they are doing and have no way to "look across the room" to see what others are doing. Lack of context kills.
2. Assumptions are not explicitly stated.
3. People don't enjoy it - they don't have fun. Without the laughs to go along with the work, it feels less "human" and the lack of personal interaction is dispiriting.

So, one of the key ways to make your virtual team happy is to make your team happy. Period. So, let's look at what makes a good team in general. Throwing people together does not a team make; a team is measured by its interconnectedness and the understanding of its goals and roles. One important step to achieving this is to create a team charter that outlines the purpose of the team, its norms, everyones roles, and how success will be measured. You don't need to write this down or talk about it in an overly formal way, but you do need to address this early on. And regularly.

Read more on how to create a better team on the CTC blog.