Leading Effectively: What is your Global Management Style?

February 25, 2009

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Dealing With Communications Problems

While most virtual team members had a positive experience overall, the biggest area of complaint involved communications problems. These complaints fell into several categories. The first was lack of project visibility. Team members knew what they were doing on an individual basis, but they weren’t always sure where their pieces fit into the whole puzzle. Second, there were sometimes problems in actually getting hold of people. One team member said: “[It’s frustrating] not being able to get a response from people as soon as you like. Weeks can slip by and we are all doing other jobs. You send out a question and in some cases an answer never comes back. You don’t know how to interpret it. They don’t want to answer or what?” Occasionally, there were constraints from the technology. “Communication in a virtual environment has its own set of challenges,” said one team member. “It’s sometimes difficult to derive the meaning from text-based messages, especially if the person is attempting to be sarcastic or facetious. Guidelines on how to let others know the intention of your message, whether it’s through the use of emoticons or whatnot, are important.” For the uninitiated, “emoticons” are those expressive little faces made out of parentheses, pound keys, percent signs, and so forth. Human ingenuity seems to have triumphed once again, finding a way to add nuance and feeling to electronic text.

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