There are two key things I trust you will notice in the graphic:
- First, look at the central quintile. Highly productive team members communicated with one another 54% more often than did less-productive teams. They communicated about task specifics 150% more often, and disagreed 50% more often than their less-productive counterparts. They also discussed team process and relationship more often. These are hugely important points to remember. HOW we use virtual collaboration tools may be much more important than the tools themselves.
- Second, it was remarkable to me that only in one quadrant—the lower right Different time/Different place—did the highly productive teams focus primarily on task-related issues. When the highly productive team members in the study communicated with one another at the same time (the top two quadrants) or in the same place (lower left quadrant), they focused primarily on the human element of their collaboration—creating bonds, gauging emotions, building commitment, understanding disagreement, and agreeing on team processes.
If you explore details of the study, you will see that the less-productive teams most decidedly did not differentiate how they communicated what and where as the highly productive teams did. This was a small study of 56 people in 12 teams, but all teams participated over a nine-month period. Interestingly, though I published this study back in 1996, I am disappointed to say that I have seen very few (if any) research projects since that have tried to link team behaviors with productivity in virtual teams. If you know of some, please let me know.
Quintiles ©Institute for the Future
Data ©Dianne Hofner Saphiere
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Cultural Detective Blog 
Hi Dianne,
a past business partner pointed me to your article.
I turned my company 10 years ago into a virtual one and since then work 100% virtual with people all over the place with a focus on software development. My experience with working virtual is very positive and I would suffer giving up this work style.
Based on my experience, I regard the research you put forward good but also very conventional with more than obvious results. Of course, that does not affect the truth you put forward.
Concepts like “same place” or “same time” might be helpful to sort out research data and come up with a first understanding what virtual collaboration is all about, but apart from that, I don’t see those dimensions relevant in practice. In fact, I have not seen anybody I collaborate with virtually being concerned about space or time.
More important to virtual collaborators are aspects like that they need to make a living from collaboration or investors paying for the collaboration need to make a profit.
And that raises questions like how does the tool help me to claim my efforts to be paid via the collaboration tool used? Can I record work time? Does it write my invoices? How do I find new collaborators willing to pay my efforts? How does the tool help me so that I do not get charged for nothing and how does the tool help me to control this?
Most tools I know fail to help with those questions, take Skype for example.
Do you see my point? I expect to get answers to those questions gets every more important for a collaboration tool to be useful, because I see more and more people making a living via online collaboration. In short, I collaborate to make a living and I expect a tool to help me on that.
A good collaboration tool “understands my need to make a living” and if that is not the case, then those tools not helping me specifically to “make money effectively and efficiently” are just utilities and not collaboration “tools” platforms.
Also, we found a good collaboration platform/tool has to be as useful to my car mechanic as to my dry cleaner because I collaborate with those people as well. A good tool would help them in turn with their clients/supplier. Additionally a good tool allows me to exclusively build a long term data asset where I have full ownership and I’m free to share this data with anybody. For example, I want to share my files with my lawyer as long as I see fit and then share those files with a new lawyer by the press of a button. I want also to be able to sell or inherit this data asset.
We use Skype a lot but based on our above experience that most tools do not help us to make money, we developed our own tool to meet this requirement.
I would be glad to hear your opinion on the above.
Regards,
Peter
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Peter, what you’ve described does sound like a dream for a small business person/entrepreneur. Maybe now that you have “planted” the idea in public on the internet, some developer will take it seriously. We can hope! Thank you for reading and joining us here! Best of luck with your ventures.
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Thanks Dianne, this was useful for me as I move more and more into a virtual world. I had not heard of some of the tools so have signed up to test them out. Many thanks, Pari
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So glad they were helpful, Pari-joon. Big hugs!
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Interesting post, and nicely written. I think companies should embrace the benefits to remote and distributed working as geography is mattering less and less to business. We have begun and remain a distributed team across Hong Kong, San Francisco, Amsterdam and London. With the right tools and the right attitude, everything has been going well (apart from some occasional late nights to meet at the same time)! We write quite a bit about this as well since we are building a tool to solve the issues of online collaboration. If you like, check us out here: Nice post! It does require a certain frame of mind to be able to work effectively in a remote team, especially from all the decades of traditional office work. But social tools are changing that, and the right tools go a long way to adjusting people to the culture of remote. We write about it a lot: http://product.twoodo.com/849/overcoming-the-pains-of-team-collaboration-tools/
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Web Conferencing is truly an emerging solution for almost all types of businesses. Collaboration is becoming much more important in the workplace and web conferences undoubtedly enable better and richer collaboration. Various tools like webex, gotomeeting, R-HUB web conferencing servers etc. are used by businesses to conduct a web conference.
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Indeed; thank you, Andrew. We here at CD use Adobe Connect, an incredibly flexible service for web conferencing, webinars, virtual classrooms…
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