Stanford Business Magazine May 2003



       
      Teams That Span Time Zones Face New Work Rules

            PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM BRADLEY
      May, 2003
      By Bill Snyder
      How's this for a management challenge: Run a 16-country, multilingual team 
      that operates on both sides of the International Date Line, make it 
      capable of interpreting thousands of arcane and sometimes conflicting 
      government regulations for product designers back homeand do it at a time 
      travel budgets are tighter than ever.
      That was the mission Hewlett-Packard gave John Monroe, the now retired 
      head of the company's Corporate External Standards (CES) organization, in 
      1999. A 24-year HP veteran with a doctorate in electrical engineering, 
      Monroe knew that the team members needed to trust each other, solve common 
      problems quickly, and demonstrate a significant return on investment to 
      the company's increasingly cost-conscious management. "Sure, I was unhappy 
      that we couldn't travel much, but I just told myself to get over it," 
      Monroe says.
      Get over it he did. His team saved the company $800,000 a year in 
      compliance costs for consumer products in Argentina and $200,000 a year in 
      avoided costs and faster cycle times in Korea. In 2002, the HP-Compaq 
      Merger Integration Team adopted the CES organization structure and 
      business model.
      Not every company with a dispersed workforce has challenges on the scale 
      of HP's external standards group, of course. But as business expands and 
      diversifies, and supply chains routinely span the globe, more and more 
      managers are required to build and run teams whose members rarely work 
      face to facewhether they are prepared or not.
      "It's scary. A lot of organizations create virtual teams with almost no 
      understanding of the unique implications of that decision," says Margaret 
      A. Neale, the John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of 
      Organizations and Dispute Resolution at the Graduate School of Business.
      Making those teams work isn't easy. Relatively routine tasks, such as 
      scheduling a meeting, become complex and fraught with interpersonal 
      friction when one person's work day begins as another is sitting down to 
      dinner or sound asleep. A simple email exchange frazzles nerves because of 
      cultural misunderstandings, and information needed in one place sits on a 
      desk in another because there's no routine mechanism to share knowledge.
      "We put people in a complex virtual environment and we don't give them 
      training, because we don't know what to train them on," Neale says.
      For Neale, understanding the virtual environment is a natural extension of 
      her research and teaching on collaboration and negotiations. Neale and 
      colleagues Terri L. Griffith of the Leavey School of Business at Santa 
      Clara University and Elizabeth A. Mannix of the Johnson Graduate School of 
      Management at Cornell University have studied and written about virtual 
      teams for four years.
      While still incomplete, their research suggests that despite inherent 
      limitations the virtual team model can be used successfully by a variety 
      of businesses. Stanford Business interviewed Neale and Griffith recently 
      and spoke with executives at companies fielding virtual teams to solve 
      difficult business problems.
      Go to Your Rooms
      It's a common sight in many offices: groups of people huddled around a 
      spiderlike Polycom speakerphone for a meeting with colleagues in any 
      number of remote locations. Meeting via phone is often a useful tactic, 
      but have you ever noticed the dynamics of those meetings? If the groups 
      are uneven in size, members of the larger group tend to dominate the 
      conversation and engage in side talk while someone else is speaking. 
      Unable to see each other, people inadvertently interrupt and miss 
      significant visual cues. Some members almost never speak, and by the end 
      of some sessions it appears that there have been two meetings (or three or 
      however many nodes comprise the meeting) instead of just one.
      At the Sutherland Group, a Rochester, N.Y.-based provider of call centers 
      studied by Neale and her colleagues, managers found a creative way to 
      solve the Polycom dilemma. "They send people to their rooms," jokes 
      Griffith. Rather than meet in conference rooms, team members stay at their 
      workstations and dial into a phone bridge.
      The result: one meeting, no side talk, and everyone has immediate access 
      to data needed for the discussion. Of course, phone bridges cost money and 
      do not have unlimited capacity. Some companies use various forms of video 
      conferencing, ranging from inexpensive Web cams mounted on individual 
      monitors to theaterlike conference rooms equipped with equipment that 
      sends a high-bandwidth signal to another conference room.
      Whichever model is followed, regularly running remote meetings takes tact, 
      cultural sensitivity, and creativity.
      Although English is the official language of HP's standards group, not 
      every non-native English-speaking employee finds it easy to communicate in 
      a meeting, especially during a teleconference. As a result, those 
      employees tend to be quiet, and the company loses the chance to benefit 
      from their ideas. HP managers noticed this and instituted the "warm-up" at 
      the beginning of every meeting. According to Monroe, it works like this: A 
      manager asks each participant to "check in" with the team by relating a 
      two- to three-minute story in English about some event in their personal 
      or business life. The topic, he says, isn't important. "At one meeting we 
      discussed the World Cup. It got everyone's motor running."
      As a result, team members get to practice speaking and, just as important, 
      listening in English. They learn more about each otherwhich builds 
      trustand get a sense of what skills other members bring to the team.
      Thanks for What?
      Even when employees have good language skills, they naturally interpret 
      written and verbal communication through the filter of their own culture. 
      Consider a situation that developed at Check Point Software Technologies 
      Ltd., an Internet security software firm with most of its 1,200 employees 
      split between offices in Israel and the United States:
      "People in Tel Aviv asked me why their U.S. counterparts would sometimes 
      seem upset by email exchanges," says John Alexander, the company's Redwood 
      City-based director of human resources. A major problem? Not exactly. But 
      Israelis, who tend to be rather direct, and even blunt, were sending 
      emails that seemed, well, a bit rude to their American counterparts. And, 
      he says, the Americans were sending emails that seemed "wishy washy."
      Americans, for example, tend to frame requests with phrases like "Thanks 
      in advance for sending me ," and Israelis would say, "Thanks for what? I 
      haven't done anything yet," recounts Laurie Guarino, a member of the 
      company's public relations staff.
      Although individual incidents tended to be rather minor, the company knew 
      that cumulative effects could affect morale and hinder the development of 
      the team. Check Point brought in an Israeli-born consultant to help 
      Americans understand how Israelis think and communicate. "Now," says 
      Guarino, "I'll simply write something that's polite, but very direct, like 
      'Please send me the memo by 5 p.m. your time.'"
      Check Point's managers dealt with the situation before it became a major 
      issue, but not recognizingand amelioratingconflict when it does occur is 
      a common problem in virtual settings, says Neale. "People hope conflicts 
      will go away. But they get worse. It is the responsibility of the team 
      leader to be hypervigilant, to keep these problems from spiraling out of 
      control," she says.
      Staying on top doesn't necessarily mean bending your budget to acquire new 
      technologies. In any case, the current economic slump makes it difficult 
      for managers to win the case for exotic new technologies. But even in 
      better times, whiz-bang technology isn't always the key to success. Neale 
      recalls one company that "spent inordinate amounts of time trying to get 
      the latest and greatest technology and then found out that what their 
      people used was the telephone."
      "The telephone is easy, it's synchronous, and it's broad-banded. That is, 
      I can get a lot of information from your voice if I know you," Neale says.
      By now, most people understand the downside of email: flaming, 
      inadvertently distributing messages very widely, and shooting from the 
      hip. But it's also worth noting, says Neale, that email, unlike spoken 
      communication, gives the author a chance to finish a thought without 
      interruption. And it gives people time to think, because they don't have 
      to respond instantly.
      Neale and her colleagues have found that email is the key enabling 
      technology for virtual teams. One drawback that, in fact, extends to the 
      whole virtual team process is the difficulty of sharing knowledge. Reading 
      a long email thread can be difficult, and many search engines index email 
      poorly. Moreover, some organizations lack the storage space to archive it 
      for long periods of time.
      More broadly, much of the knowledge developed by virtual team members is 
      scattered across their computers, filing cabinets, and most important, 
      their brains. When they leave the company, how can that knowledge be 
      retained? Although corporate portals and sophisticated search engines are 
      helpful, there's no easy answer.
      What Time Is It?
      Everyone has heard stories about inconsiderate managers who consistently 
      call subordinates in other time zone hours well outside of normal business 
      hours. But less common are organizations that find creative ways to gain 
      advantage from significant time differences.
      Lode Coen, the art director of Antics Online, a small marketing agency 
      based in Belmont, Calif., works from an office in Brussels, where it is 
      nine hours later. California staffers send projects to him at the end of 
      their work day (which is the beginning of his), go home, and find Coen's 
      additions to the project ready when they log on to the computer system the 
      next morning. The result: a saving of one workday, a crucial edge in an 
      extremely competitive market.
      The disadvantage: The window of time for U.S. and European staffers to 
      actually discuss the work is rather small, and multiple emails are 
      sometimes necessary to clarify points that could be dealt with in a quick 
      conversation.
      Moreover, Antics cofounder Kevin Welsh warns that not every team would 
      cope as well with a nine-hour time difference. "If Lode and Charlie 
      [Antics co-founder Charles Ogden] and I hadn't worked together for years 
      [while co-located at another company], this might not work."
      Because Antics is small and close knit, the time difference rarely leads 
      to personal grievances. But avoiding the 5 a.m. conference call is much 
      tougher at a larger business. HP's Monroe says his team learns to share 
      the pain. "We rotate the hours, so everybody gets to work in their pajamas 
      at times."
      Don't Be Afraid to Fight
      Writing about social change more than 30 years ago, activist Saul Alinsky 
      said, "Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can 
      movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict."
      Modern business is far from frictionless, of course, so the real question 
      is not can conflict be avoided, but how can it be managed. The first step: 
      Understand that there are different types of conflicts. Neale and her 
      co-authors identified three.
        Relationship conflict is an awareness of interpersonal differences; it 
        may include personality differences, hostility, and annoyance between 
        individuals. 
        Task (or cognitive) conflict is an awareness of differences in 
        viewpoints pertaining to the team's task. 
        Process conflict includes disagreements regarding how to do the task or 
        how to delegate resources. 
      Conflict can be frightening, but it can also be very useful.
      "Task conflict," Neale says, "is the conflict of ideas or controversy. And 
      this is exactly the kind of conflict that is absolutely essential. It's 
      the type of conflict we want to create and encourage in teams because it 
      gets people to share their ideas. The battle of ideas occurs, and 
      something better comes through the interactionor else we wouldn't even 
      have the team there."
      So the task of managers is to ensure that conflict about ideas doesn't 
      turn into what Neale calls a "relationship clash." Not surprisingly, she 
      says, "virtual teams have a much more difficult time distinguishing the 
      conflict of ideas in their virtual environment from the conflict of 
      personal relationships."
      The antidote? Trust. The more team members trust each other, the less 
      likely they are to mistake the battle of the idea for the battle of the 
      ego. Again, this places more responsibility on the team leader. "You [the 
      leader] have to be much more intentional about it," Neale says.
      Neale emphasizes that successful managers of virtual teams build trust 
      with face-to-face contact. "There's no substitute," agrees HP's Monroe. 
      "Driving travel costs to zero is a false economy." CES regional teams meet 
      face-to-face in locations every year or two for three to five days, he 
      says. Alexander and his Tel Aviv-based boss meet face-to-face at least 
      once a quarter, teleconference weekly, and speak on the phone and email 
      each other frequently. "You can't over-communicate," he says.
      Measuring Success
      Neale and her colleagues partnered with a large Silicon Valley software 
      firm that asked to remain anonymous. They called it SoftCo. They 
      administered a Web-based survey to 35 teams ranging in size from 2 to 28 
      members, representing employees from the company's three U.S. locations 
      and a variety of European sites. The teams ranged from those whose members 
      all worked at the same site to a team that had eight members in seven 
      locations.
      Here are some of the findings:
        The distribution of team members does not have an observable effect on 
        performance. At SoftCo, teams with members who all work at the same site 
        do not receive significantly higher performance ratings from their 
        mangers than do teams with members in multiple locations. 
        Virtual teams and traditional teams have the same levels of task and 
        relationship conflict. 
        Process conflict is greater on virtual teams. "As more virtual teams 
        have to manager greater complexity, attention to process can become a 
        key to their success. A similar focus in (more traditional) teams, 
        however, may actually get in the way of efficient and effective standard 
        operating procedures." 
      Not all benefits, or downsides, of virtual teams can be quantified. By and 
      large, making them work is a case of finding virtue in necessity. If the 
      results from the SoftCo study are projectable, it suggests that virtual 
      teams focused on noticing conflict may actually have an advantage over 
      traditional teams in managing it.
      The dynamics of working in a team are more complex than working alone, and 
      virtual team dynamics are more complicated still, Neale, Griffith, and 
      Mannix concluded in "Conflict and Virtual Teams," a chapter in the 2003 
      book Virtual Teams That Work. While it is the case that team members, 
      whether virtual or not, need to pay attention to how the team functions, 
      members of virtual teams needs to be especially vigilant, they write. 
      Problems resulting from miscommunications that may be easily corrected 
      through face-to-face interaction can take on a life of their own in the 
      virtual environment. As such, communicationand, perhaps, 
      over-communicationamong team members may be the key to success when team 
      members are physically, temporally, and culturally separate. "Given 
      appropriate resources, by being aware of their situation, they can 
      construct their environments to avoid process conflict, and perhaps find 
      ways to outperform their co-located counterparts."
      Says Neale: "Virtual teams don't limit us to physical proximity in 
      choosing members. It opens up a set of players that I may not have access 
      to if I insisted we all have to be here all the time for meetings."
      And that's a significant win for business. 



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      Managing Virtual Teams
      Tips from the Trenches
      Maximize face time. If possible, launch the team with a face-to-face 
      meeting. Get together as frequently as resources permit.
      Be considerate. Team members should know what times are appropriate to 
      call one another (think time zones here) and what days (considering 
      cultural, family, or work schedules) are off limits.
      Handle serious conflicts face-to-face whenever possible. Remember that 
      overt conflicts often conceal underlying issues that hinge on matters of 
      trust and respect.
      Make sure that nearly all communications are kept in a shared database, so 
      that a historical document of the group's work is available for new team 
      members to study.
      Tips from the Trenches including uses of email, subject headings, file 
      types, urgency markers, and use of the corporate intranet or portal.
      Consider moving teleconferences out of the conference room and into 
      individual workspaces.
      Utilize appropriate technologies, including collaborative software (such 
      as PlaceWare, WebEx, Lotus Notes, and NetMeeting) and video conferencing 
      if available at a reasonable price in your locations.
      Communicate, communicate, communicate. 
      More reading:
      "Conflict and Virtual Teams," by Terri L.Griffith, Elizabeth A. Mannix, 
      and Margaret A. Neale, In Virtual Teams That Work edited by Cristina B. 
      Gibson and Susan G. Cohen, Jossey Bass, 2003.
      Distributed Work, edited by Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, eds. MIT 
      Press, 2002.
       
          
       
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