When you create a virtual team, it becomes incredibly important to have clearly defined deliverables and timeframes. It is equally as important to ensure that your communications are clear. It’s hard enough when people are in the same office to get all of these things working toegether, let alone when staff are in different time zones. Add to this, that you may have clients half way around the world, the whole team dynamic becomes more complicated.
For all these reasons, I suggest that a small business should start out slowly and with smaller, targetted projects and then progress to larger projects, as the fine points are mastered. Growing your virtual team from one or two people to ten is likely to cause chaos and growing pains that aren’t fun or productive. When your virtual team, grows at a slower, more gentle pace you will find that that learning curve (and that of your staff) becomes easier to deal with.
Developing a Virtual Team means that YOU, as the business owner, will be the Team Leader. As the Team Leader, you will be responsible for providing the guidelines, specific deliverables, deadlines and work parameters.
Be clear, be concise and give your team members a deadline by which to confirm and accept any assignments. The acceptance of an assignment is incredibly important – don’t just assume that because you’ve sent a job, that your team member has accepted it. Your Virtual Team members, have their own lives and those lives can get complicated. By including them in the decision making process, a small business owner can better insure that deliverables and timeframes are met and that communication goes more smoothly, with the least amount of disruption.
Leverage Your Teams Talents
Fine tune your work assignments to your team’s talents. This might sound like common sense, but it is often forgotten in the heat of the moment. By fine tuning your work to capitilize on your team’s talents, the work comes out better, the client is certainly happier and you have a better working relationship as a result.
Your team should be aware however, that once an assignment is turned down that the work will be assigned to someone else. Speaking of which, if one of your team members is doing great with one client – keep the deliverables consistent. Clients like to have work that “feels” right and the more your Virtual Team gets to know a client’s needs, and anticipate them, the better.
Schedule and Plan Your Work
When looking at team assignments, it’s important to consider the regular or scheduled work. This becomes particularly important when considering acquiring more work or clients. It goes without saying that looking after your “regulars” and ensuring that you have the capacity for their work, is critical to business success.
Planning
At the end of the day, a small business owner needs to come up with an assignment process for deadlines and deliverables and use that consistently. Work flow and timing is an important par of this process – if you receive client request on Saturday, then email your Team on Monday with the assignments and do that EVERY WEEK WITHOUT FAIL.
Be assured, that as your business evolves, you’ll find an approach that helps you determine necessary resources, improve your planning process, and provides an excellent feel for both your Team’s and Client’s level of communication/understanding.
Why not share your thoughts about working with a Virtual Team – either as a Business Owner or a Team Member below….
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