William Buist

The ability to communicate via email has led organisations to believe that they can communicate effectively with a much wider group of people, and much faster. But all too often ease of use, and speed, lead to organisations becoming less capable of creating and maintaining the right context for the conversation with the audience. So how can you ensure that your internal communications across a virtual team are effective? As a specialist in building community spirit in teams, William Buist highlights the common pitfalls in virtual communication programmes and explains how to engage people in conversation that guarantees higher success.

Organisations are progressively working with suppliers, customers and staff who are distributed across various locations and opportunities for an entire project team to meet and discuss matters is becoming less frequent. As a result of tools which allow instant communication, team members lose the benefit of receiving visual and oral feedback during the conversation to enable them to check understanding about the perception of the message received.

The challenge with any form of communication is, of course, ensuring that it is both understood, in the manner of which it was intended, and perceived in the context that was intended too. This can be achieved by engaging people in the conversation from the onset and managing risk by focusing people to work the right way at the right time.

Engaging people in a conversation

In order to be sure that the understanding of an issue, or the needs of a project team are clear, communication must be two way and feedback is essential. Validation of the perception of individuals is just as important as often the feedback itself can be misunderstood.

Misunderstandings between individuals who are well known and liked by each other are much more speedily resolved than those between strangers – who often fail to even reach a resolution at all. The same is true in business teams, so one of the key areas to help ensure misunderstandings are minimised and resolved quickly is to ensure that team members know each other well and, as far as is possible, like and respect each other too.

CASE STUDY: MANAGING CHANGE

In the financial services sector a requirement arose for all the companies in a particular market to make simultaneous changes in their infrastructure to meet regulatory reporting requirements imposed by the government.

A virtual team with representation from organisations within the market, the organisations implementing the change, trade associations integrating the feedback from those organisations and the government bodies themselves, along with a number of associated organisations needed to be co-ordinated and managed. Engaging all of these different bodies in a common conversation to ensure a universally understood project goal would have been a challenge at the best of times.

It wasn’t enough for the conversation just to take place on an adhoc basis; they needed to be co-ordinated and garnered in a framework that enabled the right things to be discussed at the right time.

to facilitate meeting and discussing not just the project but areas of individual interest, understanding personal goals and how those aligned with the organisational goals for each individual in the team, and creating an environment in which those goals were aligned were all critical success factors in bringing this collective delivery to fruition.

In fact, throughout that project one of the key things that people commented about was not the level of communication, or, indeed, the quality of it, rather it was about the level of collaboration between members of different organisations whose only reason to collaborate was the relationship that they had with each other, and with those involved at the centre of the project.

The central team was tiny, its primary role was only to facilitate the relationships to enable the conversations to take place, and to ensure that when those conversations took place that they took place with a purpose and in a frame work that enabled the right discussions to take place. When things went wrong, rather than blaming people, they drew on the relationships to resolve the issue.

The techniques used to do this are now becoming much more widely known.

Don Tapscott (Wikinomics 2006) talks about four principles of mass collaboration, Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally, and these elements are key to building a team that uses communication as the glue to enable mass collaboration. In that sense ‘global’ does not have to be interpreted in a geographic sense, rather it can be seen as the widest possible extent for your team.

Risk Management

Another of the key areas of any conversation within an organisation that is designed to facilitate the delivery of a project or resolve an issue is that the future events are inherently linked to elements of risk and uncertainty.

Misunderstandings cause the wrong things to be done, lack of experience or skills cause the right things to be done in the wrong way and an uncertainty of direction or strategy can lead people to feel unwilling to do a task which does not appear to be aligned to a central goal.

Taking those three things together, a conversation that helps people to understand what to do at the right time and how to do it in the right way and demonstrating to them the alignment to their own personal and the organisational goals can dramatically reduce risk by focusing people on the work in the right way at the right time.

Business leaders are gradually changing the approach that they take in terms of directing the work that is required to be done. Successful leaders are engaging and building relationships with their staff in a much more open and transparent way and progressively conversations are taking place not just between people in the office but also using online tools such as instant messaging, telephone, text message, Skype and Social Networks. Conversations can continue in all of those forms, and in, whichever is most appropriate at the time.

Risk management through regular communication (conversation) and constant feedback is likely to lead to significantly lower and better managed risk but in addition the visibility of those risks will be much higher. Just that they are being talked about, keeps the risk in people’s minds.

The conversation reminds people to keep their eyes open and look for the problem. Talking about what could happen and what is happening enables you to see a much better picture from a risk management point of view.

CASE STUDY: REDUCING MISUNDERSTANDING TO MINIMISE RISK

Using the same Financial Services Sector example, conversations took place with the suppliers on a regular basis to ensure a clear understanding of their progress and the issues that they were facing. When an issue did arise where there was a lack of understanding, the depth and trust in the network that was available to both the supplier and the co-ordinating organisations at the centre enabled them to have fast conversations to resolve the misunderstandings. The development never progressed far down the wrong road.

Of course there were occasions when misunderstandings passed unnoticed for some time however, the uncertainty and the strength of their relationship to the centre enabled them to raise the issues without fear of being seen as either trouble making or unwilling to support the main project.

Again the common goal, the understanding of the individual’s goals and the way that the interactions between the organisations were working through strong and developing relationships enabled trust to be built quickly and maintained even in the most difficult times.

One question to ask the internal team in any organisation (to assess their readiness for building relationships of this kind) is how well they know their clients, suppliers and peers at a social level, how they understand their needs, aims and concerns, rather than simply the business matters.

The opportunity for big wins is significant. The opportunities to make a dramatic advance over competitors, to become the supplier of choice to your clients, because you engage with them in a way which they like and respect and because they have a relationship with you which means choosing a different supplier over you is much harder.

It’s not simply a matter of changing supplier; it’s now also a matter of building a new relationship from scratch. It’s no longer merely a matter of cost but also one of time and effort and those factors enable you to both gain new, and maintain, existing relationships in an ever stronger communications environment that builds strength and trusts over time in an increasingly important way.

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