Social Distance
The degree of emotional connection among team members.
What is social distance?
Team members located far from the leader require this type of contact with him or her.
What is frequent?
Revising employee (blank) so that everyone on a team was on the same schedule allows people more time to socialize with their teammates away from their workstations.
What is break schedule?
Reduced output, short and abrupt emails, reluctance to engage in telephone calls or video conference calls, shortage of new ideas, just to name a few.
What are team conflict warning signs?
In order to keep the entire team working together as one cohesive, productive unit, don't fall into this trap because you aren't seeing issues and hearing conflict.
What is assuming?
A framework for identifying and successfully managing social distance and is made up of five components - Structure, Process, Language, Identity, and Technique.
What is the SPLIT framework?
Members of global teams may unwittingly send the wrong signals with their everyday behavior so it is important to do feedback on this kind of interactions.
What is routine?
This is essential for team performance and morale, is particularly important for geographically dispersed teams, and can include staying in contact with everyone, ensuring it is fair and consistent, and that rewards are equal.
What is feedback?
Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
What are the stages of group development?
It is the #1 reason virtual teams fail and the team not meeting performance objectives and deliverables are delayed or of poor quality, relationships between team members and the leader are damaged, team members are not clear about the team's direction or purpose, and team members are not engaged are signs of it.
What is ineffective leadership?
Location, number of sites where teams are based, and the number of employees who work at each site.
What are the structural factors that determine social distance?
At the beginning of a meeting, this type of communication is positive because it allows for the organic unfolding of processes that must occur in all business dealings - sharing knowledge, coordinating and monitoring interactions, and building relationships.
What is unstructured communication?
Cake for people's birthdays, occasional lunches or drinks with co-workers are great team (blank) activities, but won't work with geographically dispersed team but these activities might - set up intranet team page, build virtual team room, use webcams, be sensitive to language barriers.
What are team bonding activities?
It is important team leaders be especially proactive in following up and resolution, before productivity and trust are lost, even with these procedures well-defined.
What are conflict resolution procedures?
High-performing teams establish these up front and continually reassess and ensure clarity over time. A lack of these can have a huge impact on virtual teams.
What are clear roles?
Geographically dispersed team members perceive this type of imbalance when they feel there are in-groups and out-groups.
What is power?
Leaders should do this for disagreement both about the team's tasks and about the process by which the tasks get done.
What is encourage?
Depending on budget, managers should do this at least once a year, or more if possible.
What is get together?
Research shows that highly (blank) teams offer many benefits to organizations, including more innovation in product development and service delivery, more creative solutions to problems, reduced potential for groupthink, and even significantly higher financial performance; however, they also bring a greater likelihood of relationship conflict, which, in turn, can lead to poor performance and, in extreme cases, team dysfunction.
What is diverse?
To assess a lack of this, team leaders should regularly assess their teams by asking the following questions: Are all team members contributing to conversations and projects? Are they attending and actively participating in team meetings? Are team members motivated to take on new work or are they feeling overwhelmed? Are people working well together or is there frequent and unproductive team conflict?
What is engagement?
These are the two best predictors of productivity.
What are a team's energy and engagement outside formal meetings?
Team members who can communicate best in the organization's lingua franca (usually English) often exert the most influence, while those who are less fluent often become this.
What is inhibited and withdrawn?
Team (blank) won’t materialize overnight, but is created through thousands of everyday interactions. Leaders need to encourage cohesiveness every time they communicate – for example, creating a positively loaded team nickname or communicating a success story.
What is team spirit?
This type of training is an important component of preparing global team members; addressing conflict is a challenge for any team, but especially challenging for highly diverse global teams. Different languages and cultures, working across different time zones, lack of frequent face-to-face interaction, and heavy reliance on meeting technology such as videoconferencing and e-mail present additional challenges for global teams.
What is conflict management?
Office cliques and the conflicts that come with them can still form with dispersed teams. Not taking time to build an atmospher of this because there is a lack of face-to-face contact inherent in virtual/dispersed teams can be even more arduous.
What is collaboration?