Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59976
Technology close working relationship with each teammember. "They have to be muchmore proactive in the virtual environment," he says. "I was talking recently to amanager who leads sev- eral virtual teams.Hemakes semian- nual visits to each teammember to learn about himor her and determine the best leadership style to use with each one." Designing, delivering, scheduling, and evaluating virtual teamtraining will be amajor challenge on the cor- porate agenda, say these professors. They presented a paper based on their study, titled "Identifying Training Needs for Virtual TeamLeaders and Members," at the Academy ofMan- agement's annualmeeting in August. Time to Disconnect? Act Locally, Think Virtually Employees working on virtual teams at Dow Chemical take courses in virtual teametiquette and onlinemeeting management. GlaxoSmithKline uses cultural awareness exercises to improve virtual teamcommunication.Dow Chemical and GSK are only two of a growing number of companies that aremaking virtual teamtraining a pri- ority, say researchers at the Kenan-Fla- gler Business School at theUniversity ofNorth Carolina at ChapelHill. Kenan-Flagler professors Ben Rosen and Dick Blackburn and for- mer doctoral candidate Stacie Furst, now an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, recently conducted a study of virtual workgroups. In it, they ex- plore just what today'sHR profes- sionals find most important when it comes to virtual team building. Blackburn, Rosen, and Furst sur- veyed 440HR professionals; most in- dicated that companies could be 50 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 doing more to prepare employees for virtual team projects. Seventy-two percent of respondents noted that employees needed skills in leading virtual team meetings; 70 percent emphasized the importance of virtual coaching and mentoring skills. Respondents also identified the following skills as important in virtual team projects: s Establishing trust and managing conflict among team members (61 percent). sMaintaining cultural sensitivity and communications (58 percent). s Teambuilding (57 percent). s Using communica- tions technology (65 per- cent). It's human nature for workers to paymore atten- tion to "co-located" team members than to those in remote locations, says Blackburn.However, vir- tual teamleaders also need to know how to develop a D ATA B I T Seattle recently topped Intel Corp.'s list of wireless U.S. cities. According to a map created by University of Washington students, Seattle's downtown boasts 5,225 public networks within a two-mile radius. Communications technologies such as e-mail, cell phones, and pagers may make the world seem like a smaller place. But do we really want to use tech- nology to defy distance? In a recent lecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's College of Computing Sciences in Newark, computer guru Darl Kolb argued that distance isn't always a bad thing. He questioned the world's growing use of commu- nication andWeb-based technologies and warned that "staying connected" could be a growing threat to our need for some time alone. Kolb, a visiting profes- sor at NJIT from the Uni- versity of Auckland Busi- ness School in New Zealand, pointed out that technological connectivity "has rendered the percep- tion that distance as a phe- nomenon is diminishing." Even so, he added that "improvements in com-