A merely working together is different from true collaboration that requires a high level of mutual trust between team members and their capability to set aside egos. As difficult as achieving true collaboration may be for your collaborators, this is vital to build efficiency and win your competitors in the global market.
Unity is strength, an old idiom says. But what is exactly unity? This word is not a synonym of working together, as a team is something more than the mechanical sum of its individual parts. True Collaboration is an expression that describes much better unity, instead. It implies that team members are able to build mutual trust, share knowledge and set aside their egos without losing their energy, enthusiasm and proactivity. When collaboration is achieved, teams become magic and creative. The motivation of their members peaks up, and great results are achieved.
How do Successful Virtual Teams achieve collaboration? According to some researches, team sizes matter. The larger the team, the more difficult collaboration becomes. So, the present trend to build teams of even a hundred of people is bad. A better solution would be the utilization of a fluid structure distributed on an inner core (charged with important decisions), an operational level (day-to-day ongoing work) and an outer network of freelancers or temporary members that are taken on board just to take care of a particular segment of the project. This setting allows gathering together those team members who need to collaborate with one other for some specific purpose or reason.
Social Media plays a great role in virtual team, as they can make the miracle to make dissimilar people to collaborate. The reason is that social media help your collaborators to find a common ground and share practices and advices. So, don’t be afraid of using them. The organizations that have been able to use social media correctly have all enjoyed consistent improvement in their workforce productivity.
Playing Games that encourage collaboration is another way to build great teams, in the measure that these games are able to get your team members into the right mindset for working together. This implies another important activity, staff training, the only way to help your collaborators to develop quickly some crucial skills like networking and emotional intelligence.
Role Clarity is the last (but not least) important factor behind collaboration. Some researchers have given evidence that collaboration increases when the group has not got a certain goal, but everyone has a well-defined role. It seems that it happens since doubt encourages everybody to collaborate and think more creatively.
In conclusion, collaboration is what makes the difference between mere working together and really effective and successful Virtual Teams. Recent researches have enlightened some of the key-factors that are behind true collaboration, like the skillful usage of social media, a wise team hierarchy and the specific training that teams receive.
Are you interested in virtual teams and their complex problems? You are going to find more resources on R-HUB`s blog (http://www.rhubcom.com). It is also possible to have a 30 days free trial through which to test your virtual team on R-HUB`s real time collaboration servers.
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