Setting Up a Virtual Team

Organizations use virtual teams for myriad functions, ranging from cross-functional project teams to task forces and line management. The concepts for setting up each type of team are the same, though the particular roles and responsibilities may vary from team to team. In an ideal world, managers would be able to select the tools, personnel, and projects that they want to work on, and would have complete control over all aspects of the effort. In reality, managers must usually work within the confines of the existing organization, infrastructure, and available personnel to meet the project deadlines that upper management imposes, and hire only when they need to fill the gaps in their teams.

Hiring With virtual teams and teleworking opportunities expanding exponentially, managers are increasingly faced with hiring employees, contractors, or consultants who will work and live far from the boss’s office. Ideally, managers will bring the top two or three candidates on-site for a final interview and screening. Often, however, managers do not have the opportunity to meet the potential employee or contractor in person, but must rely on prescreening and telephone interviews to determine whether the candidate is a good fit. In such situations, prescreening becomes even more important, and you may want to consider hiring a recruiter or employment agency that is familiar with the locale.

Before You Need to Hire Before you need to hire someone, you can improve your chances of finding a good fit by doing the following:

-  Network with colleagues: Just as networking is the best way for job seekers to find a job, it is also the best way to find out who is available and who is good at what they do, especially when looking for contractors. Get involved with local professional organizations, chambers of commerce, and so on. Keep a list of the names and specialties of people who are frequently recommended (you can set up a secure manager’s area of the project wiki or intranet site to store this information). Find out which employment agencies and recruiters are the best to work with. Act as a mentor for university students majoring in your discipline (even if there is no local university, most mentorships can be carried out via email and the telephone). Agree to requests for informational interviews and keep the person’s résumé on file, even if you do not currently have an opening; you never know when that person might be useful to your organization.

-  Track industry trends: Often when one industry experiences a downturn, others need to hire. Skills are often transferable between industries, and hiring someone from another industry can provide a much-needed injection of new ideas and methodologies into your organization. Business publications, such as Inc., Fortune, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal, help you identify potential opportunities and threats, as well as provide ideas for strategy and process related to your industry. Such ideas can help you devise interview questions, re-examine the skills you are looking for in a candidate, or give ideas for training and teambuilding.

Investigate and establish relationships with recruiters and employment agencies: Researching employment agencies and recruiters in your area before you need them enables you to be proactive about your search for new team members. If you wait until you are in dire straits, you have less room for negotiation and likely will not get as good of a fit. In addition, by doing your homework up front, you can eliminate unscrupulous agencies from the mix and focus on the ones that provide you with excellent service. Note: Using recruiters and employment agencies can significantly reduce the time required to bring in a qualified candidate. However, you need to make sure that you have done your prehiring homework (as detailed below) before engaging an agency.

-  Evaluate your needs: What skills do you need on your team? Are there certain character traits that would fit better with your team than others? When you picture the ideal candidate, how do you see that person interacting with the team, and what do you see him or her contributing? Do you need someone with lots of experience, or would an intern work better? How much supervision do you anticipate providing? What kind of manager are you? Is it important that the candidate have previous experience working on virtual teams? Using a strategic planning tool, such as SWOT analysis (see the following sidebar), can give you a quick way of assessing your current status. When building a team, it is important that the team members have complementary strengths and skills. Homogeneity tends to lead to group-think, and the product will not usually be as good as one produced by a more diverse group. Online surveys work well for gathering information from the team, as do less formal methods, such as instant messaging and teleconferences. And, consider setting up a secure manager’s area of the team wiki to collect and manage the information you gather. (See Article 3 for more details on needs analysis.)

-  Develop an organizational chart: When setting up a team, it helps to create an organizational chart so that you can clearly see functional and reporting relationships. Even if you do not have a specific person in mind yet, you can include a spot for that function. The organizational chart also helps you to visualize what skills or functions you might be missing. (See also the section in this article titled “Establishing Team Structure and Roles.”)

-  Develop a written job description: If the human resources department does not have a written job description, create one yourself. Doing so will help you clarify what capabilities you need and want for a particular function, as well as help you determine the level of seniority needed to adequately perform those functions. Post the job descriptions for each team function on the wiki.

-  Prioritize hiring checklists: No candidate will have 100 percent of the experiences and skills that you advertise, so determine which skills are must-haves and which ones are good to have but optional. For example, if you are hiring a senior design engineer, it might be imperative that he or she have a degree in mechanical engineering, but less important whether or not he or she has managed people before. SWOT Analysis SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You can use this tool to fairly quickly identify your team, department, or organizational status. The analysis does not have to take long; simply list each area in a text document or on the wiki and make a bulleted list of all the items that belong in each area. Once the analysis is complete, you can use the results to compare your current status to where you want to be, using the project plan or corporate strategic plan as the basis for comparison.

-  Strengths: These are things that your team does well. For example, perhaps you have an excellent wiki setup or have great team synergy.

-  Weaknesses: These are things that your team does not do well, or restrictions on things that you are allowed to do. For example, the version control is problematic, or the project files are not easily accessible to everyone on the team.

-  Opportunities: These are outside influences that have a beneficial effect on your team. You typically have no control over when or how they happen, but you can possibly use the occurrence to your advantage. For example, your department gets approved for some capital expenditures that were not in your original budget, or you identify an additional market for your products.

-  Threats: These are outside influences that have a potentially negative effect on your team. Like the opportunities, you have no control over when or how threats happen, but recognizing them (or the possibility of them happening) enables you to mitigate their deleterious effects. For example, hurricanes and tsunamis can wipe out infrastructure, or a competitor might release a product very similar to the one that you are working on, or rumors in the company indicate a layoff is imminent. Documenting these things enables you to more clearly envision what you need to do to get to where you want to be.

During the Hiring Process When hiring virtual team members (or rather team members who will work virtually — since they actually exist but just work in a different location), managers must rely more heavily on prescreening, reference checks, and other clues to determine how well a candidate will fit with the rest of the team. Behavioral cues, such as proactiveness, ability to follow directions, and attention to detail, are all readily apparent during the initial screening process. Think about how well the candidate performs in these areas as you perform the following tasks:

-  Ask for recommended candidates. Before placing an ad, use your network of colleagues and coworkers to identify candidates who might be a good fit. If they meet the requirements and indicate interest, place them in the “to-be-interviewed” folder (which can be an electronic directory or a physical file folder, depending on your preference). If you receive enough candidates this way, you often can avoid having to place an ad, which can give you more choices than you really have time to deal with.

-  Be explicit about the résumé/curriculum vitae (CV) requirements. Different locales have different expectations for what should be included on a résumé or CV, as do different disciplines. Being explicit about your expectations helps to ensure that you receive the information you need to make a good decision, as well as ensuring that the information is in the correct format for you to be able to store and read it electronically. For example, you may want to ask how familiar the candidate is with using wikis, blogs, VoIP, web cams, instant messaging, and other technology that you use with the team. Or you might want to request that the candidates fill out an online application.

-  Prescreen. Once you have obtained an adequate number of résumés or CVs, sort them into Yes, No, and Maybe piles based on their qualifications and what you already know about them from your colleagues. The Yes pile contains the résumés or CVs for the people you definitely want to interview. The No pile contains the résumés or CVs for people who are clearly not qualified for the job (go ahead and send them a rejection letter — you will not hire them for this position regardless of the rest of the pool). The Maybe pile contains résumés or CVs for people about whom you need more information before deciding (for example, maybe they have most of the experience you want, but are slightly off on one of the skills). Look for errors, omissions, and exaggerations (these may not be immediately obvious) in their résumés/CVs and cover letters. Identify which ones have bothered to find out about the company (with the Internet, there is really no excuse for not knowing something about the company and showing it in the cover letter). If one of them calls or emails to follow up, mark that on the résumé.

-  Search for them on the Internet. Once you have winnowed the stack of résumés to a reasonable number of Yeses and Maybes, you can often narrow the list further by performing an Internet search for the applicants, particularly if you are looking for senior-level team members. On more than one occasion, managers have discovered that an applicant who looked good on paper was posting rude messages or comments that indicated a lack of qualifications on an email list, or was bashing an employer in a blog (things that are good to know before you hire someone).

You can use Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, or myriad other search engines that abound on the Internet. You may even want to use more than one because different engines contain slightly different information. One caveat — be sure that you are actually reading information about that applicant and not a doppelganger. (For fun, search for your own name and see what comes up.)

-  Schedule a telephone interview. Scheduling even a 30-minute telephone interview can help you see how the candidate will interact with the team, especially if you ask behavioral and scenario-based questions relevant to virtual teams (see the sidebar titled “Things to Look for When Hiring for Virtual Teams” later in this article for suggestions). Start with the candidates in the Yes pile. You might be able to narrow the list to your top three candidates without needing to access the Maybe pile. Consider using VoIP for this interview, particularly if the candidate is located internationally. Most VoIP is free if both people are using the same service and within certain restrictions, such as number of people on the call. (See Article 4 for more information.)

-  Get work samples, publication lists, or patent lists, or request a sample project. Depending on the position you are seeking to fill, work samples and lists of previous work can help you figure out what the candidates excel at, as well as where their experiences are focused. In some cases, due to the nature of the samples, candidates may only be able to provide you demonstrations or to bring samples to an in-person interview, but will not be able to send you copies. You can find out a lot about a candidate’s value system and ethics by his or her response to the request for work samples. When you receive publication lists or patent lists, verify the contents to the extent that you are able. If candidates have websites or online samples, link them to a secure area of the team wiki so that the other team members who are interviewing candidates can access the information.

-  Schedule an in-person or video conference interview. Once you have narrowed the list to your top three candidates, it is time to bring them on-site for an interview. (If you cannot bring the person on-site, try to go to him or her, have a local manager conduct the interview for you, have a video conference interview, or use a web cam if you do not have video conferencing facilities. Seventy percent of communication is nonverbal, and you want to know the candidate as well as possible before making an offer.) These interviews are generally more involved than the telephone interview, and often include several key members of the teams on which the candidate will be working. Some companies intentionally stress the candidate to see how well he or she functions under pressure. Others prefer the kinder, gentler approach. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. During this interview, look for body language and verbal cues for how well things are going and how the candidate is getting along with the team. Assess interest level by listening carefully to the kinds of questions the candidate asks and to the casual comments he or she makes. A smart candidate will be assessing you at the same time you are assessing him or her, so be at your most professional. After the interviews, collect impressions from each of the team members who conducted interviews (using an online survey tool might work well for polling the team about candidate preferences). Often, a clear selection stands out from the crowd and your choice is easy. Other times, two or more candidates can be equally qualified and equally well-liked, in which case, the selection becomes more difficult.

Check references. Most people do not ask someone to be their reference unless they are really sure that the reference will be a good one. Sometimes, however, you can be surprised, especially if you present the questions as open-ended rather than yes/no, so it is a good idea to check the references. And, remember that silence and hesitation sometimes speak volumes. In the United States, lawsuits filed by people who received a poor recommendation from their former employers have caused some companies to develop strict policies about references. In some cases, if you call the human resources department, you will only get the dates of employment and the job title. You can get around this difficulty by requesting personal references as well.

-  Review post-interview behavior. If you have a couple of candidates who seem equally qualified and have equally excellent references, hire the one who sends a thank-you note, follows up with additional thoughtful questions after the interview, and seems the most proactive in his or her communication. Proactive communication is fundamental to a successful virtual team.

-  Make the offer. Most companies get a verbal indication of acceptance from the candidate and then send out a letter with the specific terms of the offer. Expect to negotiate, particularly if you are dealing with a senior person. Determine what things you are willing to give a little on. For example, you might not be able to do anything about benefits or retirement plans, but you might have flexibility in salary, vacation time, home-office setup costs, or moving expenses (rare on virtual teams, but something to consider).