How To Make Virtual Teams Work

Leading any team involves managing people, technical oversight, and project administration, but leaders of virtual teams perform these functions from afar. Leading Virtual Teams walks you through the basics of: Connecting your people to each other--and to the team’s mission Surmounting language, distance, and technology barriers Identifying and using the right communication channels Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives--from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

An instant #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller and USA Today bestseller! The remote work revolution has been rapidly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations as big as Twitter have learned their employees didn't need an office to get great results, and employees are using the flexibility of remote work to live where they want, ditch their commutes and live a work-life integration that works for them. Remote work is here to stay, and the companies that do it well will have a clear competitive advantage in the future. As founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a 100 percent remote organization with 170 employees who work from home, Robert Glazer has discovered that with the right principles, tactics and tools for managing remote employees, many businesses can excel in a virtual world. In this highly actionable book, Glazer shares how he and his team built a remote organization that has been recognized with dozens of awards for its industry performance and company culture. "A timely, practical, and highly informative guide to effective techniques for remote work; of benefit to practitioners or students of business. Highly recommended."—Library Journal, STARRED review How to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace shares insights from the remote employee, manager and leader perspectives, offering a blueprint any person can use to make remote work successful, productive and fulfilling. Learn how to leverage the flexibility of remote work, be more productive while working at home, avoid burnout, lead a team of virtual employees and build an organization that sets the gold standard for virtual work. The remote work revolution is here—the leaders who will build the future are the ones who can lead top performing virtual teams. Learn how to build a world-class organization—office no longer required.

The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams is an essential resource for leaders, virtual team members, and work group leaders. The editors provide a proved framework based on five principles for working collaboratively across boundaries of time, space, and culture. Written by experts in the field, the contributors offer practical suggestions and tools for virtual team who need to assess their current level of effectiveness and develop strategies for improvement. This important resource also contains an array of illustrative cases as well as practical tools for designing, implementing, and maintaining effective virtual work.

In today’s complex organizations it is not uncommon to have as many as 50 percent of employees working on virtual teams. As the “virtual revolution” continues to spread, how can companies ensure that virtual team collaboration is producing the desired results? Highly practical and easy to navigate, Virtual Team Success leverages the authors’ robust global research study and hands-on experience to provide an immediately usable resource for virtual team members and team leaders. This groundbreaking book is a hands-on, practical toolkit filled with down-to-earth examples and insights that can enhance the virtual team experience for everyone involved. The authors’ research study is one of the most comprehensive applied studies ever conducted on virtual teams, and all of the recommendations outlined are based on these findings as well as the authors’ years of experience helping virtual teams and virtual team leaders effectively lead and collaborate from a distance. To help organizations and leaders enhance virtual team performance, the book includes: Why Virtual Teams Fail—outlines the four pitfalls that frequently derail virtual teams Profile of High Performing Teams—addresses the characteristics of the most effective virtual teams and what makes them successful Virtual Team Launch Kit—provides practical guidelines and tools for successfully launching virtual teams How to RAMP Up Your Team’s Effectiveness—introduces a practical research-based model of virtual team effectiveness to improve team performance Profile of Top Performing Virtual Team Leaders—identifies the practices of the most successful virtual team leaders Facilitating High-Impact Virtual Meetings—includes tips and techniques to effectively lead “v-meetings” Virtual Team Success also includes practical resources for virtual team leaders, quick reference guides for diagnosing virtual team problems, and six lessons for virtual team success.

Virtual Teams That Work offers a much-needed, comprehensive guidebook for business leaders and managers who want to create the organizational conditions that will help virtual teams thrive. Each chapter in this important book focuses on best practices and includes case studies and illustrative examples from a wide variety of companies, including British Petroleum, Lucent Technologies, Ramtech, SoftCo, and Whirlpool Corporation. These real-life examples demonstrate how the principles identified in the book play out within virtual teams. Virtual Teams That Work shows how organizations can put in place the structure to help team members who speak different languages and have different cultural values develop effective ways of communicating when there is little opportunity for the members to meet face-to-face. The authors also reveal how organizations can implement performance management and reward systems that will motivate team members to cooperate across multiple boundaries. And they offer the information to determine which technologies best fit a variety of virtual-team tasks and the level of information technology support needed.

Organizations are implementing virtual teams using web technologies as a cost-effective measure for training and project development. In Working at a Distance, Cassandra Smith provides a detailed, comprehensible virtual team business model for managers, professionals, teachers or students involved globally with such initiatives.

The future of work is virtual, with dispersed teams, telecommuting, remote working and virtual meetings becoming the norm across sectors and industries around the world. However leading virtual teams requires a new set of skills and a facilitative leadership approach, Virtual Leadership is here to help. At its best, virtual working can be productive and creative, tapping into the best people wherever they are and bringing skills and experience together efficiently and at low cost. But it can also lead to isolated and disengaged workers, ineffective communication, and uncoordinated and even counter-productive activity. Virtual Leadership provides practical strategies, tools and solutions for the key issues involved in managing at a distance. How can I provide leadership, motivation and vision through virtual channels? How do I make virtual meetings effective, engaging and productive, and ensure actions are followed through? How do I create engaged and cohesive teams across distance, cultures and languages? How do I stop virtual team members silently checking out, distracted by local challenges and offline issues? With diverse case studies and examples, this is the essential guide to making a difference as a leader of virtual work.

A remote book on building a successful virtual culture from USA TODAY and WALL STREET JOURNAL bestselling author, Robert Glazer! Close to twenty-five percent of professionals today work remotely in some capacity (and even more since the start of the pandemic). There are a lot of benefits to companies who employ a virtual workforce: cost savings on office space and other overhead, improved job performance, better employee morale, and a broader pool of talent from which to recruit. However, there are also challenges: communication limitations, social isolation, and managing distractions, among others. In his leadership management book, How to Make Virtual Teams Work, Robert Glazer, bestselling author of Elevate, taps into his decade of experience managing a virtual office—and winning twenty "best places to work" awards—while providing leaders with a step-by-step playbook on how to intentionally build a remote workforce and culture by developing core values that provide guidance in hiring talent who works well remotely, creating comprehensive onboarding plans, using technology to communicate and connect with remote employees, and more. This goes way beyond a typical HR strategy book. By employing these specific organizational behavior strategies, leaders can build a remote environment that thrives and make it one of their key competitive advantages. Praise for Robert Glazer: "Robert Glazer has led a top performing remote organization for over a decade. With this book, he shares the essential keys to building a world-class remote company." —Keith Ferrazzi, New York Times bestselling author of Never Eat Alone "Bob Glazer leads from the heart. When the work week drags you down, his clear-cut advice can lift you up." —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals "Bob Glazer has become one of the finest business columnists writing today, and he's done it while building a truly great company, Acceleration Partners. You can get a taste of both from this wonderful book." —Bo Burlingham, author of Small Giants and Finish Big