Effective Business Communications in Geographically Dispersed Teams

I read a great article today (Psychology of Effective Business Communications) that was written by Pearn Kandola and commissioned by Cisco Systems. Pearn Kandola are occupational psychologists who spend some of their time studying how teams of people work together.

The article is based on a report that states that globalization, atomization, and knowledge management “will have a significant impact on the structure, functioning, and distribution of teams within and across business”. Key to this is that while people will become increasingly spread out in order to service their markets, these same people will need to be more closely linked to the knowledge assets within their organizations.

The article then goes on to talk about how communications works in dispersed, multi-cultural, and virtual teams.

While there are some elements of this article that hit home and are right on the mark, I think some other pieces are missing. Specifically, the article makes no mention of one of the most significant communications tools for multi-cultural, virtual, and dispersed teams. That is Persistent Group Messaging, or topic-based, persistent group chat. Why do I think this is an effective medium of communications for these types of teams? Because for years we have been watching our customers manage such teams through the use of our tools. It doesn’t get any more dispersed and multi-cultural when you have one person sitting in London, one person in Singapore, and then a handful of people sitting under galvanized steel roofs in Africa while still more are sitting in ultra secure locations (leave your machine guns at the door) on trading floors in Columbia. Yet while all of these people are in different time zones and sit in different locations, they share research and trading information over MindAlign as if they were shouting across the room of a physical trading floor. This concept has revolutionized business where remote areas used to be starved from the rich and constant sources of information that are generated back at hub locations.

What makes this possible? This is where I think the article is right on the spot. The first key point is that teams of people must have trust in order to communicate effectively. But this is a bit of a catch 22 since communication is necessary in order to establish trust. The article points out that companies must facilitate development of effective trust using socialization strategies such as virtual coffee breaks and online chat rooms. Furthermore, the article states that trust building in virtual locations is difficult when people cannot observe the amount of effort or overhear what team members say when they are interacting with others. We have seen online virtual coffee breaks, or other discussions work. But more importantly is the concept of knowing what the other party is doing, and being able to get immediate feedback and validation from others about ideas. Think about being able to chat in real time with a team where half the people are chatting in their second language yet it is possible to have a complete and seamless dialog about ideas.

The next key point is about conflict. I especially like the comments that “spontaneous and clear communications is key to reducing conflict in all teams. This is especially important in virtual teams where there may be more ambiguity about what colleagues are doing”. Once again, we have seen this work for years using Persistent Group Messaging. In fact, we can relate this back to personal experience. Our company is itself geographically dispersed. We have core operations in Chicago yet we have sales, support, and implementation teams in London, Washington DC, New York, and Denver. Furthermore, there was a time at the beginning of our company’s history when we had development teams working out of their homes while we moved offices. During that time we were able to deliver 3 releases of software on-time with no loss of productivity. How? Because we were able to communicate effectively, monitor what each other was doing, and easily resolve conflict through constant and persistent communications.

Bringing it all together: Unified Communications

The article points out that there are multiple means of communicating, and each has its purpose. It then points out that the core attributes of communication: immediacy, symbol variety (availability of multiple cues in the medium), parallelism (can you communicate in multiple topics simultaneously), rehearsability (can you pre-edit what you write or say), and reprocessabliity (can you go back in and view archives) are seen in different communications tools. For example, video conferencing has high symbol variety yet has small rehearsability and reprocessability. Then it mentions Unified Communications. I think my definition of Unified Communications is slightly different than that discussed in the article. To me, Unified Communications means bringing together all of the said communications tools, including conferencing, voice, video, and Persistent Group Messaging. However, from my point of view there is one item that is the framework, or launch pad, for all other types of Unified Communications. And that is Persistent Group Messaging. Once again, I am stating this based on observing our customers, who stop using email in favor of PGM. Additionally, PGM is the first thing they start in the morning and the last thing they turn off at night. Once people are organized in persistent topics, then it becomes extremely easy to launch into voice conferences using a presence enabled contact list of the users within the topic or room. The same goes for data conferencing (Live Meetings, Meeting Place, etc.). So, from my perspective, virtual teams need it all. But the place to start is the easiest thing to deploy and the easiest thing to understand. And that is Persistent Group Messaging.

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