You are possibly considering creating your virtual team to free up part of your time, enjoy a vacation, grow your business or become more productive.
By building a virtual team, you can use the knowledge and skills of others outside your office and even beyond the borders of your country.
Building and keeping a virtual team brings you a lot of flexibility but challenges too.
You may sometimes find hard to manage your virtual team because multicultural factors, physical distance, etc.
Here are some points to work effectively with your virtual team, in my experience:
Make a daily call conference a few early in the morning to discuss the work of each team member. You can also to speak about the obstacles to accomplish the task.
It is important to communicate and compensate the fact of not being in the same office. In the office environment, people know each other and exchange ideas. When working remotely it is necessary to create opportunities for that to happen.
Keep a constant chat room open to all team members. You can use Skype, for example. That way any member of your team feel they can make some inquiry if a question arises along the way.
You can allow your team members to work flexible hours, but you also need to work together at least a couple of hours each day and get everyone involved in the daily telephone meeting.
When people are working flexible hours you must use a software to check the worked hours.
Throughout my years as a Virtual Assistant I’ve used many time tracking tools:
Toggl https://www.toggl.com/ can keep track of hours by client, make notes about what your Virtual Assistant is working.
HoursTracker http://hourstrackerapp.com/ can track time for one or more projects using timers and allows your Virtual Assistant enter hours manually. It automatically calculates how much and when you should pay your Virtual Assistant
Paymo http://www.paymoapp.com/time-tracking/ It is a web timer.
Your VA can record the time used on a specific project or task. Whenever you start working on a task, just select it and start the stopwatch. All time entries are saved with start and end times for super-accurate time reports.
If you hire people from different countries (which is likely) you should solve the time differences problems (which can be easily fixed).
When setting days and times to complete certain task you must tell exactly the time to which you refer. If you are for example in Spain you must tell “the task needs to be completed on Friday at 5pm Spain time”. Thus will all be clear.
You will also have to ask them (before hiring) if they will take free the days of national holidays in their country. If their answer is yes, then you will have to decide if it suits you to hire them or not.
In short, it is important to define a schedule and timetable adapted to the virtual team. That way you and your team members will be able to combine work and family life.
Create a knowledge base. You can use tools like Google Docs, Facebook private group, DropBox, Asana, BaseCamp etc. so that all information is accessible to all team members in one place. Besides all members can provide information and, if necessary, and the different processes they use to perform tasks.
This will help to create a base of valuable knowledge, will save you time when you hire new members, team members will be motivated because members who contribute to that knowledge base gain recognition.
Create a WhatsApp group or Facebook group for informal communication. A place where team members can feel free to post fun things, their pets photos, talk about children, etc. This will create a sense of a real team, not just a group of strangers working on the same project.
Although initially managing your virtual team can seem tricky, these teams offer many advantages, and it is precisely because in this globalized world to work with virtual teams is becoming “the rule” rather than “the exception to the rule.”
These are just a few tips about how to work with your virtual team. Wait for my next posts with more information on the subject.
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