The Hindu Business Line : Loner, and a team man too

WHEN the cat is away, it is playtime for the mice; and that's something one gets to see in most offices once the boss goes on a holiday. Out of sight, out of mind, and that could explain how TV screens are suddenly free from faces that had grown to be permanent fixtures and so perhaps viewers too feel lighter. To be fair, there is a contrary saying too: that absence makes the heart grow fonder. While that can warm up the heart of the NDA, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review is titled, "Can absence make a team grow stronger?" Jointly authored by Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra, Jeffrey Stamps, and Jessica Lipnack, all active as IT professors and consultants, the work observes that far-flung teams can outperform the ones that work side by side.

The article opens with a `blasphemous' experiment in Rocketdyne, a producer of liquid-fuel rocket engines - to produce "an engine that was radically simpler and cheaper than anything in its catalogue". An eight-person group was assembled through partnership with companies that had never produced a rocket engine; and the team size was "about one-tenth the normal size". Result was achieved in "one-tenth the time span it took to develop its predecessors"; actual number of hours were only 1 per cent; parts numbered fewer, and not hundreds; and "it cost millions of dollars less to manufacture".

The secret behind this achievement was IT; "modern communications technology" helped fashion "a virtual, far-flung team of diverse talents that no face-to-face team could match, even if its members uprooted themselves to come work together, or commuted between their home offices and the team's site, for the project's entire length." Lest you discount virtual work as rocket science, the authors speak of their survey across 26 companies drawn from high-tech, telecom, financial services, consulting, heavy manufacturing, automotive, and consumer product companies.

A few gripping statistics about the study: "Fewer than 4 per cent of the 293 participants in the survey reported ever meeting with all of their fellow team members face-to-face, and less than 17 per cent reported ever meeting with any other member in person. Almost two-thirds of the teams included people from at least three time zones; slightly more than three-quarters had members from more than one country. The members of 57 per cent of the teams performed different functions, and members of 48 per cent of them came from more than one company."

Another instance of irrelevance of geography is about how an R&D team at Unilever Latin America redesigned a deodorant for the Colombian and Venezuelan markets: "The packaging for the roll-on, stick, and cream formats were to be manufactured in Brazil; the engineer who was to develop the cream packaging was situated in Argentina. The roll-on formula itself was going to be made in Mexico and Brazil, the stick in Chile, and the cream in Colombia." That is, five countries and one job.

Believers of face-to-face meetings may shake their heads in disbelief if they were told that the team members in the study contributed more during virtual meetings than during traditional settings. Many found meetings harmful to work progress because "if such a meeting is in the offing, everyone expects it to be where the real work will take place and avoids doing anything of value until the meeting occurs."

The authors put together three guiding principles for virtual teams: Exploit diversity, use technology to simulate reality, and hold the team together. The first task is to form the team, handpicking the members; there were at least nine dimensions that team leaders used for rating their men and women, and these included "quality of innovation, collective output, and adherence to budget."

On the technology front, e-mail was seen as "a poor way for teams as a whole to collaborate", because one-to-one exchanges can lead to diminution of trust in the group. How about `cc everybody'? "They soon were drowning in messages. To cope, members resorted to deleting e-mail without reading it." Also, there was the problem of knowing which one was the latest version of a document.

More than video conferencing or teleconferencing, a technique that finds favour is the use of `virtual work spaces', where team members "posted their work in progress electronically and examined their colleagues' postings, well in advance of teleconferences." What are these `spaces'? "These work spaces were more than networked drives with shared files. Accessible to everyone at any time, the work space was where the group was reminded of its decisions, rationales, and commitments." Interestingly, many found IM useful though organisations are not too favourably inclined to the use of instant messaging.

Language helps hold your team together, and it need not be English. In the Unilever example, the team adopted "what they called Portunol, a hybrid of Spanish and Portugese." Well, you can try with some Hinglish, packing in a glossary with usages.

When virtual teams can be so productive, why are we not packing our bags and going elsewhere to `team up' from a distance? Inertia is one reason, states the article. Another is that "computer revolution missed a step". The authors explain: "When companies went from enterprise computing to individual computing, they jumped over the small-group level, where the preponderance of work takes place." Now that `forgotten step' is "the focus of advances in collaboration technology".

If you, therefore, have a productive colleague who is a pain in the neck to work with, here is perhaps the answer. Who knows, absence may make the heart grow fonder.

ITworks@TheHindu.co.in

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