Virtual Teams, Distance Work, Silence and Resentment

I work in Distance Ed, and I've been working on distance/virtual teams for a long time. The unique problem with distance work/distance management, I think, is the lack of shared context. When you all work in the same office, you know when someone is sick, on vacation, overloaded or working to a deadline on something. So if they do not respond to a request of yours right away, you understand. When you don't have that contextual information, then when somebody doesn't get back to you, the reason is a mystery. You just get a sense that the person is unreliable, or thinks you are unimportant. Then you resent them for that.

Basic attribution theory suggests that this is a natural way to respond when lacking contextual info, but it is very destructive on virtual/distance teams!!

One way around this is to spend time at the beginning of a distance collaboration with everybody together in one space, to synchronize everybody's internal sense/mental models of themselves, each other, the team, the task and the timeline. Then you have to meet face-to-face periodically to re-synchronize and keep your collective "groove" fresh.

Here's something I wrote elsewhere on this topic:

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Advantages of Collaboration at a Distance over Collocated (local) Collaboration (Shunn et al., 2002):

On virtual teams:

- Info sharing can be more even (all members have more to share, because as a group they have access to more/more varied information sources, by virtue of being in different contexts)
- Wider influx of ideas, wider variety of mental models (same idea as above)
- Less tendency for groupthink, regionalism, conformity
- Asynchronous communications more thoughtful, measured and complete than live conversation, and better-structured for persistence and re-use
- Asynchronous communications tend to be more durable
- Collaboration of any kind involves a rhythm of social integration and then going off to do solo work - the "solo" part of this work cycle unfolds with less disruption when collaborating at a distance

However:

- Frequent face-to-face meetings are important, esp. at beginning of a collaboration (e.g. weekly)

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WHY?
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DISTANCE COLLABORATION DISRUPTS INTERACTIVE GROUNDING

Copresent collaborators can build the common ground that will sustain the successful distance collaboration, through dense and rich interactions.

In copresent communications, they can coordinate conversational turn-taking, respond to the precisely timed conversational cues of their collaborators, repair misunderstandings in real time. As a result, the mental model each collaborator forms of the other collaborators' communication styles, frames of reference, assumption bases and cognitive processes, greatly facilitating coordination during solo work phases.

Collocal meetings inculcate task, team and context awareness. "People keep up with information about the demand for their work in the real world, how particular tasks are progressing, what fellow workers are doing, who is communicating with whom, what equipment is out of order, and many other details of the collaboration that concern them directly or tangentially. Here we distinguish between awareness of the task (e.g. what steps have to be taken next…) and awareness of the collaborative team (e.g., who knows what among the members…). Developing and maintaining this team awareness is much more difficult in distributed teams than collocated ones.

Task awareness, which includes collaborators' beliefs about the overall project, including its history, current status, and future directions, is crucial for successful coordination. When collaborators divide work, they need to monitor their partners' activities for personnel management and to understand the impact of their partners' progress on their own work. This monitoring can help people determine when and which collaborative actions are required (e.g. whether it is time to nag someone to complete his or her section of the project). The granularity with which collaborators need to maintain task awareness differs depending on the nature of the task…

Team awareness, on the other hand, refers to collaborators' beliefs about both stable and changing attributes of their partners. Detailed and accurate models of each other's knowledge, skills, and motivation help collaborators assign tasks appropriately and solicit and offer appropriate help. Collaborators share beliefs about project roles and responsibilities, interdependencies among team members, the current status of each person's assigned tasks, their availability for interaction, and the like…Equally important, when team members are collocated, they can passively monitor activities going on around them and pick up relevant information without explicit communication… This passive monitoring of other's activities aids collaboration… [e.g.]members of a team pick up information about each other while training side by side, which allows them to allocate tasks more effectively.
Not only do collocated teams pick up information implicitly, but they also share a context that helps them accurately interpret this information… the lack of shared context leads to misattributions for behaviour, resulting in poorer coordination and distrust. For example, one member may send another mail asking for an update, but does not get a response because the recipient is on vacation. In a distributed team, the lack of shared context often led to ambiguity about interpreting silence, which in turn resulted in failures of coordination and distrust… failure to respond to mail was attributed negatively to the person (that person is unreliable) rather than to the situation (the mail did not get through or the team was on vacation). By contrast, in a collocated setting, vacation schedules and availability would likely be known." (Kraut et al., 2002 p. 153-154)

THE IMPLICATION of the first study is that when collaborators take the time up front to build shared cognitive models through interactive grounding, then they can better withstand the corrosive effects of distance collaboration, and reap the rewards of distributive work efforts.

THE RISK to virtual organizations such as our own is that we fail to recognize the strategic importance of building a cohesive group through real-time, face to face interactions, and so many of our distance interactions will be compromised by insufficient shared grounding.

REFERENCES:
Kraut, Robert E., Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan and Jane Siegel, "Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work" p. 137. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Schunn, Christian, Kevin Crowley and Takeshi Okada, "What Makes Collaborations Across a Distance Succeed? The Case of the Cognitive Science Community", p. 407. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Problems upon problems

So I'm designing an online course for some clients of mine, and I have a problem. The course is boring! I am boring myself while writing this course, God only knows how boring the poor students might find it. This won't do. I have to re-think my design plan.

There is a lot of buzz about using narrative principles to structure courses, so I surf around the web and my design library at home. Here is what I figured out.

We very commonly design courses within an overall "problem-solution" pattern. We describe some problem in the world that our students will face, and present the knowledge to be gained by the course as the solution.

I think a simple problem-solution frame is too simplistic to hook and engage the narrative imagination of students (or anyone else for that matter). There is no suspense. The solution is too pat. Too near at hand.

You start to draw on the appeal of narrative by making a very simple shift in your design plan. You heap problems on top of problems at the top-level of the design plan (sub-problems don't count, they have to be top-level).

For example, I was just designing a course for an online MBA program. The topic was organizational lifecycle analysis. My initial problem-solution frame went as follows:

No single management approach is good for all situations. The top management priorities for one firm might be very low on the list for another firm. Furthermore, within any organization, there is a multitude of different units, teams, projects, intiatives and so on, all of which may require different things from managers. The question, "How will you know what to do in each situation?" Organizational lifecycle analysis can help, in these various and sundry ways...

Basic problem-solution, not very dramatic. But wait!

Once you complicate, frustrate, or oppose this solution, making it impossible to attain the result right away, then your course plan starts to exhibit some drama!

...However, just knowing about lifecycle analysis is not enough. There are all kinds of barriers, structural and cultural, that can prevent you from bringing lifecycle problems to the attention of the management team, and further barriers that can prevent you from implementing solutions to lifecycle problems...

Gasp! The goal is in jeopardy! We have entered the drama zone.

For this reason, we will also study tools for overcoming these barriers, to solve lifecycle problems and improve communication on the management team, so that in the future you will be able to anticipate such problems and prepare for them, driving organizational change instead of letting it drive you.

I think that compounding problems on top of problems like this, of holding out a goal but then raising doubts about our ability to reach it, these create more complex problems that are more engaging, more story-like. They are complex enough to hold learner interest. Simple problem-solution design frames, I think, are too simplistic. The sales job they do is too blatant and too on-the-nose. More complex, story-like design frames with some risk and some challenge are much better choices - especially for online education, when the risk of having students drop out is so high.