What I’ve Learned from 15 Years of Virtual Collaboration

In 2010, I was working for Capella University. This was the year I learned what it meant to collaborate in a virtual environment. How to try to get stuff done with a group when they were not physically co-located. 

At that time, I facilitated multiple academic committees that built new curriculum for the university. Because Capella was an online university, they would get talent from all over the world. As a result, the faculty members that I worked with were all over the place! 

Prior to my stint at Capella, I’d worked as an instructor at a community college and taught entrepreneurial management courses in a hybrid model – part online and part face-to-face. If you attended higher ed. classes in the early 2000s you too likely saw the beginnings of virtual collaboration in online learning.  

In the grand scheme of things, virtual settings haven’t been around that long. Many industries were slow to incorporate virtual collaboration. Instead flying people halfway across the world for a short business meeting, spending thousands of dollars in the process.  

It wasn’t until the pandemic that things shifted dramatically. Many people had to learn how to collaborate when not in front of each other. This proved difficult for many because it is not human nature. Humans are community based. We do really good work when we’re together in the same location.  

In my own business, the pandemic caused a massive shift. We had just finished building a new product that was not intended to be delivered in a virtual setting. We had secured event locations across the country and marketed our in-person events. Suddenly, my focus shifted to leading virtual trainings on how to set up Microsoft Teams and manage projects when not working in the same place. While we weren’t immune to a huge, pandemic-caused pivot, we did have a leg up. Since my days of coordinating with professors at Capella, I’d been consistently collaborating virtually for a decade. Microsoft Teams was already an integrated part of my processes before the pandemic hit and I had clients and contractors across time zones and state lines. Many other businesses would follow suit.  

Microsoft Teams saw a huge uptick of users over the course of the pandemic, rising from 20 million users in November 2019 to 44 million in March 2020, 75 million in April 2020, 115 million by October 2020, and 145 million in April 2021.  

Lessons Learned 

File Sharing 

Historically, teams that were together had a shared filing system. I remember in my first job putting paperwork away in a giant gray filing cabinet. Part of my training/onboarding for the department directly involved learning their specific filing system. Can you relate? Whether it was alphabetical or based on project or client, there was some decision made early on that was then shared with the group along the way as to how to organize information.  

Everyone is touching the same filing cabinet. If you tried to find something in the filing cabinet and it wasn't organized correctly, it wasted time and energy. And if you saw someone standing in front of the cabinet looking perplexed, it served as a visual representation that something wasn’t working. This would then provoke a reminder in your next team meeting, “People can’t find the things they’re looking for. Let’s review the system…”  

In a virtual team environment, having a place where people can keep their files organized and accessible to the whole department is of equal importance. But we need to be clear about the filing mechanism, organization, and naming conventions. Just like that decision made early on and shared along the way amongst the in-person team, the virtual team needs to come up with a structure as a team. They need to make decisions about what will work best for the group and remind those that have forgotten or are new.  

Quick Connections 

When your team is co-located and you need to talk to each other, you pop your head up from inside your cubicle and if the person isn’t on their phone, you just walk over to their desk or holler out your question. 

While many of us hesitate nowadays to actually pick up the phone and call somebody, being on the phone and getting a real-time response is often the most effective and efficient when trying to make a quick connection with someone in another zip code. I have learned that gauging your teams’ preferences around communication is best, but you also have to come together to establish some rules of engagement.  

For example, if we’re dealing with a risk, don’t just send a text or a Slack chat. Pick up the phone.  

Every team’s level of escalation will look different but deciding ahead of time will save you a whole lot of headaches and mixed (or missed!) messages.  

The Boardroom 

When teams all share a physical office, they probably have some sort of a collaboration space. It might be a giant table they all sit around, a designated huddle corner with a white board, or a conference room. Spaces we look at and know, “that’s for team meetings.”  

When we move into the virtual space, we also need to have a space where we can be face-to-face. Even if our bodies aren’t in the same room, I truly believe seeing faces is so important. That means having access to a camera. It’s also nice to have the ability to share screens and use instant messaging to chat. I also love having the online equivalent of a whiteboard as well as the opportunity to create smaller groups in breakout rooms.  

Engagement and support can feel like second nature when you’re physically sitting with your team, so it’s important that we have the tools we need to create those same feelings remotely.  

The Peopleside® of Virtual 

Finally, building a human component into virtual collaboration technology is something I’m particularly passionate about.

How do we build fun into the system? How can we be creative about it? How can we make sure we’re improving and adjusting so that we’re fitting the needs of our virtual team?  

Every office building is different. The walls are painted different colors; the furniture is arranged differently. They have different meeting spaces and things on the walls and storage systems. The same is true in the virtual space. What works for one team doesn’t necessarily work for the other.  

Find what works for you. After you have identified the tools that your team needs to be successful virtually, it is important to discuss how the team will use these tools. Team norms are a set of guidelines that are established by the team to define how they will work with and interact with each other and the tools. To gain consistency with your team you need defined expectations and processes and then reinforce those expectations. Consistency is important as it leads to habits.