What the Research Tells Us: Virtual Teams

To continue our series on the training and development findings from our 2021 research study, How We Thrived: Virtual Project Management Practices for the Pandemic and Beyond, as promised in my last blog, I’d like to dig down a bit into the data about virtual teams.

Here at PM College, we’ve been focused on, and writing about, virtual teams pretty much forever. One of the first articles I recall reading on this topic was a column by Deborah Bigelow Crawford in PM Network, about 20 years ago. Since then, developing training materials for both virtual and in person training, and working virtually as a dispersed community of instructors, researchers, curriculum designers, training execs and training clients has taught PM College a lot about the ins and outs of virtual teaming. We were thus a bit better prepared for 2020 than many companies.

We’ve taken our own advice on virtual teams, and rely on them to meet our goals. So it was validating to see, in the 2021 study of how organizations met their goals in spite of the pandemic, that virtual team practices scored very highly as success factors. The top three practices used by high-performing organizations in the study were:

1. Held regularly scheduled, effective virtual team meetings
2. Allowed flexible work hours
3. Made an extra effort to keep people feeling committed to the team

They also excelled at setting up team member expectations to clearly outline virtual participation, as well as developing reward systems that kept virtual team members motivated.

Facilitating virtual team meetings also showed up as a top practice for project managers in the high-performing organization.

My own experience as a leader and team member in the virtual environment over the past 25 years tells me that managers often do not do that well at virtual teaming, unless they are specifically trained to understand how virtual or remote work differs from office-based. There’s good and bad in both environments, and individuals react quite differently. Training project managers to facilitate virtual teams is thus a key first step in achieving the kind of improved organizational performance we saw in this year’s study—in good times and bad.