Question

1. Suppose that you are part of a virtual team and must persuade other team members on an important matter (such as switching suppliers or altering the project deadline). Assuming that you cannot visit these people in person, what can you do to maximize your persuasiveness?

Answer 1

Solution:

One of the major disadvantages of being in a virtual team is that there is no physical interaction and everything about the work is discussed over the call. This is very risky because having an in-person touch is always helpful for teams working together on a project. The in-person interaction helps in bonding well of the team members and hence the team cohesion goes up. This increases the performance levels of the team and makes them more effective. However, this is not the case when the teams are working virtually together.

With virtual teams, there is rarely any physical interaction and it becomes very difficult to create a strong bond within the team to ensure effective team dynamics. because of the virtual nature of the communication, it becomes crucial for the team leader to be able to convey the thoughts across and have an effective implementation of work on that. To ensure that your ideas are heard and implemented in virtual teams we can either converse through a video conferencing and explain in detail the reason behind a certain change in the project and also present certain findings to convince the team members to listen to your advice and work accordingly. Another way could be to have direct communication with the concerned person and explain everything to the person to ensure the changes are done accordingly.

Hence, this is how you can remove the communication roadblocks in the virtual teams and get your thoughts and ideas across your team and convince them to implement your ideas.