Collaborativity meets the Challenge of Virtual Work

As social creatures, we are accustomed to physical presence and contact during our communications. In virtual communications, most assume we have lost some of our capacity to communicate.

While some “social bandwidth” is lost, we can significantly improve our ability to communicate using virtual presence technologies. In this technological age, it is ironic, and no less true, that we maximize communications technologies when we maximize our individual gifts, through the most basic of human skills: self-awareness, listening, and speaking.

Foundations of the Collaborativity approach

• · Successful virtual teams thrive when organizational culture values and supports shared leadership, collaboration, and free flow of information.
• · Adaptive, diverse, and collaborative virtual teams are more responsive, innovative and productive than highly structured, control-oriented ones.
• · Communications practices in virtual teams require explicit attention to alignment, diversity of perspectives and opinions, feedback mechanisms, and adaptive meeting formats.

Successful virtual relationships—as managers, leaders, and team members—require us to have multiple skills sets. And the willingness to improve what we believe we have mastered.

So You Think You Know How to Use the Phone?

For example, most of us assume we are expert in the use of that most basic of communications technology: the telephone. After all, we started using the phone as kids. But most of us leave the telephone’s latent “social bandwidth” unused because we have not mastered the human skills of self-awareness, listening, and speaking. Understanding, and addressing, the differences between in-person and virtual meetings are critical.

Telephone Bandwidth—Way Beyond 56K

At Collaborativity, we believe when we expand our individual communications gifts with skills and human-centered protocols, we can turn the telephone’s unique characteristics into relationship-enriching assets. Telephone-based meetings, supported by explicit processes, then successfully replace the interactions we use in face to face communications.

Experience has shown everyone possesses these skills in latent form. Collaborativity training makes these skills explicit. Once we notice and are aware of their use, we become more effective in all communications— whether in-person or over the telephone.

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