Given that I am just returning today from an international trip where I met with two seperate teams that are absolutely critical to our business and obviously working virtually - I figured it would fit to discuss how we manage a virtual team.

From day 1 our team has been virtual so I’ve gotten quite used to it, however, the more I meet other companies, I have learned that managing a virtual team is quite a task for many and also unsuccesful.

There are many things that we do, some purposely and some just happen by chance that really make a virtual team possible.

Today, let me share some of the TOOLS we use to make it possible…

1. Conference Call Lines

In the U.S. we use www.freeconferencecall.com to run at least 1 team call a week where we have a very specific outline we use:

A) General reporting from the CEO and any other team lead with major news. Here we discuss the status of all on-going projects and any other major developments.

B) We go through all members of call 1 by 1 and ask the following 2 questions:

i) What are the 3 main objectives for this week.
ii) Anything you need from any team members?

** The great thing here is that it makes everyone’s commitments public and also gives everyone a chance to chat live.

If someone commits to doing something, they are now obliged to the entire team. The sense of responsibility drastically increases.

C) We go through any questions anyone has regarding anything going on.

** Our calls range from between 30 minutes to 1 hour.

2. GTalk

Most of us all have Gmail accounts and are constantly logged onto Gtalk so we can easily ping each other instantly if needed.

GTalk allows you to do instant messaging chat and also allows you to use their system for live chat through your computer (which is crystal clear even internationally).

3. Skype

You can host multi-user conference calls through Skype for free which are also free to use.

4. Project Management System

We currently use BaseCamp. This is a system that allows you to create many projects, deadlines, to-do lists, chat boards, etc…all around specific projects. You can also control who has access to what.

http://www.basecamphq.com/

My confession here is that I’m still not very good at using BaseCamp (the rest of the team is), I still prefer receiving e-mail threads, but am trying to get out of that now.

These are the 4 major tools we use to run a virtual team, they are simple and mostly free!

Tip of the Day: Even if you don’t have a virtual team, a weekly team call is critical - it has tremendously helped us stay organized and also build relationships and repore between the team members.

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