Challenges Faced By Virtual Teams Building and maintaining trust – with less interpersonal interaction and greater need for self-reliance, it’s hard for virtual team members to trust one another. Creating synergy – when people don’t spend time with one another, it’s difficult for them to connect with one another. It’s even harder for their manager to encourage that bonding take place. Battling isolation – many virtual team members (including managers) work along in home offices, or in remote company offices. Isolation can make a team member feel out of the loop and can create social problems that are hard to assess (because you can’t see them) and address (because it’s harder to connect on a personal level) Collaborative processes – managers need to adapt their management style and establish new ways to encourage and monitor group processes. Virtual team members are required to be independent thinkers and self-starters. Sometimes that means they’ll try to do everything themselves. Assessing performance – When employees are scattered around the globe, it’s hard to see when they’re neglecting their work. It’s also hard to see when they’re performing above and beyond their duties. This makes it difficult to detect and address performance problems or to reward excellence. Virtual team managers must establish reliable quantitative and qualitative measures for accurate performance assessment. Cultural Concerns Successful virtual team members learn to cope with different national, corporate, and vocational cultures. As a member of a team working across borders, members must prepare themselves for the likelihood that they will be confronted with all kinds of dilemmas, ranging from cultural to social to environmental to ethical. There are a number of elements that reflect the cultural diversity of a team. Here, we will briefly address two areas of particular concern for virtual team members: language and time; addressing these areas can increase both team performance and…