Building Effective Virtual Teams: From Relationships to Results
Following up on our strategies for virtual connection with tactical frameworks for team performance.
Sian Romo
Consultant | Vector Advisory Services, LLC
Introduction:
With an estimated 22% of the U.S. workforce set to be working remotely in 2025, the formation and management of virtual teams is a critical component of continued organizational success. Virtual teams allow organizations to access resources outside their immediate geographic proximity, and in pivotal moments such as integration work, ensure an enterprise develops a strong foundation for inorganic growth.
Virtual teams aren’t going to disappear with the return to office mandates issued by many major companies and it’s imperative that organizations develop methodologies to enhance the outputs that both temporary and permanent virtual teams deliver. Though industry nuances and cultural contexts influence virtual team efficacy, the hallmarks of high-performing virtual teams remain consistent: leveraging the right technology, establishing regular meetings, clarifying as well as tracking commitments, and fostering a culture of accountability.
Leveraging the Right Technology:
Where possible, teams should leverage existing technologies and platforms that are accessible across the combined entities. This mitigates the challenges of learning new technologies while attempting to drive change management and prevents unnecessary resource allocation in attempting to make collaborative systems function effectively.
Establishing a Regular Meeting Cadence:
Regular meetings provide opportunities for team members to encourage joint solution-seeking and form supportive structures. For virtual teams’ routine checkpoints are even more important to gauge progress on independent work tasks, reassign workloads, and provide feedback on barriers to advancement. Meetings ideally occur on the same day and time each week and where possible consideration should be made for virtual teams working across multiple time zones to avoid placing an undue burden on specific team members.
Clarifying and Tracking Commitments:
One of the key challenges that virtual teams experience is the inability to directly observe other members’ engagement and productivity. Virtual teams should be intentional in explicitly defining intermediate steps to accomplish milestones and goals and leverage shared tools to demonstrate output. Combined with regular status meetings, establishing clear tasks and processes to reach collective goals ensures virtual team members remain on-track in both independent and interdependent tasks.
Fostering a Culture of Accountability:
Accountability for virtual teams can be addressed through various methodologies, including regular team meetings and time-tracking tools. Developing processes that foster productivity, transparency, and collaboration such as daily check-ins with the team helps hold everyone accountable for their work. Virtual teams should also have 1:1s set up between managers and team members to provide employees with a designated time to discuss progress, voice concerns, and seek solutions.
Vector’s Approach:
Virtual collaboration is at the core of Vector’s operating model with both our internal and client engagements primarily conducted in digital environments. Consequently, Vector has developed and refined processes that prevent common virtual team challenges from hindering forward momentum for our clients.
Specifically, within our M&A workstream the success of virtual teams who seek to achieve a 90% integrated state in 90 days is paramount. These teams are driving a significant amount of change within a short timeframe and need to effectively deploy the techniques above to reach an integrated state. For example, the Vector team will lead regular status meetings with functional team members to discuss progress, mitigate arisen risks, and escalate to key decision makers. The Vector team embeds these techniques within the M&A framework, enabling clients and their integration teams to realize the full value creation potential these transactions were designed for.
Conclusion:
While some in the corporate landscape seek a retreat from virtual engagement, one of Vector’s distinctive advantages lies in our geographically diverse expertise. We continue to refine our frameworks supporting effective virtual collaboration, recognizing that both our permanent teams and temporary client engagements thrive in this model—a cornerstone of how we deliver exceptional value.