As work goes virtual, people lose the ancient connection between groups and places. Historically, place serves both social and task factors. While we struggle to create new virtual places to hold our work, these places are even more important for holding the human glue of a team that “clicks.” As physical space dissolves, virtual spaces must be created to serve fundamental small group purposes. While using virtual places to better manage and do our work is a powerful new enabler of teams, we all too often ignore or miss the critical people factors that will usually determine success or failure.

The sociology of collocated teams has matured over thousands of years. People know how to do teams face-to-face. It’s in our genes.

Time and teams have changed. We are just beginning to tackle the sociology of virtual teams. This new way of working is not in our genes, but it grows out of and depends upon ancient knowledge about collaboration.

Independent
People
have skills and experience they bring to a job-position with one or more roles

Interdependent
Positions
have relationships played as roles in structures and processes within and between teams

The NetAge Virtual Teams Methodology and its associated training includes deep attention to people factors that need to be part of the new distributed way of working. Historically, three key factors of team formation and persistence have been associated with a shared place:

• Identity
  “Shared but secret information” separates members (“us”) from others (“them”)
• Socialization
  New people become members of a group through “controlled access to group information”
• Rank
  According to tradition, authority  is highly dependent on access to exclusive places that houses special knowledge

The methodology includes a series of steps (a process) to collect, or create, key data regarding the who, what, why, and when for a team that also shapes a basic team room architecture:

People (in positions) team members, their roles, other players and other teams Purpose Team goals and tasks inside and mission, results outside Links Roles and relationships within and between teams Time Activities represented by calendars, plans, and life cycles are moments in time