Online Team Communication

Online Team Communication

Online learning is now a reality, with distributed learning and blended learning becoming more widely used in Higher Education (Whatley, 1999). Online learning has many advantages and disadvantages. Teamwork in online environments is becoming a widely used tool, whether it is in business or education. A team working together has more and better input than individuals working alone. This results in better ideas and decisions and higher quality output. Virtual teams are a good way to enable teamwork in situations where people are not sitting in the same physical office at the same time. The effective team-building requires the combination of clear team goals, empowerment, atmosphere of trust within the team, authentic participation of every member of team, innovative approach to work and ability to manage risks, proper leadership and ability to make the constructive changes.

Clearly defined goals and objectives are essential so that everyone understands the purpose and vision of the team. A team leader might be surprised at how many people do not know the reason they are doing the tasks that make up their jobs, much less what their team is doing. Everyone must be pulling in the same direction and be aware of the end goals. Empowerment in terms of team building is clear definition of roles and especially of leader's role and functions (Krell, 2007). Clearly defined roles help team members understand why they are on a team. When the members experience conflict, it may be related to their roles. Team members often can manage this conflict by identifying, clarifying, and agreeing on their individual responsibilities so that they all gain a clear understanding of how they will accomplish the team's goals. Another issue is the authentic participation. If communication is the most important team characteristic, participation is the second most important. Without participation, there is no team; there is just group of bodies. Authentic participation ensures that everyone on the team is fully involved (Field, 2007). It does not mean that if leader can have five people each are speaking 20 percent of the time. Talking is not necessarily a measure of participation. We all know people who talk a lot and say nothing. It does mean that each individual is contributing when it is appropriate. The more a team involves all of its members in its activities, the more likely that team is to experience a high level of commitment and synergy (Krell, 2007).

Most problems of all kinds can be traced back to poor communication or lack of communication skills, such as listening well or providing constructive feedback.

Not everyone can perform well in a virtual team environment. The members should be self motivated and able to work independently. They need to be able to keep working effectively without much of external control or structure. The next important quality is strong result-orientation. Unless the person shows clear results, there is nobody around to see how intense his or her work activities are. Another critical factor is communication skills. The team member should be able to communicate clearly, constructively, and positively even through the more limited channels of technology, in spite of the loss of many nonverbal cues of face-to-face communications. Members of virtual teams also need to pay much more attention to maintaining clear goals, performance standards, and communication rules (Field, 2007). People have varying assumptions on what to expect from each other. To avoid build-ups of misunderstandings, in a virtual organization it is critical to replace those assumptions with clear rules and protocols that everyone understands and agrees upon, especially for communication.

In real life, team work success rarely happens by itself, without focused team building efforts and activities. There is simply too much space for problems. For example, different personalities, instead of complementing and balancing each other, may build up conflicts. Or even worse, some people with similar personalities may start fighting for authority and dominance in certain areas of expertise. Even if the team goals are clear and accepted by everyone, there may be no team commitment to the group goals or no consensus on the means of achieving those goals: individuals in the team just follow their personal opinions and move in conflicting directions. There may be a lack of trust and openness that