What Is Virtual Collaboration?

Few of us work every day, all day, in a traditional office anymore. We log in from clients’ offices. We participate in conference calls on our commutes. We work more and more frequently with people perched at faraway desks, whom we’ve never met.

Virtual collaboration is the new norm. For the purpose of this book, virtual collaboration means all the work we do with others when we don’t see them face to face. You’re a virtual collaborator if you:

• Work outside an office regularly, full or part time

• Work from home in a pinch, because of bad weather or to wait for a contractor, care for a sick child, change your scenery, or get more done

• Travel regularly, but need to stay in touch with your team back home

• Are on a short-term assignment away from your usual workplace

The “virtual” part of these arrangements arises in how you interact with the people with whom you work. Brainstorming over video chat, updating each other on projects by text, sharing files over e-mail: In each scenario, the communication tool you’re using functions as a simulated space where you meet to work together. Making this space work well poses a unique set of communication, scheduling, and motivational challenges.

What’s not virtual, of course, is the person on the other end. The pixelated, jerky figures on your screen are flesh and blood, and your interactions with them are subject to the same dynamics as any other professional encounter. You need to build rapport and trust, communicate effectively, and be productive. But these goals can be harder to achieve in a virtual setting, when communication becomes muddled, scheduling grows more complicated, and isolation and distractions prey on your ability to stay focused and motivated.

This book shows you how to solve the technological and administrative puzzles of virtual collaboration; it presents solutions such as finding and using the right tools, routinizing communication, and tracking progress. And it gives you tips for managing the social and emotional experience, too, as you strive to deepen professional connections while working in isolation.

The challenges of virtual collaboration

Just because we’re all working remotely at some point in our careers doesn’t mean that we’re good at it. The habits that helped you in an office won’t always make sense when you’re working remotely. Which changes are hardest to adapt to?

You must set and manage expectations more proactively. One of the great things about virtual work is that each person can tailor the arrangement to their own needs—and this means that everyone does it differently. There’s no standard workday, no common conventions for writing text messages. And no one knows when it’s their turn to speak on a conference call.

You are your own IT department. If you’re in an office, you can rely on IT specialists to address your technology issues. But if you’re off-site, you need to get up and running—and stay there—even if it’s not your area of expertise.

You spend more time building and maintaining relationships. When there are fewer chance encounters, you must purposefully and proactively reach out to colleagues. Because every interaction requires some planning, it carries a higher tax—more e-mails to answer, more calendar notifications to sort. Yet the social distance between you and your colleagues is harder to close—some days you feel so lonely you wind up talking the ear off the delivery person.

You’re communicating with blunt tools. Without face-to-face interaction, you spend more time sussing out unspoken expectations, trying to interpret incomplete messages, or sifting through pages of project updates.

Other people can’t “see” your work. How do you let colleagues know you’re not binge-viewing the latest hit series? How can you manage people’s perceptions of you with such limited opportunities for meaningful interaction?

To meet these challenges, you’ll need great communication skills and a sense of initiative. You’ll develop new instincts for how to express courtesy, enthusiasm, or dissent in digital communication. You’ll become more self-reliant as solving technological glitches becomes routine, and more self-motivated as you develop rhythms with both your work and your partners to get your job done. You’ll also learn to tolerate the ambiguity inherent in this work—to find the humor and spirit in a coworker’s terse e-mails or to make a decision on your own when your colleagues aren’t around for consultation.

For you, the payoff is a kind of flexibility that’s hard to come by in a traditional office. Virtual collaboration gives you more control over your day-to-day experience and frees you to do work in the time, place, and manner that best suits your needs. And flexibility for you can actually mean a closer working relationship with each of your colleagues, whether they’re a onetime collaborator in another city or a regular coworker who sits next to you in the office four days out of five. You’ll stay in touch even when normal, side-by-side routines don’t bind you together, and you’ll keep assignments moving along so that everyone stays productive.

This level of productivity, of course, requires some up-front investment in relationship basics. You’ll start at the ground level by setting expectations with your collaborators about how you’ll work together.