Virtual teams VS Face to Face teams, THIS is the key to your success

Agile or Kanban, teams or zoom, pizza or pasta? These are all good questions. But the one question virtual leaders want to know is: Virtual teams vs face to face teams, which is better? Or at least what are the advantages or disadvantages of each.

Virtual teams vs face to face teams is an important question to ask. However, the key is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each.

If understanding is the key, understanding and applying that knowledge is stepping through the door to the other side. Being able to utilise this will unlock your ability to succeed in the modern business setting.

Your business is unique to you. You will have your own distinct culture, practices, and market demands. This means if you try to force something that doesn’t fit or align with your current situation you could be running headlong into trouble.

Many companies, after enforcing telecommuting, have since reversed these policies. Yahoo was a clear example of this in 2013.

However, I don’t think that banning one or the other is the way forward. The knee jerk reaction of banning telecommuting was an example of the pendulum, drastically, swinging from one extreme to the other.

So where can you start?

First ask yourself:

1. What types of teams am I currently leading?
2. What tasks are they carrying out face-to-face and what tasks are they carrying out virtually?

Map these out so you can review them later.  

By the end of reading this you will be able to understand better the strengths of virtual teams vs face to face teams and how you can allocate your efforts accordingly.

Virtual Teams vs Face to Face Teams – Virtual Teams Are Better?

Many studies have been carried out regarding the efficiency and efficacy of virtual teams in contrast to face to face teams. If you lead virtual teams, it might be music to your ears to hear that they have been shown to collaborate more effectively for some tasks than face to face teams.

A good example of this was a study “Comparing the Effectiveness of Face to Face and Computer Mediated Collaboration in Design” (Hatem, 2012). This study showed that collaboration often decreased due to negative emotions relating to the task.

If you want your teams to perform well, it is critical that they have positive emotions, not only to the task, but also to their team members. This is especially important when there is a requirement to collaborate.

An interesting fact the study highlighted was this. CMC teams on average made more, on task interactions that FTF. This surprised me, you would assume that face to face teams would be more successful at collaborating.

Hatem noted that on group tasks one individual would take the lead role. In the study this person was referred to as user one (U1). In FTF teams U1 would often use body language and gestures cutting off communication from U2.

Over the duration of the project this would affect U2’s emotional state towards the project as well as their participation. This in fact increases quite dramatically, especially, when the two participants had a larger gap of expertise.

Hatem pointed out that:

The positve emotion factor is better for User2 in CMC than it is in FTF, which indicates teh more submissive team member becomes more positive…Likewise the negative emotion factor improved for both users in CMC, indicating a better relationship between users.”

Wadhah Amer Hatem: Comparing the Effectiveness of
Face to Face and Computer Mediated
Collaboration in Design, 2012

Now before you jump back onto that pendulum and start forcing all your teams to work online. Take the next point into consideration. According to a Mckinsey survey in 2021 just 11% (8% pre pandemic) of surveyed workers wanted to only work remotely.

So, before you start trying to implement something that could end in workers revolt, lets pick this apart a little further.

There is a lot that can be unlocked here, not all of which I can write in this article, however, here are some key things to think about. The affect time plays in a role or task, its complexity, ability to use tools and systems, team size and the dynamics between different individuals.

Here’s something quick that you could think about.

1. Who are the U1 and U2 players in your teams?
   • Have you even thought about this or mapped it out?
   • Do you sometimes approach as a U1 player?

As I said. There is a lot to unpick there but hopefully, that will give you a start of things to think about. If you have time, write, and map this stuff out. If you don’t have time, fear not. This will be playing sweetly in your subconscious while you sleep!

Virtual Teams vs Face to Face Teams – Face To Face Teams Are Better?

Sometimes face to face work offers opportunities that cannot be substituted by virtual work. A study of nurses, in Scotland in the UK, found that mentors would often let students practice on them.

This was very helpful as sometimes anatomical models were not available, a problem that highlighted in another study of remote health workers in Nigeria (if you are interested in this and how it relates to effective remote leadership, I have written an article here). Furthermore, from a kinesthetics learning perspective it is very effective to teach in this way and can also support bonding between the mentor and mentee.

Spending time together travelling between patients allowed mentors to learn about their students, not only professionally but also personally. They were even able to support difficult issues such as deaths of patients during these debriefings.

As a leader or an employee of a business you do not need to share your personal life for all to see. However, the leader who fails to understand and help address their teams’ personal struggles is doomed to fail.

Working face-to-face gives you the opportunity to communicate with less distractions and generates a stronger feeling of trust between members. All methods of communication that are not face-to-face, according to Bos et al. (2002), are considered as having delayed or fragile trust.

When you consider that trust is one of the central constructs of teamwork and team success clearly having some sort of face-to-face contact is critical.

Innefective teamwork is often the prevailing reason for success or failure. No matter what the developments in technology are. There will always be an element of teamwork required. Not addressing this as a leader can have devastating consequences.

For example Risser et al. (1999) reviewed 54 incidents across eight different emergency departments in U.S hospitals. They found half of the deaths and permanent disabilities that occurred in these incidents could have been prevented had teamwork been better.

O. Brown: Teamwork in Extreme Environments, 2012

As already displayed (Hatem 2012) we know that CMC can be more efficient in its communication. However, FTF communication can speed up larger and more complex projects.

The CMC vs FTF study only covers one project. Furthermore, this specific project is just one element of a piece of much larger work. It is a component of for a large construction project.

So the success of this element being carried out as CMC does not directly point to FTF being inferior. Undoubtedly the project still required, multiple face-to-face and virtual teams within it.

It would likely fail without the right combination of both.

In an article by a team at MIT studying productivity the authors follow the following line of thought. (if anyone wants me to dig this out please let me know)

1. Face-to-Face communication is the “richest” medium for transferring information.
2. Face-to-Face promotes trust
3. Higher trust = higher transfer of knowledge / information

What is meant by a richer medium is one in which there are multiple social cues, communicated without any break, that allow people to quickly build rapport “through both natural language and body language.

These rich social cues allow us to easily understand each other and to develop the trust needed to transfer complex knowledge between one another.

The most important takeaways from all the research regarding face-to-face are:

1. Tasks that require great levels of trust benefit most from face-to-face
2. Highly complex tasks that require great levels of knowledge sharing benefit from face-to-face.

Face-to-face is an expensive commodity and should be use with a more acute appreciation. Used effectively it is massively powerful and is an important asset to your organisation. Reject it at your peril. Almost as bad as rejecting face-to-face is not utilising it thoughtfully.

Allowing the dominant to tyrannise, or off task communication to completely take over can be just as damaging. Knowing where face to face is running off task and how you can support your team to stay on task is critical.

1. Where in your organisation should you be using face to face?
2. As a leader what things should you be carrying out face to face and which could be done virtually.

Virtual Teams vs Face to Face Teams – Selecting What’s Best For Your Organisation AND Task

So, let’s pull the pendulum back to the equilibrium again. Both elements have benefits in all the following areas: Cost, time, and quality of work done.

Your larger and more complex team tasks will have elements that benefit more from being face-to-face and some that will benefit from becoming more virtualised.

Sometimes other factors will be at play. Face-to-face might not be economically viable. Or you might not have the systems, hardware, or software to implement a virtual setup.

Moving certain aspects from face-to-face also requires changing attitudes and behaviours of staff which opens its own challenges.

The McKinsey study showed post-COVID-19 workers wanting flexible work moving forward had risen from 52% from 38% (here). The fact that businesses were forced to invest in remote work capability coupled with workers being forced to work remotely clearly helped with this shift.

However, what is clear is that although all of this was forced, there is still a clear demand and need for face-to-face communication in the workplace.

A few points you can action on this…

This week sit down with a member of your team:

1. Write down the benefits of remote work on one side of a piece of paper.
   1. Do the same for face-to-face work
   2. On the other side think about how you could apply, as much as possible these benefits into the opposite.
   3. For example a benefit of face to face is trust: For virtual teams you could increase time and frequency of video calls to increase this.
2. Get one of your team to map out their tasks and rank from most face-to-face requirement least face-to-face requirement.
   1. Does this match with what they are currently doing?
   2. Are there any points you disagree?
   3. If there are things that could be changed rank them with easiest to implement and most expected impact.
   4. Pick one thing to implement and track the results
3. Think of your U2 team members you listed earlier
   1. If you can work face-to-face
      • Allocate some time to listen to their ideas.
      • Actually, listen to their ideas.
      • Help them implement their ideas that you can sign off.
   2. If you cannot carry out face to face work with them.
      • Can you increase frequency of communication to increase their participation?
      • Remember text chat has the least trust and easiest trust to break.
      • Frequent, scheduled video or phone chat. Make sure you listen!