Learn About the Team
Working on virtual teams offers a lot of advantages; companies reduce overhead, workers get more flexibility and autonomy. The biggest challenge of working on a virtual team is communication. Language nuances in communication, differing time zones, and just generally getting to know people is harder in a virtual environment.
Assembla takes a lot of the financial and technology pain points out of working on a virtual team, but the people aspects are always a little harder. The following points will help you adapt what we know about best practices for working on a virtual team to working on Assembla.
Who is on the team?
Assembla governs permissions at the workspace level. The space owner adds people to it based on who needs to see the same information. There may be people on the team that aren’t in the workspace. For example, stakeholders and analysts may not be in a development workspace, but they are on the team. Ask the person who invited you who is where and in what space.
Who is in the workspace? Where are people from? What are the time differences?
This is easy. You can click on the Team tab in the workspace and see a list of everyone in the workspace. Click on the username links to view each person’s photo, last login and contact information. You can click a link to go to their full profile which will include information about background, interests and helps team members get to know each other better. Individuals choose the information to share. Connections and trust are built through relationships.
What are the ground rules for keeping core hours?
With everyone working in different time zone, there is probably a certain set of core hours that everyone works around. There may be subtle shifts in what these are based on what your work is that are different from the published core hours. Check with the people you primarily work with what hours they work.
How are meetings conducted? What outside communication channels are used?
At Assembla, we use the Chat tool to hold daily standup meetings. It provides the basic functions for holding a virtual team meeting, which is a list of everyone who is in the meeting, ability to hold a real time conversation, and accessibility via the web.
The most commonly used outside communication tool in the Assembla community is Skype, followed by Jabber IM.
- Download Skype here. Basic accounts are free.
- Download Jabber here. The client is free, but you must connect through the Assembla server.
Your team may have other communication channels based on either how geeky they are or how much money they have to spend. Even though other tools may be available, they may require more bandwidth or better setups and not everyone has that luxury. Skype and Assembla Chat are the lowest common denominators for hardware and network setups. If you can stick to these, everyone will be able to participate more fully.
Also, the more communication channels used by a team the harder it is to get everyone to communicate… there are too many places to look for people or check messages, and the messages left get out of date. Try to stick to the main tools that everyone on the team uses.
What is everyone’s job on the team?
Assembla doesn’t have formal job titles. We are all more than the title we get paid by. If your team has official duties and responsibilities, your workspace owner will know who to contact. Assembla roles are not the same as titles… Our roles describe permission assignments.
How do team members socialize?
Working on a distributed team with people you’ve never met can be a challenge… It is hard to build trust and working relationships with people you don’t see every day. One of the strongest aspects of Assembla is the built in community features. Check with team organizers to see what folks are up to. There may be public workspaces that team members are encouraged to participate in that are related to the project, like a Ruby on Rails forum. Or maybe everyone is playing WoW. You never know.
How do you say "Hi"?
When joining a virtual team, there are three choices:
Take a look through the workspace and get grounded. Then just post a "Hi" in the Chat.Wait until you have a reason to talk to someone and then be really friendly.As you have time, reach out to people and say hello (via IM or voice).
Which option you choose is generally based on how social you are and what your cultural norms are. In general option 3 is the strongest. The time to talk to people isn't when you need them. It is before you need them. If you only talk to people when you need them, they will not be as helpful as when you talk to them regularly. Here is a good sample script:
"Hi. My name is ________. I just joined the ________ space on Assembla and saw you listed. I'm just getting up to speed on the project and thought I'd say hello. Is this a good time?" Then commence small talk.