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Virtual Teams: Success For Small Business
| Guest post by: Charly Leetham |
Article Overview: When you create a virtual team, it becomes incredibly important to have clearly defined deliverables and timeframes. It is equally as important to ensure that your communications are clear. It's hard enough when people are in the same office to get all of these things working toegether, let alone when staff are in different time zones. Add to this, that you may have clients half way around the world, the whole team dynamic becomes more complicated. Developing a Virtual Team means that YOU, as the business owner, will be the Team Leader. As the Team Leader, you will be responsible for providing the guidelines, specific deliverables, deadlines and work parameters.
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Free Download - Google Panda and Your Search Engine Rankings By Charly Leetham |
Virtual Teams: Success For Small Business
When you create a virtual team, it becomes incredibly important to have clearly defined deliverables and timeframes. It is equally as important to ensure that your communications are clear. It's hard enough when people are in the same office to get all of these things working toegether, let alone when staff are in different time zones. Add to this, that you may have clients half way around the world, the whole team dynamic becomes more complicated.
For all these reasons, I suggest that a small business should start out slowly and with smaller, targetted projects and then progress to larger projects, as the fine points are mastered. Growing your virtual team from one or two people to ten is likely to cause chaos and growing pains that aren't fun or productive. When your virtual team, grows at a slower, more gentle pace you will find that that learning curve (and that of your staff) becomes easier to deal with.
Developing a Virtual Team means that YOU, as the business owner, will be the Team Leader. As the Team Leader, you will be responsible for providing the guidelines, specific deliverables, deadlines and work parameters.
Be clear, be concise and give your team members a deadline by which to confirm and accept any assignments. The acceptance of an assignment is incredibly important - don't just assume that because you've sent a job, that your team member has accepted it. Your Virtual Team members, have their own lives and those lives can get complicated. By including them in the decision making process, a small business owner can better insure that deliverables and timeframes are met and that communication goes more smoothly, with the least amount of disruption.
Leverage Your Teams Talents
Fine tune your work assignments to your team's talents. This might sound like common sense, but it is often forgotten in the heat of the moment. By fine tuning your work to capitilize on your team's talents, the work comes out better, the client is certainly happier and you have a better working relationship as a result.
Your team should be aware however, that once an assignment is turned down that the work will be assigned to someone else. Speaking of which, if one of your team members is doing great with one client - keep the deliverables consistent. Clients like to have work that "feels" right and the more your Virtual Team gets to know a client's needs, and anticipate them, the better.
Schedule and Plan Your Work
When looking at team assignments, it's important to consider the regular or scheduled work. This becomes particularly important when considering acquiring more work or clients. It goes without saying that looking after your "regulars" and ensuring that you have the capacity for their work, is critical to business success.
Planning
At the end of the day, a small business owner needs to come up with an assignment process for deadlines and deliverables and use that consistently. Work flow and timing is an important par of this process - if you receive client request on Saturday, then email your Team on Monday with the assignments and do that EVERY WEEK WITHOUT FAIL.
Be assured, that as your business evolves, you'll find an approach that helps you determine necessary resources, improve your planning process, and provides an excellent feel for both your Team's and Client's level of communication/understanding.
Five Ingredients For Virtual Success
No Trust, No Team: Building Trust in a Virtual Setting
Virtual Collaboration is Not For Everyone: The Characteristics of Top Performing Virtual Leaders and Team Members
4 Keys to Achieve Success With Your Virtual Teams
How to Stay Connected in a Virtual Team
Article Tags: business owner, small business, team dynamics, team leader, virtual team, virtual teams
Referred by: http://www.outrageouslyhealthy.com
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About the Author: Charly Leetham RSS for Charly's articles - Visit Charly's website Charly's expertise has been developed throughout her career that exceeds 24 years. Initially as a hands on 'tech' in the Electronics and Communications Industry (before the IT Industry even existed) and later as a Sales Person, Client Relationship Manager and Contract Manager managing business for employers. In 2004, Charly left her steady, 6 figure a year job to follow her dream of becoming a small business entrepreneur. Her journey has taken her from Retail Store Franchisee, through financial turbulence to a steady and comfortable Home Based Business. Charly shares the experience, the challenges, the realisations and the lessons that she has learnt during her journey to Home Business Entrepreneur. In addition, Charly is Wishlist Member Certified and is one of a few online business professionals who are recommended by the creators of the Wordpress Wishlist Membership Plugin to consult, install and configure Wordpress based Membership and Community Sites.Click here to visit Charly's website   Google Panda and Your Search Engine Rankings Why Choosing The Right Membership Model Is Critical To Business Success Virtual Teams Success For Small Business Building teams for Small Businesses and Solopreneurs Email Marketing The Importance To Small Business |
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The Little Man Introduction
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This is John Hoover from Little Man Consulting. Our company has been floating along as a after thought for a few years. This year we decided to make a go of it. So far we are doing great.
We are Virtual Administrators, Web Developers, Database Designers, and Software instructors. Basically, if you have someone in your office to do it, we can do it virtually. Our company was created to "Provide Big Business Resources to the Small Business".
Wish me luck, I plan on revolutionizing the small business world with this!
My entry
- 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read
- this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody.
2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto.
3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book
Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
These maybe the coldest franchises out there:
- Here are the worst 15 performing franchises in regards to having the highest Small Business Administration (SBA) loan failure rates. The list is dotted with sub sandwich shops, fitness centers and car shops.
WORST FRANCHISE LOAN FAILURES Failure %
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Exclusive: Interview with Results
- Hi Forum Members,
I'm helping start up a Business Coaching and Consulting company here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (a Subsidiary of RSC Business in Los Angeles).
As a Research and Development Intern I am required to practice my listening and interview skills by surveying Small and Medium Businesses on thier Business.
This Survey is designed by RSC Business to also assist the Business being interviewed more insight into their own business.
I am looking to interview about 30 businesses across North America over the span of 3 months.
At the end of these interviews I will be publishing a report of the results and they will be made available for free to the Interviewees. The Report data will include responses from a minimum of 100 interviews.
I would like to extend this opportunity to members of the Forum.
If you would like to have this short 20-30 minute interview conducted on your Business and you reside in North America please send me an email or PM.
Please contact me at andy[at]jvprosperity[dot]com to arrange our interview and to get free access to the results when they are published.
Re: Biz Plan Competition
- i just wanted to say that posting Small Business Events on CanadaOne is a great resource. Thanks Julie!
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