their people to deliver upon them. We believe the answer lies in virtual teams focusing on the everyday actions they need to take to make a difference. There is a simple six step process which can galvanise virtual teams and focus them on what really matters: STEP ONE – Ask your virtual team if each one is clear on what their goal is and what they should be doing to smash it. The answers will probably be mixed at best. Take time to bring clarity to the team goal. Then organize a ten-week sprint. Get everyone together and motivate and inspire them to smash that goal. STEP TWO – Sit down with each member of the team and be very specific about what they need to do to contribute to smashing the goal. Encourage them to act small and often. Encourage them to focus, not be distracted, and stick to the task. STEP THREE – Measure progress and make sure everyone can see how they and the team are doing. For this we devised an app called Nudge. It does two things - it Nudges people every day on their phones or PCs to carry out their key individual actions. It also gives the team access to high quality tracking and insights about how they are getting on. STEP FOUR – Encourage everyone to aim for progress and not perfection. It is consistency we are trying to achieve, not 100% infallibility. STEP FIVE – Make everyone accountable to ensure they maintain momentum. Give everyone a peer coach and hold coaching sessions with everyone to discuss their progress, their challenges, and their approach to the following week’s effort. STEP SIX – Finally, make sure that each week you celebrate the small successes, and call out the achievements of members of the team, especially when they help colleagues and work in a collaborative way.The results, in our pilots with virtual teams, have been hugely encouraging. The cyber security business VCG trialed a ten-week sprint with their sales team. They aimed to put on £3 million in value across their sales pipeline. They cracked that in just 3 weeks. By the end of the sprint, they’d added £4.6 million in new sales. What’s more the process of bringing people together, focusing and inspiring them, transformed employee engagement. Their engagement scores went from a depressing -69 to a positive +20. In all, they added more than 450 new business opportunities. Most of all, the methodology transformed prioritization and hugely reduced the distraction of non-value adding activity. It remains tough to convince some that many of the methods of the past are unfit for the virtual world. However, with the right commitment the focus on “everyday actions” cannot fail to make game changing improvements in performance. Since the pandemic many organizations have met the challenges of the virtual by only tweaking what they did in the old world of work. The reality is dawning. What we did in the past is not fit for the present. Some of those who led teams in the past may not have the skills, aptitude, and emotional intelligence to lead in the present. The new world of work requires a new mindset. That is the secret of how to make a virtual team a happy one. Jeremy Campbell is the CEO of performance improvement and technology business Black Isle Group; an expert on behavioural science; and an executive coach. About the Author
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