Working Together When You Work Apart: A Guide to A Unified Virtual Team

You want to start a business with a group of friends, but you all live in different cities. Will somebody – or several somebodies – have to move? Not these days. You can keep up with each other and share a “virtual office space” online. In fact, doing so may mean that you will save money on overhead, if your business is service-oriented. Instead of renting a physical bricks and mortar office space to share, you can operate within a free or nearly-free virtual space, and physically work at home (if you can stand the solitude and/or potential distractions). How will you do it? Here are a few pointers:

Get in the habit of scanning all your physical documents into electronic format.

That way you can easily share documents with your colleagues in another city or state with the click of a button.

Decide where you will store electronic project files that you need to share.

You may want to turn to an official online collaborative workspace, such as Huddle, or a shared online file storage account, such as Dropbox or Google Documents, both of which are fairly accessible from a multitude of devices, and both of which allow you to invite coworkers to share a file or folder. Some collaborative workspaces are set up to allow you to create online Wiki files for your project, which can be very helpful if your project guidelines are continuously being updated. Almost all will allow you to create project-based to do lists and calendars.

Make a habit of tracking your time so that you can give accurate estimates of how long tasks take to other team members.

You can use an online time tracker such as toggl, Tick, Harvest, or yaTimer. Some of these time trackers will allow you to set a time budget for a project or a task. You can also use the resident timer that you’ll find in an online collaborative workspace such as Huddle, or in an online invoicing program such as Freshbooks (see below).

You may want to consider setting up an Evernote or Stixy account for your team.

Guidelines, project documentation, notes, transcripts, and receipts can all be searched – making it faster for any member of your team to find the information that is needed. If you need someone to scan handwritten notes and receipts, you might want to try sending them all to Shoeboxed, which will scan them and integrate the results with your Evernote account, for a monthly fee. Or, you may want to try using online collaborative brainstorming software, such as Wridea, Writeboard, ReviewBasics, or EditGrid.

Choose a conference call platform that works well for you.

You may want to keep it simple and use your cell phone carrier to conference calls together, if you only need to talk to a few people at once. Or you may want to make video conference calls using Skype, Oovoo, or even Google Chat.

Set up an online billing/accounting/bookkeeping/time tracking program

One that you can all access via the Internet. You might want to investigate Freshbooks, Bill.com, Outright, IAC-EZ, MinuteDock, and ProWorkflow.

Use social networking software, such as Twitter, to take the place of interoffice memos, when they can be short and sweet.

Or use Manymoon, which integrates with LinkedIn and will allow you to microblog in a Twitteresque way to just your project members. ManyMoon will also keep track of project tasks, events, and time, and can be used as a shared space to store files and folders, similar to Huddle. Just remember to be careful about privacy when using a public messaging system. For longer “memos,” you might want to use a forum structure, or set up an email newsgroup in Google or Yahoo Groups, to allow you to update your team members. Having an email newsgroup devoted to each project can be a way to help team members keep control of their email, if it tends to get out of hand, because all emails from the newsgroup will have the same tag line and will be from the same place – enabling team members to write email filters for each project.

Make a commitment to being organized.

It’s one thing to put off logging your time spent on a project for several weeks when it affects only you, or forgetting to file project documentation when you have it sitting on your desk when you can see it. But if you have colleagues halfway across the country who can’t access that information unless you remember to upload it in the proper location, you will have to be organized about doing so routinely – or hire an assistant or virtual assistant who is willing to do it for you. No matter who handles the online filing, be certain that it is done on a regular basis so that no member of your team is left without the information resources that he or she needs.

Decide in advance who will handle what kind of calls.

You may want to go so far as to set up an online phone number – even a Google Voice number will do – for the business. Using Google Voice, you can forward company calls to a particular landline or cell phone number, or to all the numbers that are associated with the account. Your company phone line could literally ring in several cities at once – it’s just that your virtual colleagues won’t hear you if you call out, “I’ll get it!” Or, you may want to hire a virtual assistant to field incoming cold calls and take messages. Then, based on how you have divided the work load for your business, your assistant can email the message to the appropriate team member for following up.

Safeguard the privacy of your team and your clients.

You’ll find that many of the online tools that you can use for collaboration purposes come from companies that have partnered with each other and can integrate seamlessly with each other. Before you decide how to structure your virtual workspace, explore the partnerships between these companies and figure out what sort of information flow will be best for your work. Consider the issue of privacy and the confidentiality of your clients, and check each site’s security policies before throwing yourself into a new online workspace.

Remember that you don’t have to stick to one type of collaborative tool for all the work that you do within your company. Depending on the kind of collaboration that is involved, you may find that one tool is a better fit for one project, while a different tool is better for a different project. No problem! My advice is, go forth and experiment – hopefully, you will end up creating a system that is customized to your particular needs.

About the Author: Ripley Daniels is an editor at Without The Stress, a passport, travel visa, and immigration advisory firm located in Los Angeles.

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