Improving Virtual Collaboration for a Global Team at Vestas
At Vestas, a new global team of finance business partners is being set up.
The team has about 45 members of 12 different nationalities. Some of the team members work at the Danish headquarters, others work at local sites in Germany, Spain, Italy, China, India, Brazil, and the US.
Due to changes in organizational structures, most of the team members' managers will be based at the Danish headquarters and manage employees around the globe.
Most of the team's collaboration takes place online and the collaboration can be quite complex and challenging.
Solution
As all the team members were gathering at the Danish headquarters in August 2018, they asked C3 Consulting to facilitate a half-day workshop to improve the virtual team collaboration and the distance management between headquarters and local sites.
The workshop covered subjects like:
- Myths and facts about virtual collaboration
- Being aware of cultural differences in your team and understanding how that affects your teamwork
- Training a flexible mindset that enables you to see different perspectives in different cultures
- Collaborating more effectively across time zones
- Establishing effective workflows and rules in virtual collaboration: How do you make decisions? Give each other feedback? Share knowledge?
- Which communication tools work best for the various types of assignments and messages
- Preparing for, holding, and following up on virtual meetings
- Learning to recognize and handle the typical pitfalls when you work between Danish culture and other cultures
Client feedback
Vice President and CFO René Jensen Nystrup decribes the workshop:
"We had a session around collaboration in global teams facilitated by C3 Consulting, which is highly recommendable.
We gained a lot of insights from best practice in other organizations collaborating virtually, which will make our development process go faster.
We also got tips and tricks, for instance on how to create more trust in global teams and how to increase productivity in Skype meetings, and we discussed the creation of team agreements to better align expectations.
Finally, we got some recommendations on specific tools and platforms that can be useful for us on the journey we're in, e.g. increased use of Yammer instead of emails, and in general what’s available out there of tools to better enable virtual collaboration (Trello, Sococo, Linoit, Padlet etc.)."
You can also watch the video below, where René Jensen Nystrup explains why the team has decided to focus on improving their virtual collaboration and what their takeaways from the workshop are (click here, if you prefer to watch the video directly on Vimeo).
