During the last weekend, I had a chance to observe a couple of workers who were installing new backsplash in my kitchen. One of them was setting the tiles as quickly as he could. It was clear that he wanted to finish his task and get out as quickly as possible. The other went about his work patiently. He took measurements for tiles to be set at the edges, cut the tiles according to measurement, and finally set those tiles. When setting the tiles he had cut, he would look over the work of the first worker and tweak the tiles on the wall in case they were not aligned properly. Occasionally, the first worker would question him about what he was up to and he explained that the alignment of the tiles was not proper and he was fixing it. I remember the first worker telling the second one that it wasn’t a big deal if the tiles were not perfectly aligned. The second worker responded that he felt uneasy if the alignment wasn’t proper. “The quality of what we produce is important to me,” he added.

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I often hear from business leaders that while they see some value in using Facebook for business-to-customer interactions, they see little value in using it internally. They argue that the use of Facebook to engage in social chit-chat will distract employees from their work and make them unproductive. I believe that these business leaders are not seeing the value of the social interaction that is facilitated by a tool such as Facebook. Research tells us that social interaction is very useful for facilitating knowledge transfer and innovation in organizations. It is, therefore, not surprising that some companies are reporting significant benefits from the internal use of Facebook or a similar tool.

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I have been away from writing for Leading Virtually for a little more than a year. I didn’t intend for my absence to be so long, but it was a very eventful and busy year for me. I am happy to be blogging again for Leading Virtually at the start of this new year! Although I was away from Leading Virtually, I was not away from the realms of leadership and computer mediated communication. I’ll tell you briefly what I was doing the past year and few months.

One thing I was doing was getting married! Leading Virtually readers will be able to relate to my story. I met my husband in Second Life in 2007. He is from Europe and I am from the US. So we developed and grew a relationship using online and mobile tools like Skype and Picassa, and virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft in between our opportunities to visit. After four years I consider myself a veteran of online communication! We look forward to the day these tools are unnecessary, but we are so thankful that we live in a world in which they exist and make our communications easier and instantaneous even across the Atlantic.

The other thing I was doing was finishing my dissertation! I successfully defended my dissertation in November. My dissertation focused on using virtual worlds for education and training. I completed two different studies using two different virtual worlds. I’ll give a brief description here of the two studies and will write subsequent posts with details of each. In the first study, I used the Virtual Forbidden City to look at student learning about the Forbidden City in Beijing. The study had students learn about the Forbidden City using an online PowerPoint presentation as used in a lot of distance education courses as well as taking a virtual field trip to the Forbidden City using the virtual world. The second study focused on using online tools for leadership development. In this study, a comparison was made between using Second Life and WebEx for delivering some basic leadership training materials and activities.

Again, I’ll give more details about the studies and what we found in my next posts. Today I wanted to say happy New Year, and I look forward to writing again and continuing our conversations.

Among the many things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving was a set of free tools that I have been using for years now. Many of my students find the tools useful when I share the tools with them. I thought I should share these with my readers who might also find them useful. Several of the tools I have shared below would benefit virtual team workers because of their collaboration focus. The others would benefit them by helping them manage and access their documents or Internet resources more easily.

Google desktop for search. I have been using this for over two years now. I collect a lot of articles, some scholarly and others from popular press, for my research and teaching. Most of them are in pdf format. I find Google desktop for search to be invaluable for quickly locating the documents or Outlook emails I need at any time. On my Windows laptop, I press the Ctrl key twice and in the dialog box that shows up I enter a few keywords. When I am looking for a document and I know that it is in pdf format, I enter filetype:pdf along with the keywords. Or when I am looking for a PowerPoint file, I enter filetype:ppt along with the keywords. Google’s search algorithm goes to work for me and shows relevant documents quickly in a drop down that appears below the dialog box. With an additional click, I am able to open and use the document. In January, my university shifted to Gmail (we call it Bmail for Binghamton mail). But my old emails are still in Outlook. Google desktop is very helpful in searching through my old Outlook emails as well.

PrimoPDF. I save many web pages and popular press articles on my computer as pdfs. I use PrimoPDF, a free tool for Windows, to make pdfs. PrimoPDF installs itself as a printer by the same name. To make the pdf of a web page or an article I am reading online, I proceed to print the article. When prompted for a printer, I select PrimoPDF. I then proceed to indicate the name with which I wish to save the file as well as its location. It is as simple as that.

Google docs. I collaborate extensively for my research. I also share my class notes with my students. I find Google docs to be very useful for collaborating on research papers and for sharing my class notes with students. With Google docs, my collaborators and I work at our own pace and we don’t have to wait for someone to finish her/his part on a paper and email the paper to us before adding our own contributions. When I share my class notes with my students, they are able to add to the notes when I say something that is not on the notes. Different students adding different parts and the whole class ends up benefiting from comprehensive notes. With the addition of new features on a regular basis, Google docs is only getting better.

Zotero. A good bibliography management tool can be a great lifesaver for an academic like me. If the tool is free and makes it easy to add items to my bibliography and cite them in my research, it is even better. Zotero is one such tool. Zotero is a Firefox extension that requires just a few clicks to add an item from Google Scholar, New York Times, or elsewhere to one’s bibliography. Once an item is added, you can just drag and drop it into your list of references in a Word document or a Google doc. Zotero even allows you to share your bibliography with someone else.

Firefox. I switched to Firefox as my browser more than five years ago. I like it because of the several extensions that make my life easier. Zotero is one of those extensions. Another reason I continue to use Firefox is that it lets me create ‘smart’ keywords for sites I visit frequently and search for information there. For instance, I use Google Scholar almost daily. I have created the keyword ‘s’ for search on this site. To initiate a search on this site (say, on virtual teams) when I might be elsewhere (e.g., I might be working on a google doc), I just press Ctrl-L on my Windows keyboard (to take me to the URL box in the browser; if you are on a Mac, use Cmd-L) and type in ‘s virtual teams’ and hit Enter. The next thing I see is the Google Scholar page with results for ‘virtual teams’. I have set up similar, easy to remember keywords for other sites where I conduct search frequently (e.g., g for Google, n for Google News, y for Yahoo, t for thesaurus.com, d for dictionary.com, bd for Binghamton University Directory, a for Amazon, and so on).

Avast anti-virus. I got tired of the bloated anti-virus software from Norton or McAfee. I would get free versions with a new computer but then I would be prompted to pay for a new version after a year or so. I would also find myself dealing with software I did not want and which took over my computer and made me less productive. After some research for free anti-virus software, I settled on the free version of Avast’s anti-virus software and have been very satisfied with it. It is currently installed on all of my Windows PCs.

Skype. I use Skype extensively to collaborate with my co-authors. I also use Skype to conduct interviews for my research. If I am in a Skype call with just one person, I also use Skype’s screen sharing feature to show the work I am doing on my PC with the other person. In case I on a Skype call with more than one person and I wish to share my screen with them, then I use a separate screen sharing tool. Until recently, I used Dimdim for screen sharing. Recently, I began using join.me and I am very happy with that.

Join.me. Unlike the other tools I have listed in this post, this is a new tool that was released about a month ago. I have had a chance to use it on four or five occasions since its release. Join.me is a free screen sharing tool that allows you to share your screen with up to 250 people. It is very easy to use. Just visit join.me and click on the button for sharing your desktop. A small program is downloaded on your computer. To begin sharing your desktop, click on the downloaded program and a link shows up on your screen. Share the link with your collaborators via email or other means (e.g., instant messaging) and they are sharing your desktop within seconds. I find it to be extremely useful when I am on a conference call with remote collaborators and I need to show them the work I am doing on my PC (e.g., data analysis or a presentation). By the way, you can do more than screen sharing with join.me. You can chat, transfer files, and even take over your collaborator’s desktop.

These tools have certainly made life easier for me and I am thankful to their creators for making them available free of charge. What tools are you thankful for?

Social media isn’t what it used to be — there is a lot more content but the interaction is missing. As more and more companies are creating social media accounts and encouraging people to interact with them through these channels, it becomes increasingly more important to follow social media best practices to avoid unintentionally pushing away those who wish to interact with you. After all, it’s only a matter of clicks before your customer becomes interested in a competitor’s offerings on Facebook, Twitter, or other Web 2.0 channels.

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A recent Harvard Business Review blog post by James Champy argues leadership does not change in a Web 2.0 World. Mr. Champy’s core points are that (a) leadership requires relationships and personal engagement and (b) technology does nothing to alter this requirement in leaders. Based on his points, Mr. Champy seems to suggest that the most appropriate way forward for a leader in a Web 2.0 world to is engage her/his followers face-to-face. While Mr. Champy’s core points are accurate, they rest on a very simple picture of leadership. It is only when one sees the more complex picture of leadership offered by leadership scholars, one can begin to see that the requirements for leadership are expanding in a Web 2.0 world. If all we say to leaders is that they need to keep focusing on building relationships and enabling personal engagement in a Web 2.0 world, we would be giving them advice that would be technically correct but of limited practical value.

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When air travel to and from several European cities was curtailed due to volcanic ash, people adopted Skype and other video conferencing tools in lieu of travel. Unlike email or telephone, video conferencing is thought to be like face-to-face communication but only somewhat leaner because one is not in the same place as the person one is communicating with. In other words, video conferencing is thought to vary in degree rather than in nature.

Research on video conferencing, however, paints a different picture. It argues that video-conferencing gives rise to a different kind of information processing than what takes place during face-to-face meetings. A case in point is a study by Carlos Ferran and Stephanie Watts, published in September 2008 in Management Science.

According to the researchers, communicators using video conferencing face a higher cognitive load than face-to-face communicators because of a variety of challenges, including those of identifying who is speaking, detecting movement, coordinating eye-contact, turn-taking, and conversation pacing. Video conferencing also consumes greater cognitive attention due to heightened self-awareness. Faced with a higher cognitive load, users of video conferencing may economize when evaluating the information presented the speaker. They may economize by using heuristics, such as how likeable they perceive the speaker to be, rather than the quality of the arguments presented by the speaker when judging whether or not they will adopt or use the information presented by the speaker. On the other hand, in face-to-face meetings, the communication medium does not impose as much cognitive burden, thereby leaving the receiver of any communication with adequate cognitive resources to focus on the quality of information while making judgment about whether or not it will be adopted and used.

Ferran and Watts report results from a field study in which they found support for their model of how video conferencing may differ from face-to-face communication. In a study of medical professionals, they found that participants attending a seminar via video conference were more influenced by the speaker’s likeability than by the quality of the speaker’s arguments, whereas the opposite pattern was true for participants who attended in person. The likeability of a person was based on the extent to what that person was perceived as charismatic, appealing, interesting, and friendly. The researchers also confirmed that differences in cognitive load explained these effects. Based on these findings, the authors argued that video conferencing does not simply approach face-to-face interaction — it changes what we attend to. Essentially, we end up attending more to peripheral cues in the form of a person’s likeability than to systematic or rigorous cues to judge the information we are receiving from that person via video conferencing. A word of caution should be noted about Ferran and Watts’ findngs: they apply to the use of video conferencing in seminar-like settings where participants have not had prior interaction with the presenter.

What do the results from Ferran and Watts mean for a leader? When the leader is having a tough time convincing others about the merits of a proposal but is a likeable person, s/he should use video-conferencing rather than a face-to-face meeting to make her/his case. A leader may also recruit a likeable person to present the proposal. Or, if a virtual team is using video-conferencing and the leader would like participants to be more systematic in their processing, the leader should minimize the cognitive burden of using video conferencing. This can be done by giving the users enough training on the use of video conferencing. Moreover, the users should do a dry run with each other so that they become more familiar with each other’s turn-taking pauses, pacing gestures, and other ways of regulating the communication.

Another thing a virtual team leader who can do to increase the attention to logical aspects of the information being presented is to make it easy for participants to focus on logical aspects. Having another window (in addition to the one showing a video of the presenter) that allows users to see a running slide presentation, with arguments laid out very clearly, might be helpful.

In summary, the evidence presented by Ferran and Watts suggests that video conferencing may not be comparable to face-to-face meetings because it changes the nature of information processing by its users. In that sense, it does not substitute for face-to-face meetings. Consequently, simply thinking that video conferencing can be made to approach face-to-face meetings by improving the picture quality may not suffice. One needs to focus on reducing the cognitive burden imposed by video conferencing in order to make it approach face-to-face meetings.

Both AFP and Reuters are reporting a spike in video calling as air travel is halted in Europe due to volcanic eruption. According to Cisco, there has been a huge surge in demand for its telepresence facilities in Europe. Skype, too, is seeing an increase in video-calling during the past few days. Some executives who have been prevented from getting back to Europe are running their companies via Skype, according to reports. A couple about to wed in Great Britain but stuck in Dubai went ahead and got married in Dubai — the couple included guests via Skype video.

I believe the reported spike in video calling is showing both increasing accessibility of video conferencing and how comfortable people are becoming with it. We are going to see a further boost in video conferencing as front-facing cameras become a common feature in smartphones. Even the future iPhone, whose pictures leaked out during the weekend, is expected to have a front-facing camera to facilitate video calls.

Do you have an interesting story about how you or someone else used technology to overcome the problem of not being able to fly into Europe?  We would love to hear that.

The blockbuster film Avatar showed us how easy it is to move from one reality into another environment where the rules are different.  Where a person can be reborn into a 10 foot tall, blue, non-English speaking, dragon-creature-flying, environment-protecting militiaman.  So is it all that hard to fathom that leadership inside the four walls of an organization morphs into something different in the virtual world?  I wondered about that and so experimented by creating a blog titled:  Peg Breen’s Blog:  In Search of Meaningful Work. (http://pegbreen.wordpress.com)

Like millions of other people, and  thousands of other executives, I was without employment and in search of not only a new job, but one that I could be passionate about and that allowed me to use my talents.  Since I was one of a close knit group who exited my organization at the same time,  I decided to use the opportunity to demonstrate my leadership through this blog.  I wrote about the stress of this kind of transition, the reactions that people have when you go through job loss, and what it was like to surface leads, network and stay positive despite the fact that, yes, you are “blue”.  Not because you are on the fictional planet Pandora, but because of the emotions this circumstance creates.  I set out to be a positive, inspiring, humorous motivator to my colleagues, and may have helped my own psyche as much or more than any of my readers.

I discovered that the intimacy and anonymity of blogs helps people let their hair down.  They can release their emotions much easier, there are no titles or power broker relationships, just virtual-equals sharing their perspective.  This is valuable inside organizations. Why?  Because perceiving that you have a voice and that you’ll be heard, not censored is very empowering. Real organizations should do this more often. I also found that when I met my colleagues for dinner or  breakfast, there was an even closer trust relationship.  It seems that the blog enhanced our ability to show compassion, and to trust and collaborate on strategies related to our individual job searches.  Finally, the blog gave me something that is a rare gift.  The time to reflect.  How many of us put in our 60 hour week, respond to 100 emails a day and barely get in our run at the fitness club?  Through this written, intimate venue, I momentarily turned into the psychologist from the sitcom “Frazier” and in doing so was able to be everything a leader should be for myself and for friends I’ll value for a lifetime.

In my last post, I mentioned that the best way for business leaders to understand Twitter or other social media is to begin using them. I recently saw how experimenting with social media can help business leaders appreciate its power. I had an opportunity to advise a business leader, Ms. Peg Breen, about blogging. Peg was without employment like thousands of other executives and was looking for a meaningful position. She blogged about the stress of this kind of transition, the reactions that people have they you go through job loss, and what it was like to surface leads, network and stay positive. Peg gained a lot from this experience and I asked her to write about her experience and share it with the readers of Leading Virtually. She graciously agreed and shares her experience with us in the following post.