What: David Pogue’s NY Times Blog Post on basic technology tips.
Posts to Which it is Related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology
Bottom Line: A significant contributor to a virtual team’s success is members’ familiarity with technology. Many virtual team leaders tend to assume, oftentimes inaccurately, that team members possess basic computer skills which would allow them and the team to be productive. By basic skills, I am referring to skills such as file management skills (copying, moving, deleting files), web-browser skills, email skills, and the like. We find a certain way to do something and then stick to it, even though it may be a long way and there may be a more efficient way to do it. Recently, David Pogue wrote an article on his blog about “essential tech tips you thought everybody knew–but nobody, including you, knows them all.” Apparently, the article has touched a chord among readers–it received over 1000 comments, with most providing additional tech tips, and was among the most emailed articles for several days. It is now going to be turned into a book. According to Pogue, “Humanity is wasting hundreds of millions of cumulative hours, days and years by doing things the long way.” I have started using quite a few tips from the article and the comments. For instance, I now press the space bar when I am in my web-browser (Firefox) to go down a page or shift-space bar to go up a page. It is easier for me to locate and press the space-bar than to reach for the page down key. I used to do Ctrl-F to use the find function in Firefox. Now I press / to invoke Quick Find. To get to the URL box in my browser, I now press Alt-D instead of locating the cursor in the URL box and pressing the left button on my mouse. I press Ctrl-K to quickly reach the Google search box in the search toolbar of Firefox. There are many other tips that I am sure you will benefit from. Go check them out and make yourself and your team more productive!

What: Research article on knowledge transfer in virtual teams.
Posts to Which it is Related: Building Trust in Virtual Teams
Bottom Line: This research article based on a sample of over 800 members of virtual teams highlights another reason for building trust in virtual teams–it promotes knowledge sharing in virtual teams. Knowledge sharing, in turn, leads to more effective team performance, indicated by perceptions of the quality and quantity of team’s work and by members’ intentions to remain on the team. An interesting finding was that the relationship between trust and knowledge sharing was stronger when the level of interdependence within the team was low. According to the authors, this suggests that trust is more important in situations where there are weak or no structures to guide interaction among team members. Another interesting finding was that the relationship between knowledge sharing and team performance became weaker (though it remained positive) for hybrid teams than for co-located or fully distributed teams. Hybrid teams are those in which some members were co-located with the respondent while the others were remote. Moreover, when teams are split evenly among sites, the positive effect of knowledge sharing on team performance is stronger than when the teams are split unevenly. Since it is often not possible for a virtual team leader to control where team members should be located, this article provides the leader with additional things to watch out for (i.e., whether the team is hybrid and whether there is an imbalance in how team members are distributed) and compensate for during the team’s work.