Today the online community of commentors, Gawker.com, ripped BusinessWeek for its recent focus on promoting the benefits of the virtual world Second Life's potential for workplace team building.  Their editorial argues that

Lots of the hype was the fault of BusinessWeek, which bought into it with wide-eyed enthusiasm. And the magazine is still trying to get your employer to drag you off to a fantasy computer island for fun team-building exercises....

The unidentified author calls efforts by companies the magazine identified, including IBM and Xerox, to hold virtual forums to connect employees around the world "the single least fun corporate event that could possibly be inflicted upon an employee."

Perhaps Second Life, which the author (rightly) calls "an imaginary land packed with flying monsters," is not the best venue in which to host these events – it certainly depends, first and foremost, on a firm's mission and values, and then on the demographics and interests of its workers.  But to write off the whole notion of virtual team building would be a disservice to employees as well as businesses, which can benefit from these new and evolving employee engagement activities.

As Wikipedia notes, virtual teams can generate the following benefits:

  • For employees: lower commuting-related expenses, enjoying flexible scheduling, and making physical handicaps a virtual (no pun intended) non-issue.
  • For businesses: Freeing up physical office space, reduced travel expenses, no capacity limits, and improves flex benefits offerings for recruiting purposes.
  • And for communities/society: Less commuting means decreased air pollution.

One of our 2007 Top Small Workplaces that has made virtual team building not just an initiative but its lifeblood is Seattle-based professional services provider Point B.  Started with just a handful of employees in 1995, Point B now has over 330 employees in seven cities.  The really amazing thing, though, is that they have no physical offices!  (Their project management work takes place mainly at client sites.)

How, then, do they maintain their culture and stay informed?  Primarily through these three best practices:

  1. A highly customized, leading-edge company intranet. This provides employees on the go with starting points, if not solutions, to their most pressing daily issues, based on the experience of employees who have treaded there before.
  2. Frequent, city-specific networking events where workers can talk shop and also about what's going on in their personal lives.  These range from informal and formal lunches and dinners to intramural-style sports activities.
  3. Perhaps most importantly, Point B's leadership requires each employee to "define their own Point B," which means including both personal and professional goals in their job descriptions and career growth plans.

Some of the bottom-line results of this hybrid of virtual and physical workplace team building include staff and revenue growth of over 20% for the last seven years and industry-low attrition of 8% (the average is over 20%).  Clearly, the business case is there for incorporating virtual teams into overall team-building efforts.

Leaders: What is your experience with virtual teams in your workplace?  If you've implemented them, what have your results looked like?

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