E-Collaboration

Image by Ibrahim.ID

Via Wikimedia Commons Virtual Collaboration

This week in the University of Arizona class “Collaborating in Online Communities,” we reviewed Harvard Business Review’s article “How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate.” The author describes collaboration as the “secret sauce” for creativity within teams. He then addresses that virtual collaboration can be extremely difficult to successfully achieve and what lessons have been learned from both successes and failures. 

First, he addresses that you must adjust for size. Second, your group cannot be afraid of social media. Third, he recommends to play games to learn to do what is best for the team. Fourth, groups should train for collaboration. Finally, remember that roles are more important than goals. 

I have seen these five key points to improving virtual collaboration in my personal life. While interning for a local clothing company as a social media content creator, I had to learn to collaborate virtually with a team. 

A few months into my internship, our company expanded from one store in Tucson, to a second store in the Phoenix area. As staff doubled, we had to adjust for size and a hierarchy. This made collaboration harder to achieve, as coworkers now had to be flexible and collaborate online to achieve store goals. 

Due to this expansion, we could not be afraid of using social media to connect more with each other. Internally, each coworker added each other on Facebook to be able to connect with each other outside of work. This also came into use when the Tucson employees needed to contact the Phoenix employees. 

Our team also enjoyed playing online games, such as FarmVille through Facebook, where we learned to help each other when in need. We would do what was best for someone else in hopes of strengthening our team. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Farmville, you can watch this video about "FarmVille 2: Country Escape."

Meeting with the author’s third point of training for collaboration, we each worked on our networking skills online with designers and customers. This helped our team as we would improve our virtual communication skills, which we could apply when communicating with one another. 

In our team, we each had a specific role with a very broad goal of improving sales. As mentioned, my role was to create content for social media. I had to learn to virtually communicate with the employee in charge of monitoring the performance of our posts. While we did not know how to improve sales, we could collaborate to market our store to customers. 

We did not start off as a perfect team. We did not collaborate in person well, let alone virtually. By the end of my internship, we learned these lessons, improving sales, as well as each individual. 

-Hannah Leigh Johnson