As part of my project I get to work with a team of five interns for Azul Airlines. Three of the interns are from Brazil and attend Insper Learning Institute, one is from Illinois, and one is from Brazil and they both attend UIUC. Our interactions are primarily through Zoom where we conduct conference calls. We also use WhatsApp for quick messaging communication. In these unprecedented times we have been working together virtually without having ever met in person before. While this may have caused some initial communication issues at the beginning of the internship, we have found a balance which works for us.
Building trust when working virtually is not easy. In one sense since there is much less interaction compared to working in person; you must blindly trust your teammates that they will complete the work that they were assigned. As there is less communication, you cannot as easily complain to someone for not doing their part of the work. This puts you in a position where you have to hope that everyone will contribute. Luckily, everyone in my team has been contributing equally thus far and we have not had any issues. As do not know each other, we feel more pressure to complete our aspects of the work as to not create a bad impression of ourselves. In a similar way, kids behave more around people they do not know while they will show their true selves to their parents.
Most of the work for our project is completed individually. Both the time zone difference and the virtual aspect of the internship have caused this. As one team member is in Illinois, the others in Brazil, and me in Greece, finding a time that works for all of us to work together is not easy. We have a two-hour window which we use to meet. This window is during mid-morning Illinois - afternoon Brazil - evening Greece. Any time earlier would be too early for our Illinois team member and any time later would be too late for me. As a result, our time spent together is limited. Another issue this causes is that if someone wants to work but requires assistance from another team member, they need to make sure they ask for help during the open window. Otherwise they must wait until the next day.
While diversity may cause issues initially it is a great asset to have in any team. Our team initially struggled to find common ground as we did not know where to start the conversation. In this globalized world however, it did not take too much time to find things we had in common. Commonalities eventually made conversation easier. At the same time diversity in ideas and work styles helped our project in taking different perspectives into account. I was able to learn about methods of tackling our problem that I had never been taught while I was able to explain to my teammates the methodology I had been taught to use. This helped us in creating a well-rounded project which combined multiple methodologies.
Feedback #1
Hey Nectarios!
I really liked your response! I totally agree that it's not easy to build trust with virtual teammates, and that pretty much the only thing you can use to build trust off of is the work they do. It makes the process much more time consuming and likely inaccurate.
One thing I found particularly interesting is the fact that your group is spread across three vastly different time zones. Obviously this comes with its own host of logistical challenges, as you mentioned in your response, but do you think it makes it harder for you to get to know your group members, and therefore learn to trust them? If you all lived in the same time zone (but still not in the same place) or in neighboring time zones do you think you might have stronger connections with your teammates or trust them more?
Feedback #2
Nectarios-Nicholas,
In this project, the only representation of yourself that gets seen is the result of your work. I could see how this would motivate you to do "good" work.
Your team's time zones reach around about... 1/3ish of the globe? What would happen if you also had teammates in, say, India and Japan? Whose time zone would be privileged? What factors would be involved in your negotiation of meeting times? How does Azul's hands-off approach affect this?
What kind of commonalities did you find among your group members? What kind of diversity? What is a specific way that these affected your work?
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Since Then
By the end of the project, I believe that my team found a good flow to work together. Since most of the work was done individually we decided to split up into two teams in order to work on different aspects of the projects. This was very useful as having six people work on one thing at the same time may not have been very useful. Dividing the tasks and splitting the teams according to our strengths was ultimately a good decision.
