Working with a Virtual Team

When you take a highly mobile job, you will spend a lot of time working with a virtual team.
It’s a very popular working pattern in RB as I know.
Although face to face communication is the easiest way for most people,  working in RB demands you to acquire the skills of getting messages across and organizing people by email, live meetings, phone and via teleconference efficiently.

In the first days of working in RB,  I found discussing projects with a whole team by talking to a teleconference machine quite inconvenient and easy to lose my focus during the discussion.
Soon enough I got to understand that it’s a necessary and popular working way in RB especially in the IS department, and sometimes you won’t have a chance for face to face communication so you need to grab every chance to speak up and get yourself understood by others, that’s people’s expectation here and how you contribute your ideas no matter you are typing to a screen, or talking to a phone machine, or sending out an email.
For most projects I’ve participated, the team members usually are sitting in different countries and most of the significant discussions need to be carried through teleconference, even user trainings and technical supports need to be done remotely.

And of course we will have conference held several times during the year that all the team members come together, actually it’s quite amazing that when I see in person someone whose face I haven’t seen for months, I don’t feel them unfamiliar at all even their looks change somehow,  it feels like we’ve never been far away from each other and everyone knows exactly where our team stands and what others are up to. Although most of the time it’s a virtual team, the feelings is always real.

Before you realize it you already get used to the working pattern and become better and better at communication via different ways as well as your ability to quickly adapt to a changed situation.  For example, when you have prepared a presentation facilitated by many PPT slides containing the supporting figures and charts and you are going to present it through video conference to others sitting in another country,  then something happens and the video equipment suddenly become unavailable,  you should be able to adjust yourself to the new situation that you are not able to show your PPT slides, so what you can do is to quickly accept this and adjust yourself,  make your presentation as convincing as possible by only talking through the phone,  by your voice and the words you say.  In fact, this ability is vital for every RB employee.
And no need to worry,  you will be able to practice it once you join us.