Forming groups into teams through virtual interactions: Researching remote collaborators and “getting to know you”

Research suggests that collaborators prefer to begin projects during face-to-face encounters, but in many organizations, team members are unable to meet their collaborators outside of a virtual setting. Working solely at a distance can prove to be a challenge, particularly early in a project when virtual collaborators need to get a sense of roles, tasks, and one another. How do—and how can—remote collaborators maneuver through the early stages of a project: getting to know one another and building a working relationship? How can we learn about and study how professional communicators collaborate with others at a distance? We have begun to explore such questions by developing approaches that can add voices of practitioners to the growing research literature. We place issues that surfaced during a pilot of our research instruments within the contexts of the literature on virtual collaboration and our own experiences as they relate to developing remote teams. From all of these sources, we suggest issues to consider when forming remote teams.