On Wednesday 5th October, we had the pleasure of holding the workshop “Managing Virtual Teams”, organised in collaboration with The London School of International Communication, which is part of The London School of English, member of the Chamber.
Virtual team working is nowadays the norm for many organisations, yet many teams fail to meet their objectives due to poor communication, language barriers, feelings of isolation and a lack of team cohesion.
On this occasion, our Secretary General, Igor Urra, gave a warm welcome to the attendees on behalf of the Chamber and introduced Ms. Cathy Wellings, director of The London School of International Communication, who began the session with a brief introduction to the concept of managing virtual teams and its importance considering that around 66% of international companies deploy employees across the globe.
Mr. Igor Urra welcomed attendees and introduced our speaker Ms. Cathy Wellings.
To kick off, she explained the aim of the session, which was to show participants how to minimise the challenges and maximise the benefits of working across different geographies. This explanation was followed by a group dynamics in which attendees -paired up back to back- tried to communicate with their partner. The aim of this exercise was to provide participants with a first-hand example to illustrate the communication problems that may arise when we are not able to speak face to face with someone.
After this group exercise, the speaker went on talking about the importance of launching a good and successful remote team. It is essential, she argued, to make sure that the organisation is prepared to support virtual work in the first place. Likewise, one of the most challenging situations consists in choosing the right people when we may not know them in person, which leads to the importance of building trust among the members of the virtual team in order to make it work.
The session covered the main challenges and benefits of working with virtual teams.
The Director of the London School of International Communication continued her talk with further examples regarding how to measure trust and what constitute relevant criteria to assess if the members of a remote team are effectively dependable.
To conclude the seminar, Cathy elaborated on the ideal sort of behaviours the virtual team manager should have to encourage teams. She highlighted that building a relationship based on trust, being accessible to the employees and encouraging collaboration among them was paramount to pave the way for creating and developing a successful virtual team.
Before the seminar was over, participants were invited to enjoy breakfast, whilst given the opportunity to discuss the session’s ideas and concepts further with the speaker.
Ms. Wellings providing an example of how a virtual manager should behave to encourage team cohesion.
We would like to thank all attendees for joining us, and particularly The London School of Communication, part of The London School of English, and its Director Cathy Wellings for delivering such a dynamic, interesting and useful session.
If you want to find out about other activities organised by the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, we encourage you to keep an eye on our UPCOMING EVENTS section on our website. In addition to this, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter in order to receive updates and information about our events.
