Short-Term International Virtual Teams: Preparing Students and Employees for a Digitized, Global Workplace

Introduction

Preparing students for a global workplace is challenging for instructors because this preparation encompasses technology, cultural awareness, educational backgrounds, and the team experience. To address these challenges, educators need to be creative and consider various topics and options. One option is to create classroom experiences that reflect workplace demands, and empower students with experiences and skills so that, when they move into the workplace, they are better equipped. These experiences include how students view situations that impact them and others around them and how they respond to these situations (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). A 2018 survey of 1,620 respondents in 90 countries reported that 89 percent work on a virtual team with at least two cultures and 27 percent work on at least four virtual teams (RW3, 2018). Recently, due to the pandemic, companies are experiencing significant changes, which include many employees working remotely. Of the employees who said that they rarely worked remotely, 71 percent now work either most or all of the time. For these employees, skills in using online communication tools are critical. For example, 81 percent say they use video conferencing services (Parker, Horowitz, & Minkin, 2020). Therefore, it is vital that students learn how to use collaborative tools to communicate in the workplace.

This chapter provides details and resources developed by a group of university educators who, over 5 years of teaching students in United States and European universities, have refined a virtual team project to train students: to use virtual tools, to establish strong collaborative relationships, to consider intercultural differences, to learn to be citizens in a global workplace, and to realize that their responses to situations impact the team's function and outcome. Historically, teams have been defined as a set of individuals working interdependently with a common goal. More recently, teams also include a set of individuals who are fluid, often overlapping work with other teams, and dispersed (Mortensen & Haas, 2018). Global team members are geographically dispersed across countries and continents. Each global team member needs to have the mindset of being a global citizen. This mindset includes being open, tolerant, respectful, and responsible for self, others, and the planet. The global citizen’s view of community stretches beyond a physical location to the global community (Lilley, Barker, & Harris, 2017). The virtual team project is a 3-week project implemented in two universities, and to achieve best practices, the university educators refine the assignment each year to ensure that tools and assignment design are updated. Refinements have included additional activities, in-class discussions, and role-playing assignments.

The authors provide unique insight into virtual teams, specifically short-term international virtual teams, and explain how to model authenticity and empathy to bridge cultural differences and to minimize excluding or marginalizing team members. Although the authors give an overview of the project's deliverables, this chapter focuses on how instructors can prepare students to navigate challenges that they will encounter when working on a virtual global team. Another important outcome of virtual team projects is providing students with knowledge that they could transfer when situations, such as a pandemic, occur and all of their face-to-face classes suddenly become virtual (Yao, Rao, Jiang, & Xiong, 2020). Likewise, the changes that students are experiencing in a pandemic are much like the technology-driven work practices that drastically change under time sensitive conditions. These time sensitive conditions do not allow for strategic changes and training must be done simultaneously with learning (Carroll & Conboy, 2020).