Globally distributed teams can share information easily, but they have a harder time building common work habits and personal relationships. Psychologist Art Markman points to complications caused by distance, different time zones and limited opportunities to meet in person.
Art Markman points out that distance among members of a global team creates several problems at once. People have fewer opportunities to meet face-to-face, their working hours may overlap only briefly, and language and cultural differences affect communication. Technology speeds up information exchange, but it does not remove these underlying conditions.
The first recommendation concerns in-person meetings. The organization should regularly create opportunities for geographically distributed teams to meet physically. Such meetings should be linked to a concrete project so that travel has a clear work purpose, while also including time for strategic discussion and informal social contact.
Markman refers to psychological evidence that we tend to perceive people who are distant from us in space, time or social position more abstractly than people we encounter directly. In-person meetings therefore do more than exchange information. They help team members develop a fuller picture of their colleagues and can improve later coordination.
The second area is working time. If a project requires input from several continents, work may slow simply because the next person in the chain is off the clock. A further risk is an informal expectation that employees check messages late at night or early in the morning. Over time, that pattern can contribute to frustration and burnout.
Leaders therefore need to define in advance when shared availability is expected and what happens outside those windows. If a role genuinely requires work outside normal hours, that should be explicit and the schedule must remain sustainable. Project timelines should account for time zones, and work can be organized so that tasks are handed from one team to another across their respective workdays.
The third complication is language. When people communicate in a second language, they can miss indirect meanings. A phrase that a native speaker understands as a clear request may be interpreted by someone else as merely a suggestion. The author therefore recommends more literal and explicit communication in global teams than in environments where people share the same language and cultural context.
Cultural differences also shape attitudes toward hierarchy. In settings where subordinates are not expected to openly challenge senior people, silence in a meeting may be interpreted by a manager from a flatter culture as agreement. Companies therefore need processes that surface opinions even from people who would not spontaneously voice disagreement in front of a superior.
The practical conclusion for global team management is that standardizing software is not enough. Organizations need to deliberately design in-person contact, availability rules, work handoffs, communication language and processes that compensate for different expectations about authority.
KEY TERMS
- Distributed teams: Teams whose members work from different locations and often in different time zones.
- International collaboration: Coordination of work across countries, cultures and organizational settings.
- Coordination: Alignment of tasks, information, deadlines and responsibilities among team members.
- Work communication: The rules and channels used to exchange information and resolve work situations.