One of the distinctive features of an organisation are:
A) the size
B) the number of management levels
C) the dispersion across the territory
As some of you certainly know, the number of management levels is measurable through a specific indicator called “Span of Control” which, in the simplest sense, defines the number of people who report to a manager and is expressed as “1:x” (for example 1 to 20 means that specific manager supervises 20 resources). Generally, 1 to 35 is considered to be the maximum number of resources that can be efficiently managed if supervision is “de visu”. It is easy to understand that not all organizations fall within this range and often go well above this ratio and, in case of remote teams also featuring a very high dispersion factor.
This is not making things easy at all.
The main difficulty is noticing when a virtual team is too big, because very often the symptoms (lack of participation, being silent, …) are not as evident as when people are close: some of the signs which deserve careful consideration are, for example, the difficulty of organizing meetings by agreeing on everyone’s agendas, the difficulty in receiving everyone’s input during the meeting, and the “silent attitude” described before. The sooner you intercept one of this signs, the better it is to correct it.
When instead coming to the “pure” span of control, you cannot simply nominate team leaders and managers as “drops of rain”, so one of the ways to correctly manage involvement: instead of inviting everyone to everything, you can proceed to select “concentric circles” and specific lists of people who are needed for that specific one alignment or project.
As a general rule it should be remembered that:
A) in order for virtual teams to be effective they must not be too large and this also applies to the subsets that we are going to outline. It is very important that every time we ask ourselves if the team could work with fewer resources.
B) the fact that the team is virtual does not change the way it is managed: the meeting is not a time to do the work together but rather a time to share the updates and to make decisions.
A possible structuring of the remote team goes through a 3-level model (restricted, extended, informative) that you have probably had the opportunity to meet in other contexts: individuals participate in these different meetings since the subdivision was made based on complexity of the topics to be discussed, the pervasiveness of the decision on the participant’s work and responsibility in carrying out the work.
Core Team : The team of this level should ideally have no more than 3-5 people and is the decision-making moment where the participants have a high level of involvement and responsibility in the topics covered
Extended Teams : Participants at this level offer specific expertise when needed and can contribute to specific actions. Instead of carrying out an extended participation in each meeting, it is advisable that this type of participants be aware of everything that happens so that they can provide opinions for the relevant components;
Advisory Team: are still important members but definitely less involved, they are generally operational or people with specific skills but who are involved only in certain moments.
Just practice the approach and you will find the correct balance for your organization
