If you are a business owner looking to sell a business and struggling with a workforce spanning the globe, read on. As you look for ways to improve the business productivity and valuation, consider addressing issues you may have with your international teams, whether internal or external. When it comes time to sell a business, if these international teams are highly productive, the market will reward you with a higher business valuation.

A virtual team is defined as “a group of people who interact through interdependent tasks guided by a common purpose.” It crosses “space, time and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies.” (Virtual Teams, by Lipnack and Stamps). Here are a few quick tips for improving global virtual team performance.

Build trust

According Patrick Lencioni’s The Trouble with Teamwork, the top team dysfunction is an absence of trust. For virtual teams, trust lives at the task not interpersonal level. It is critical that trust is established through performance consistency and rapid response to team members’ emails, requests for information and completing tasks. Build a culture of trust by clearly defining roles, responsibilities and communication expectations, and hold the team accountable to them.

Set strong guidelines around communication

Within the project team, establish communications guidelines and expectations around response times for voicemails and emails. Build the sense of team and empower communication with a project roster or contact sheet with vital information for each person. This includes project responsibility, back up contact, FedEx addresses, fax numbers, normal working hours, accessibility hours, special knowledge and tool proficiency, national holidays and vacations. If possible, include appropriate personal information such as photos and hobbies to help the team get to know each other as people and not just digital work units.

Consider establishing a mechanism for information exchange, such as an internal website or electronic bulletin board. As scattered people in different time zones collaborate on documents, versions can quickly become fragmented and out of sync. Time is lost trying to consolidate and manage them.

Have the first meeting in person, if possible

This is the best case scenario, one that many of my clients cannot afford to do, unfortunately. It is, however, the optimal way to give the project and team member relationships a strong start. A strong second place recommendation is to have at least one meeting in person, even if it isn’t the first one. The reality for many of my clients, though, is that in-person meetings are not in the money or time budget.

Have explicit meeting preparation and management

It is more difficult to follow standard meeting processes over distant locations, cultures and time zones. Take the time to state the meeting preparation expectations for the project. Find the best time zones for the team and alternate between them. For example, in a recent client engagement involving a US company expanding in an Asian market, we had meetings every Tuesday, but alternated between 7 am and 7 pm US CST. We were all equally inconvenienced, and that is the only fair way to do it.

Repeat names during the meeting. Since you cannot see body language, proactively monitor meeting reactions and performance, and address problems promptly.

Rotate meeting leadership and scribe roles

To promote inclusion and participation, rotate leadership and scribe roles. Wake up the team by raising your expectations of them. Whoever takes the minutes should be the next meeting’s leader, since one prepares you for the other.

Spend 70-80% of time with team members that are NOT co-located

It is easy to stay in the pattern you are already in: building relationships, sharing information and spending time with those already in your location. Global virtual team leadership requires you to go beyond your comfort zone and not just reach out but to focus on those that you cannot easily communicate with. Schedule one on one conversations for feedback and focused conversations.

Assess team and leader skills, and design training to close gaps.

With a team that is in your location, you may have a better understanding of what the team’s skills are. With a team in another location, special effort needs to be made to understand the team’s skills, and where and how to improve them.

Recognize our humanity

We are not just digital work bits. We work, in part, to satisfy our need as social creatures. Build in social interaction time into the agenda. You can, at the start of each meeting, when it is time to take roll call, ask each person to say their name and something personal about themselves or good that has happened since the last meeting.

Increase recognition of work well done

People don’t get enough feedback when working over a distance. When someone has done something well, don’t treat it as business as usual. Spread the word, send thank you’s and give public recognition. At one company we worked at, meetings always ended with participants volunteering verbal ‘roses.’ For example, Juan may say to the project team, “I would like to give a ‘rose’ to Alana for her ideas on the cost / benefit analysis.” This is a simple, strong and upbeat way to end the meetings.

And In Conclusion…

International virtual teams are our new reality. While this enables top talent to collaborate, it does require a special leadership skill set and tool kit to be successful. When selling a business, you want to make it hum – inside your headquarters and across the world.

I invite you to use these ideas during your journey to sell a business.