Developing Guidelines for Distributed Teamwork: Review of the Literature and the HFI DTC’s Distributed Teamwork Studies
Abstract
Background and reasoning behind the work
Distributed teams are increasingly being employed within complex systems and rapid technological advances are affecting the ways in which they work and can potentially work. Despite this, guidance on how distributed teams should work, how they should be organised and trained, what communications technology they should use and how support systems should be designed is not readily available. This report presents, based on a review of the relevant literature and also a series of naturalistic case studies undertaken previously by the HFI DTC, a series of initial guidelines on how teams, systems, technology and procedures should be designed and organised in order to enhance distributed team working performance.
Specific research question being addressed
Specifically, this research attempts to address the question of how distributed teamwork can be facilitated through system, procedure, training and team design.
What was undertaken in the research?
The research involved reviewing the literature on distributed teams and the HFI DTC’s previous studies on distributed teamwork, in order to formulate a series of guidelines designed to enhance distributed teamwork performance.
What was discovered?
The literature indicates that, despite offering some significant advantages over and above co-located teams, there are various problems (e.g. degraded teamwork behaviours) associated with the use of distributed teams. The literature also suggests that, despite the fact that distributed teams are likely to become the dominant form of team interaction, relatively little is known about neither distributed teams nor about what measures can be taken to enhance distributed team performance.
Encouragingly, previous work in the area (by others and the HFI DTC) provides insights into how distributed teamworking systems can be designed so that performance is enhanced. Various elements of distributed teamworking systems, including the tasks being performed, the procedures and technologies being used, and the information passed between team members, can be designed to that distributed teamworking performance is supported and not hindered.
Main conclusions and recommendations
A series of guidelines for enhancing distributed team working performance are proposed based on the literature and case study reviews. The guidelines are meaningfully organised under the headings of task (i.e. the characteristics of the tasks undertaken by the team), social (i.e. the organisation of the team and the communications links between them) and knowledge (i.e. the information used by and passed around the team) network guidelines. The guidelines specify, based on the findings from previous studies in the area, ways in which the task, social and knowledge networks used can be organised so that distributed teamwork performance is supported and not hindered in anyway.
For example, the literature and case study evidence suggests that the characteristics of the tasks being performed can either facilitate or inhibit team performance. Thus guidance regarding tasks performed by distributed teams is specified, including designing tasks to facilitate co-ordination, ensuring that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, using loosely coupled tasks, ensuring appropriate allocation of functions between team members and between team members and technology, optimising team member workload and ensuring that team members engage in performance monitoring and back-up behaviours.
The social network guidelines reflect how the team is organised and how and what communications take place between team members. Guidance in relation to the social network adopted includes to ensure that well defined and appropriate communication strategies (e.g. closed loop communications) are used, providing appropriate and explicit communications links between team members, ensuring that the team has appropriate and effective leadership, promoting the establishment of common ground between team members, ensuring that information flow is maintained, promoting and ensuring high levels of trust between team members and between team members and the technology that they use, selecting appropriate communications media for the tasks and communications required, and training distributed teams together in a contextually relevant environment.
The knowledge required for task performance is directly related to the team’s level of situation awareness. Facilitating the generation and maintenance of appropriate levels of situation awareness is all about ensuring that the right information can be communicated to the right team members at the right time. Accordingly, the guidelines regarding the knowledge network of distributed teams includes clearly defining the information requirements of the different team members, supporting the compatible and transactive situation awareness requirements of different team members, promoting the development of shared mental models between team members, promoting meta situation awareness between team members, using multiple technologies to support multiple team member roles and goals, and ensuring that technologies distribute and present information accurately and in a timely manner.
It is recommended that, when designing distributed teamworking systems, procedures, technologies and/or training programs, the guidelines presented in this report are considered. Further, it is recommended that further investigation be undertaken in the area, and that additional guidance for the design of distributed teamworking systems be specified.
Military relevance of the work
The use of distributed teams is common within the military domain and is likely to increase significantly in the future. This report presents a series of initial guidelines, developed based on the distributed teamwork literature and naturalistic case study evidence, which can be used to enhance the performance of distributed teams in military environments.
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