We know that conflict is going to be part of team activity. When we speak of reducing conflict, we are talking about unproductive conflict, the kind of conflict that does not yield a creative solution, but rather hampers progress. Effective communication minimizes misunderstandings.

The major problem with distributed teams is that the conflict is more likely to become passive aggressive. Often, conflict is sublimated to subterranean modalities. Witness an increase in snarky e-mails, avoidance, silence, or subtle forms of sabotage. This means that workplace conflicts can fester unaddressed even longer than when conflict is directly expressed, however unpleasantly. Silence kills, and when team members avoid each other, this cascades into wasted time. This can cause failure.

In distributed teams, trust develops slowly more slowly than in co-located teams, is often more fragile, and can be easily damaged. What are among the top 3 reasons that projects and teams fail? Communication barriers and weak team skills. According to a recent research by Forrester Consulting, half of the respondents have concerns about the challenges faced by virtual team managers. The leading concern was building trust among employees (57%), followed by concerns about communicating effectively (49%).

The most effective way to reduce unproductive conflict is to prevent it in the first place. For distributed teams, this means having a purposeful, transparent and sustainable process for bringing new

team members on board and deliberately enhancing conflict avoidance and resolution skills.