If you have the choice, what value would you like the virtual team to produce? $620,000 or $1 million - - with the same number of people? Obviously, you want the latter. A breakthrough research project now tells you what to focus on to achieve better results when your team works virtually.

Bridge the Distance's founder, Dr. Jaclyn Kostner, is spokesperson for a just-released international study titled Meetings around the World (a Frost & Sullivan study commissioned by Verizon Business and Microsoft). In a nutshell, Meetings Around the World conclusively underscored a critical finding for global teams: the better you collaborate, the better the results. Conversely, the less effectively people collaborate the less well they will perform. It's just that simple.

In fact, collaboration quality accounted for 36% of the variation performance. Translated into dollars, the quality of collaboration means the difference between producing $640,000 to $1 million with the same number of people! For each multiple of a million dollars in productivity, the difference in value produced becomes even more startling. The quality of collaboration can make the difference between $6,400,000 and $10 million in value produced. For even larger organizations, the quality of collaboration in your global organization can make the difference between $64 million or $100 million in value produced.

So what is quality of collaboration? Take this example. Let's say you have to collaborate on strategy for next year. If you collaborate by e-mail or by audio conference, these are the lowest forms of collaboration. They're slow, clunky, and boring. The team that collaborates through such week collaboration practices is destined to produce less.

Compare that to developing strategy in a highly interactive Web conference meeting, where people meet from their desktops; where people are constantly using polls, chats, and onscreen annotations to drive a high performance meeting and replace missing non-verbal cues; and where everyone in every location is a full, active, and equal participant in team interaction and decision making. Engaging, interactive Web conference meetings are the highest forms of team collaboration. In fact, they are so powerful, often they can be better than face to face in working issues and driving team alignment. They'll never be as warm as a face-to-face meeting; but when conducted effectively, virtual meetings are highly effective in driving high performance.

Savvy business leaders have always known that collaboration is important, but until now no one could put a number on it. By ramping up the quality of collaboration, Meetings Around the World also showed collaboration's dramatic impact on all of the key measures that businesses use to assess their results, including... ol>

So, to be clear, quality of collaboration is not sending emails and listening in to audio conference meetings. Rather, high quality collaboration is the deep, energetic, full participation of all people, in all locations, in ways that makes working together an exhilirating and highly productive experience.

Teams that have high quality collaboration are much less likely to miscommunicate. They work well together and feel a strong team connection because everyone is included and is participating actively. And they build high performance because they don't have to waste time fixing things that were the result of poor communication up front.

Would you--or better yet, would the people on your virtual team--use the word exhilirating to describe their collaboration, when virtual? If you aren't sure, read on.