Everyone was on the same page when the trans-Atlantic deal closed. And it was encouraging to see our Onyx Software team and executives at the UK software and services we had just purchased pledging to collaborate. The end-goal: distributing Onyx products and services to existing clients in the region.

To get the relationship off the ground and make it productive, we needed to develop and execute several action plans, including those for sales and distribution, employee ramp-up, and integration of operations and development. But distance, which wasn’t supposed to get in the way of this new virtual relationship, quickly caused a series of missteps that cut our return on the acquisition.

Despite daily phone calls designed to track progress and weekly staff meetings, we had a tough time integrating, transitioning and training the UK company after the ink on the M&A contract dried. Going in, we thought this transaction would provide us with valuable access to new enterprise customers and a strong beach-head in the British market. All the contact and connection up front helped us to doubly confirm our objectives, but this wasn’t sufficient, and we weren’t able to engender mutual trust and execute crisply on behalf of our ultimate goals.

What went wrong?

Because the list of action items was dispersed across hundreds of e-mails, we didn’t have an efficient way of seeing where things stood and moving forward accordingly. The “basic” task of consolidating these action items and defining next steps overwhelmed those who were also responsible for generating revenue for the partnership, and so people on both sides of the Atlantic never knew where they actually stood. In the end, we simply underperformed.

Looking back, we believe this scenario – which plays out in so many M&A deals as two parties struggle to merge after an acquisition – could have been largely avoided with the right kind of productivity-enhancing technology that provided us with a transparent and accessible look at the project’s tasks, objectives, owners and status.

Virtual – and multicultural – teams like ours at Onyx are becoming commonplace in many companies around the world today, and yet it’s increasingly apparent that we aren’t always deploying the best digital tools to insure the most efficient work across the globe. These solutions are truly needed because recent research indicates that multicultural teams linked online from a host of locations can take up to 17 weeks to become as productive as far-flung virtual teams from the same culture.

Technology that focuses on the tracking of actual work, not just the goals and objectives, can help make these – and other – virtual relationships flow better because it documents and analyzes accountability for each and every assignment undertaken. This reliable and relevant information, in turn, fosters trust and teamwork among project participants – whether they’re sitting in Madagascar, Madrid or Manchester. The data also allow a sense of mutual respect to take hold among virtual team members who may not know each other but who surely depend on each other to achieve business objectives and results.

If the team at Onyx headquarters in Bellevue had a cohesive way to track the timely completion of tasks, for example, we might have been able to share our business, technology and culture more effectively with our new teammates from the UK. And that certainly would have led to superior results.

One of the issues we face when we ask technology to help inspire virtual global teams like this to work together is that we’re often aiming the solution at the wrong part of the problem.

Most collaboration and productivity-enhancing tools are designed to stimulate brainstorming, which represents just 5 percent of the work process during the life of a project. During the UK deal, the 5 percent of the process involved confirming and re-confirming our objectives.

The challenge, though, is building virtual collaboration solutions for the other 95 percent of the work process – the actual doing and moving things forward. This part of most projects lends itself very well to online participation, as long as individuals are able to easily see all the tasks and assignments and where they stand in real-time – in other words, who’s really pushing the ball downfield in support of goals and objectives.

These types of technology solutions do exist for sales teams. Sales is clearly one of the most process- and metrics-based functions in a company – pipeline forecasts and closed deals are certainly hard-edged and measurable indicators of success. At the same time, sales is one of the most mobile corporate functions because the best sales representatives operate out of the office so they can work with customers wherever and whenever they do business.

In areas of the business that aren’t as measurable or mobile as sales, leaders of virtual teams usually default and end up making and implementing decisions once a week, when they convene their status update meetings and rehash the past seven days with geographically dispersed employees. This episodic and intermittent progress wastes valuable time, chokes off productivity momentum and forces virtual teams to march in lock-step with their managers.

We certainly experienced this during our acquisition of the UK company. And the wait-and-see process is exacerbated when virtual teams are scattered through time zones, which seriously dent productivity unless there are always-accessible digital updates of the work that’s underway.

Looking to the future, the winning companies in the global economy will almost certainly be those that can maximize productivity from virtual teams. To help businesses make this happen, we must keep developing the right collaborative technology; if we don’t, we’ll be under-serving our corporate customers and under-cutting their competitiveness.

One of the major disappointments in the opening case study involving Onyx and the UK company is that the British firm was a huge value-creator who offered us potentially game-changing distribution potential; but we weren’t able to fully leverage this asset because our collaborative technology at the time – phone, email, and CRM tools – were not purpose-built for managing tasks of integration. In the end, it’s unclear if our two virtual teams could have meshed unless we had transparent task-oriented information at our finger-tips on a 24 X 7 basis.

So, when it comes to assembling a virtual work force – large or small – it’s important to remember that collaborative technology that focuses on step-by-step execution leads to trusted and productive relationships that generate world-class results on the top and bottom lines.