Virtual Team

Virtual Teams

Research has proved that a flexible organization is more competitive and responsive to the market place . Employees have started demanding personal flexibility and technological sophistication . In addition to all this , the global workday has become 24 hours instead of 8 hours because more organizations have emerging markets in different geographical locations

All this has led to the evolution of virtual teams

What is a Virtual Team

A Virtual Team is a group of individuals who work across time , space and organizational boundaries to achieve a common goal (Wikipedia

, 2006 Members of virtual teams communicate electronically

Benefits of Virtual Teams "Strength lies in differences , not in similarities " -- Stephen Covey (Time Management Guide , 2005

Virtual teams offer several benefits to organizations as well as the individual team members

John Monroe , the now retired head of Hewlett-Packard 's Corporate External Standards Organization in 1999 , faced the challenge of running a multilingual team spread across 16 countries . His team saved the company 800 ,000 a year in compliance costs for consumer products in Argentina and 200 ,000 a year in avoided costs and faster cycle times in Korea (Snyder , 2003 , para . 2

Construction engineering giant Bechtel decreased its server management costs with a virtual team that functions as a distributed resource for server management . System administrators assigned to several offices now have access rights to the entire server infrastructure to collectively support 28 ,000 users on a global network (Gaspar , 2001 , para . 6

Virtual teams allow employees to be more flexible and reduce traveling expenses for the organization . Geographically dispersed teams allow organizations to hire and retain the best talent regardless of location Most importantly , virtual teams allow people in different parts of the world to come together to work on a project

Problems with Virtual Teams

Sometimes virtual teams fail , not because of lack of knowledge or technology , but because of miscommunication . A lapse in communication is a leading complaint among members of virtual teams . Working on a project over the virtual workspace may cause lack of project visibility Differences in time zones may also hinder communication

Margaret A . Neale , the John G . McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution at the Graduate School of Business says "It 's scary . A lot of organizations create virtual teams with almost no understanding of the unique implications of that decision (Snyder , 2003 , para . 5 ) Making virtual teams work is not an easy task Simple tasks like scheduling a meeting become complex when one person 's work day begins when the other person is sound asleep . The farther apart people are physically , the more time zones they have to cross to communicate . Thus , time becomes a problem when people who are not in the same place need some of their activities to be in sync (Lipnack and Stamps , 1997

Neale says "We put people in a complex virtual environment and we don 't give them training , because we don 't know what to train them on (Snyder , 2003 , para .7...