Virtual Teams
November 17th, 2006[ Office Gossip ]
What’s below is verbatim from here…
Can absence make a team grow stronger? In 2002, NetAge teamed up with two business school professors to try to find out whether virtual teams really work. Harvard Business Review publishes the results this month as its Best Practice. We found that “far-flung” teams are more productive than their face-to-face counterparts if they keep three practices:
They exploit diversity. The team can’t just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.
They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality. By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.
They hold the team together. It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.
November 21st, 2006 at 8:23 am
Working virtual has a pleasing sound and I would think allows individuals to work much smarter than in an office setting. One piece I find that missing when working without face to face is what I will call “sensory connectedness”. Often I find that my verbal over the phone conversations or email is misinterpreted and what I need is to see visually people’s reactions. Call it quantum or what ever you like but without an observer, sometimes focus is lost and those office meetings I so much dread become a valuable tool to make sure everyone is on the same page. Perhaps better techologies bridge this gap.
November 21st, 2006 at 8:33 am
I’m with you. We spend almost all our time working remotely but we strive for opportunities to meet face to face. In some ways I think you have to know and trust each other more to make working remotely successful.
Having said that, the same problems that will cause working remotely to fail are the same problems you’d encounter sitting in the same office. In some cases, working remotely just accelerates things.
I’m sure better technology will improve it but any technological solution is still a hack and can’t ever be viewed as a replacement for what you called “sensory connectedness”.