Virtual teams are certainly not a new concept; nor are they fixed within the 21st century. The need for them and their subsequent use has been practised for millennia: from the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church; the East India Company to the Hudson Bay Company; the Post Office to Wells Fargo; and any army that has ever operated outside of its own barracks.
All of these organisations and many more have been affected by considerable geographic dispersal, and this is one of the main factors that have always created the emergent need for virtual teams.
The technologies that aid communication, have improved immensely since the 1960s, and with this, and the ever increasing catalyst of globalisation, there has been a huge rise in virtual teamwork across many health care organisations.
Consider this: personal computers did not exist during the 1960s; mobile phones didn’t exist in the 1970s; voicemail and conference-calling wasn’t prevalent during the 1980s; and webinar platforms only came into vogue in the last few years.
Now, tens of millions of people have all of these things, more or less within reach at any given time. In the last decade distance working has increased, and even companies that employed originally co-located teams are no longer enforcing face-to-face working.
There is some discussion about whether or not the change in work behaviours over the past decade have in fact led to a more rapid development of the communication technologies that serve a more remote style of working; who knows
The technology we now have access to makes it possible to create far more effective virtual teams than any that have gone before; whether they work well or not will depend on factors both directly related to those experienced by co-located teams and specific to issues found within virtual teams alone.
Challenges experienced by virtual teams
Some specific challenges for virtual teams include dealing with time differences across the globe, different cultural norms, and communication problems that can dog leadership efforts.
Add these to issues that even co-located teams suffer, such as; disengagement, loss of trust and cooperation, lack of clarity within roles, and a lack of clear goals or priorities, and virtual teamwork can teeter on the edge of failure if the right solutions are not applied.
Fostering productivity within virtual teams
Some of the more successful team behaviours work well for both co-location and virtual operations; for example, brainstorming solutions for problems; setting team goals; and developing team plans.
Virtual teams can be extremely successful, enhancing productivity in the workplace in ways that are actually linked to the challenges experienced by team members. For example, if the time difference challenge is surmounted, the environment is created whereby workers can link up without acknowledging issues with time or place, enabling organisations and companies to connect in ways that they never could have before. It allows them to access viewpoints and knowledge bases from cultures other than their own, and this increases the spread of information at a far more rapid pace than would have otherwise been possible.
Management development is key to success. If managers and leaders learn how to develop impact within their own teams, then it becomes a matter of time before this style of good practice filters all the way through organisations and industries; at which point it matters not that they might be thousands of miles away from each other.
Till next time,
Julia
