Virtual Work Collaboration

Today, technology, speed, globalization, and complexity are rearranging the root premise of work design. Two things happen: Distance and time become problems to solve, and organizational issues develop within rigid hierarchy-bureaucracies. To deal with the demands of competition that force cross-boundary work, organizations create virtual teams. A virtual team is a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries using technology. Electronic media together with computers enable the creation of new kinds of spaces. They are real to the groups that inhabit them, yet are not the same as physical locations. However, successful collaborative work requires 90 percent people and 10 percent technology. What works can be boiled down to one word: trust. Technology and resources alone do not enable success; people do. Relationships - technological and human - drive the reorganization of work. Four words capture the essence of virtual teams: people, purpose, links, and time. We are learning new, more horizontally connected, participatory ways of achieving higher levels of small-group performance. We are rediscovering ancient small-group, face-to-face knowledge. At the same time, we're inventing some brand-new skills for the geographically diffuse groups of the future. Teams with trust converge more easily, organize their work more quickly, and manage themselves better. Trust builds with the recognition of the contribution that everyone makes. This "matter of faith" comes from past experience, however brief or extensive. The importance of trust cuts across a team's life cycle.

A virtual team is first at all a team, they see each other like a team more than anything else, and it is characterized by interdependence, shared values, and common goals. Additionally, it is characterized by members who are geographically separated from one another, who communicate mostly through electronic means, and whose boundaries may be stretched by the inclusion of core and peripheral members, members from multiple departments, and smaller teams subsumed by larger teams.

Duarte and Snyder refer about the factors for virtual teams that affect the probability of their success:

• Human resource policies
• Training and on-the-job education and development
• Standard organizational and team processes
• Use of electronic collaboration and communication technology
• Organizational culture
• Leadership support of virtual teams
• Team leader and team member competencies

In addition, they mention that there are different kinds of virtual teams as described:

• Networked teams
• Parallel teams
• Project or product development teams
• Work, functional, or production teams
• Service teams
• Management teams
• Action teams

Nakayama and D´ávila explain the advantages, benefits, and needs of virtual teams: As for the advantages of virtual teams, we verified that they comprehend both employees and employers. Employees are benefited because they save time that was once spent going to other company units to take part in meetings, and thus they have more time to dedicate to work. Projects can be developed using communication technologies extremely agile and fast, such as e-mail and videoconference. Participants of virtual teams may have in a videoconference the same level of understanding they have in a traditional meeting, besides receiving the information at the same moment. Besides, there is the possibility that members of these teams count on the participation of people from anywhere in the world, or from the company. The organization may also benefit from this practice reducing costs on physical spaces, travel expenditures, and other operational expenses. However, the organization must be prepared to implement and maintain the technology necessary for the team's work. It is also necessary that the company provides training and all the support in what concerns communication and collaborative technologies. Employees need to have discipline and work in differentiated times, they need to know available tools and must be aware of the difficulties the lack of physical contact may bring: possible communication noises, lack of motivation, or even of confidence.