You may love it or not, but globalization has changed our lifes forever! And it's not only our private life that was greatly affected by it, since today we have much greater freedom of choice then our ancestors and can decide where we want to live and work independently of the place we were born, but globalization has also significantly altered working and communication patterns of today.
You no longer have to be present at your working place to be able to work on company's assignments or communicate to your co-workers. On one hand greater work flexibility is very benificial of course, since at helps to save tremendous travelling costs and allows organization of today to draw in talanted people from all around the world considerably leveraging intellectual capital of the enterprise, but on the other hand it has its own hidden threats which one has to identify if he wants be successful in managing virtual teams and attain desired efficiency from them.
Firtsly, one has to understand psychology behind virtual teams and that although they are very similar to conventional one and mostly have the same features as the last one, there are some piculiar characteristic they possess that are not typical for traditional teams. Simply putting: virtual teams are much more complex in their essence then conventional teams since:
1) They exposed to cross boundaries barriers such as time zones, different culture and working habits
2) They use electronic communication technological means to communicate (share info) and collaborate (work together to produce a product)
Well although cultural differences and territorial remoteness play of course very important role in groups' performance and effectiveness, finding the right communication tools can be quite crucial for the group success as well.
''How team members will communicate? What collaboration softwares they will use and how the last one will contribute to the team effectiveness ?'' are the first questions every virtual team leader should bring up for himself in the first place.
And here of course in the first place come such software features as simplicity and security, since every organization wants that its internal data exchange stayed safe and only people who work on certain project had access to the data whereas not spending too much time and money on employee training teaching them to use new collaboration tool.
That's why in most cases success of virtual teams highly depends on the choice of collaboration software.Well, there are plenty of communication tools virtual teams may decide upon, such as e-mail, live messanger, video conferencing or file sharing and all of them useful and good in certain way... but the question is: could they one at a time or even all combined together provide desired outcome, and namely synchronize work of people separated by time, distance and culture and enhance their productivity???
As a student who loves to travel a lot and due to it sometimes has to work with my team members distantly on Uni assignments and as a 'remote' manager of IT company I have at home and which I had to leave and manage only distantly while my study abroad, I may say that all above mentioned communication tools are only partially solve cooperation problems virtual teams may encounter.
That's why when I first learned a year ago about TeamDrive software offered by PrimeSharing I was really excited to try it, since program was free of charge and provided vast opportunities for fast and secure data exchange. Moreover, software helped me to solve so long sought-after 'variation problem' that was bottom of so many disputes and inefficiency in team work I had in the past. I do believe that such collaboration softwares as TeamDrive or Collanos' Workplace may change the way virtual teams communicate and help managers to attain desired efficieny and cohesion in distant groups performance.
