The Boss is back from his spring break festivities in Seattle, not quite ready for school but ready to blog. This week I read "How to Pick your Million Dollar Crew" along with "6 Ways to Build Trust with your Virtual Team". I believe that virtual meetings between teams can add value to face to face interactions but virtual teams by themselves face many obstacles for success.
Being a senior in Kogod, I have been apart of many teams, however, none of them have been purely virtually based. In order to be most effective, I think that teams must have some kind of face to face interaction before they are able to create the trust necessary in order to be successful virtually. There is a lack of trust in virtual groups that makes it far more difficult to be efficient and successful.
I have been apart of groups where you choose your group and ones where your professor chooses them for you. I think it would be much easier to work virtually with a group that you choose verses one that is chosen for you.
The best groups I have been apart of are ones that set up times to meet up and then divide work up to be completely separately with communication continuing through gmail/gchat/google docs.
To conclude, I think that virtual teamwork is a very important aspect of successful groups but that it needs to be complemented with some kind of face to face interaction.
bosssssssssss OUT.
Although I have never seen companies run projects entirely based on virtual teams, the idea sounds pretty cool. I agree with you that it is good to have virtual teamwork complemented by some face-to-face interactions because we can better read a person when we meet him or her face-to-face.
ReplyDeleteI also feel that the true beauty of virtual teams is that they are time efficient and cost effective. People tend to be more focused when engaged in virtual meetings and they reduce cost and time associated with traveling.
I always prefer to work with my friends on class projects. But it would be a great learning experience to work with people with diverse social and cultural backgrounds. It makes us smarter in dealing with different personalities in the future. By working with a group that our professor picks for us, we are forced to collaborate in a way to achieve a common goal – to get a good grade.
Teams need to feature familiarity balanced with responsibility to the other people balanced with trust. If there is too much familiarity, members may feel comfortable slacking off. If there is not enough responsibility, people might make up excuses as to why they could not complete tasks. Without trust (purely virtual environments), team members may feel cheated by certain outcomes.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all; virtual teams are important and they save time and money. However, trust my be an issue and should be addressed. And in reference to picking members to become virtual, the team I'm currently in was chosen by the professor. Our schedules are impossible for us to meet. But at least a few members knew one other person in the group in order for us to be cohesive.
ReplyDeleteI think we can all agree that virtual teams may make communication easier across large distance, but that does not mean the task you are trying to complete will be done efficiently. General concensus here
ReplyDeletecompletely agree drew i think that virtual collaboration would def work better if the groups were self chosen
ReplyDeleteI feel like virtual collaboration would allow people to slack in certain areas because there is no sense of dependency. If I needed you to do something chances are I could find you in person but if I don't know who you are and we are on a virtual team there is no immediate urgency because the only thing forcing you to do the work is your own motivation.
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