During one of my college internships, part of my work was conducted through a virtual team setting. My boss, as well as several team members, were located halfway across the country.At first, the experience was very strange. You're not sure when it's appropriate to contact team members, you don't know how to contribute in team meetings, and worst of all you can't even put a face to the voice on the other end of the phone. It's extremely hard to be productive when you've never seen the people who count on you.
After reading this article by Jaclyn Kostner and understanding how to build trust in a virtual team, I realized that while there were some areas to improve, the team that I worked for excelled in most of these areas. Several weeks on the project proved that everyone was available, competent, consistent, fair and open to others. This created the ideal virtual team setting.
Having the opportunity to work in online team during school, either for class or for an internship, will be advantage for students has online teams become more common in the workplace. In the future, I think, we will have have to work on some type of online team.
ReplyDeleteVirtual teams allow companies to meet and work with people all over the world. It allows conferences to happen without spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars to ship members of the team across the world to have personal contact. It is a cheaper and more efficient way of conducting business.
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