The Virtual Team

In today’s ever expanding and ever changing dynamic world, the project teams have become much more global, geographically distributed and also mobile. The businesses have become truly global. Hence the teams have also truly become global. The teams need to tap the best talent across the globe no matter where they exist. It is not enough and competitive to have the entire team coming from one single geographical place.

Business function teams and project teams at present will have the best members from across the world and work as a single team. This has become possible with the advent and adoption of information technology. Today teams use emails, audio conferences, video conferences; VPN, VOIP, collaboration software, chat and messaging services to remain connected and collaborate in real time. It is no more necessary to have physically collocated teams where the team members will work in a face-to-face environment.

Virtual teams are teams where the members can work from different locations and can still collaborate with each other using technology, creating an atmosphere as-if they are working face-to-face in reality. Virtual teams have become the new normal in today’s team. Outsourcing of technology work and manufacturing work to distant cost effective locations have created the need for virtual teams. Virtual collaboration has become an integral part of the new management functions and processes.

Virtual teams provide greater flexibility, capability and cost effectiveness to the organization. Companies are leveraging virtual team concept to their advantage by hiring talented resources at an affordable rate from across the world and integrating them as part of their core team. Virtual team concept also facilitates people to work from home. This has provided immense flexibility to the work force as well as to the organizations. Organizations do not need to build all the work spaces. They can have some of their team members working from home, thereby saving expensive work spaces. This provides the worker the comfort of working from home as well.

Virtual team has become a revolutionary aspect of modern businesses now.