How to Manage an online Virtual Team

How to Manage a Virtual Team

Introduction to Virtual Teams

The nature of teams has been changed significantly with respect to the nature of work. The organizations have extended their services vastly. Globalization and the advancements in information and communication technologies have led the companies to promote virtual teams.  Virtual teams are the active working teams that are found distributed across the geography. These are the ambulant working forces that provide organization the potential to diffuse its services through distant areas. Despite the extinctions of time and area they work in close link to organizations. This accounts for remarkable collaborative work approach. Virtual teams strengthen an organization to successfully cope with the extensively competent environment. As virtual team’s works across the contexts of time and space, they are regulated through computer driven technologies. The fact that virtual teams works explicitly beyond the focal proximity of the organization, addresses several challenges that an organization may face in managing the team.

Challenges Faced in Managing Virtual Teams

Virtual teams require a highly structured framework to maintain coordination in tasks. Virtual teams possess a rich context of diverse people who works in different physical locations, but for the same purpose. They thoroughly rely over the electronic communication to keep pace for the work (Ebrahim, Ahmed, & Taha, 2011, p. 5). In a physical manner, the virtual teams are completely isolated with the organization. This isolation confronts an organization to face various challenges to manage the virtual team. An online context of management is less formal than to perform it face to face. Working in a traditional environment gives familiarization with not only the worker’s efficiency in work, but also of his mood and social life. The virtual team members are only judged for their working potentials. An organization can rarely come to know about the mood or capacity of virtual worker.

Variant time zones appear to be the prominent challenge encountered for managing virtual teams. The other secondary challenges include language, local laws, holidays and the breaches in technology paradigms. The problem occurred over the coordination network at any instance can disperse the problem to other linked virtual teams. Management teams must define a relevant path to assure increase in counteracting for perceived discrepancies among the virtual members.

Both the management team and the virtual team are unable to fully justify the statements due to an inability to read gestural cues. This breach creates difficulty for both the teams to judge the whole scenario. Body language contributes a lot in translating a statement with its proper context. Absence of body language and gestures subjects the virtual team to make wrong perceptions sometimes (Solomon, 2010, p. 11).