Home-shoring is replacing off-shoring

Matt Keating, writing in Phone home for The Guardian (Saturday October 15), reports that “Virtual call centres” (aka home-shoring) where staff work from home over the web can save employers significant infrastructure and accommodation costs and also keep workers happier.He also notes some of the management challenges in keeping the remote workers connected with their employers.

I ran across an excellent article, Evaluating Social Network Services, by Christopher Allen in his very interesting blog, Life With Alacrity, which reviews four of the leading social network software/services:

James Thornton in “You Have Three Brains” for TheBiggestIdeas.com reports on research by Paul D Maclean on the ‘triune’ brain. Apparently Maclean’s research suggests that we each have, not one but, three brains nested within our skulls – a lizard brain, a dog brain, and a human brain. This research got me thinking – if teams are really living systems then they might have 3 brains too?

You can now text devices as well as people

Thanks to Pat Garland from the NI e-Government unit for finding this surreal piece of technology news. I had to double-check the date to make sure it was not April 1 but with 22,000 entries on google it can’t be a hoax (can it?). Pat writes under “Tea-time for Bonzo?” that Tea manufacturer PG Tips has invented an "SMS kettle", according to Ananova.

How often do you go to a team meeting where you ‘time out’ and send everybody away frustrated simply because you could not get some of the participants to shut up? Or have you ever have meetings on ‘divergent topics’ where you feel you have opened Pandora’s Box so wide that there is little chance of getting back any consensus or convergence in the group? If either of these is your experience then you could really benefit from an innovative software/hardware/method combo called Zing.

Virtual Teams Can Thrive Without Adding New Technology - Audio-Visual Presentation Showcases How

Just in case you missed it my esteemed colleague Robin Good and I have now produced a new version of my first bioteams audio presentation.

Harvard now says VoIP is strategically important

A very interesting article appeared in September's Harvard Business Review (Vol. 83, No. 9) the significance of which may not have been fully appreciated. The article, Using VoIP to Compete, explains "Voice over IP" in laymans terms and concludes:

The term ‘email addiction’ has been growing very rapidly on the web for the last few years. When I did a google search on it I was amazed to find over 9 million entries which define, debate, discuss, sympathise and offer potential cures.

Last week I made a post seeking interest from organisational team leaders who would like to collaborate with me in a unique mini research project into the beliefs of high-performing teams. Thank you to those who have expressed an interest - I will be getting back to you shortly. I am now announcing that the closing date for me to be able to consider any further expressions of interest in this collaborative research project is next Friday (October 21).

Addressing the problem of virtual team freeloaders

One of the biggest problems in virtual teams is freeriding (aka freeloading or loafing) where certain team members do not pull their weight.