Virtual teams less productive: HR Research Findings
Stumble It!The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports in a “Meta Analysis of Virtual Teams” that virtual teams are less productive and demonstrate worse judgement that ‘face to face’ teams but there are ways to improve things.
Top Challenges facing virtual teams
- Virtual teams consistently take longer to complete tasks than face-to-face teams
- Complex judgment tasks resulted in the lowest performance for virtual teams versus face-to-face teams
Top Opportunities for virtual teams
- If team members are familiar with each other prior to becoming part of the team, they are able to perform almost as effectively as face-to-face teams
- Virtual team communication improves when meetings are synchronous allowing a continuous exchange of information
The article also briefly discusses the implications of these challenges and opportunities
It worth noting however that some of findings are at odds with other research I have seen.
The reader will have to decide for themselves which research they choose to trust in these contentious areas.
Perhaps some more research is required!
Tags: virtual teams
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Mobile business applications framework
In a just published book Work Goes Mobile by Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, authors of Nokia’s mobility master plan, propose a very useful application profiling scheme to establish the degree to which a business could exploit mobile technologies in their broadest sense. This approach would also be very useful for establishing the support requirements for virtually networked teams.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
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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?
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