COMMUNICATION & VIRTUAL TEAMS

In a well globalizad World, interconnected in all senses and with a significant number of social Networks that define our activities, hobbies and likes; companies shoulds work taking advatange of these services.

A company should think on emphasizing its corporate communication since its brand creation, like in the case of Intercontinental, the company alter analyzing its brand perception and consumer feeling towards the environment that the same company provides to work with music and by delivering a clear message to companies in the World “It is a common misconception that words used to describe a brand can be directly apllied to a music brief“

A communication process involve several issues and factors like the language, data, information and richness and can have different forms like one way communication or two way communication. But shared information between people is not always verbal, thats when proxemics and other types of non verbal communications take place to delimit important facts like territorial space, and seating dynamics.

Before corporate communication involves the current factors of a common Communications like physical proximity, status, genderr, cultural Diversity but now more factors arise in the way effective and relatively cheap information tecnology have increased in the market, showing the companies new challenges but at the same time new opportunities to encourage the creation of the now know “virtual teams“

Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtIYcbzvXXY&feature=related

A virtual team sucessful depends on its capacity to exista cross time, space, and cultural differences and with the total adquisition of a unique objective to create a common framework of effective collaboration.

According to Kuruppuarachchi (2009), what benefits and problems arise as a consequence of the creation of virtual team? Identify five each. Based on this, explain how to make the transition from a more traditional team structure to the more distributed team structure?

Benefits:

1.    Improved productivity in the way the teams guarantee efficiency and commitment within the members and the activities.

2.    Reduced cost by the use of tecnologies and web based issues.

3.    Increase competitive advantage because the teams create shared value

4.    Improve customer service because of their geographical dispersion and task structuration they are able to fullfit any need of the customer wherever the customer is located.

5.    Creativity stimulation because of its level of flexibility and freedom.

Problems:

1.    Ineffective communication because of the absent of nonverbal communications factors.

2.    Lack of leisure time for team members

3.    A lot of segmentation in the team caused by big amounts of team members.

4.    More pressure based on the speed of all processes.

To go from a traditional team to a virtual one, the team should start by  generating a more dynamic environment and by incorporating differentmeans of communication in order to start moving in a more efficient way and to drop to a final process of global team networking. The change can not disrupt at first the activities of the team but facilitates it ; then to evítate problems the team can implement activities from the traditional team too like face-to-face meetings or video conferencing. To have control of all operations the virtual team should adopt too the constant monitoring and standars that doesnt necessarily limit freedom but that clear the objectives and tasks.

REFERENCES

1. Communication and Virtual teams. Sin Kit I. Class 2011-1
2. Michael Spencer. “If intercontinental were sound… what would it be?” Journal of Business Strategy. Vol 31. P 39-46
3. Kuruppuarachchi, Palitha R. 2009. “Virtual team concepts in projects: a case of study” Proyect Management Journal 40, no. 2:19-33
4. Video retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtIYcbzvXXY&feature=related