Pros & Cons of a Virtual Team, Are they better?

The globalized nations of the world are getting closer with the dot com era inventing new wheels to do their businesses in different ways, the virtual teams are out everywhere situated on different parts of the world making it successful to do business from all the corners of the world. The actual offices are here to stay, with their own advantages, as their processes demand them to be together and work together. There are varied types of offices and business structures, it really gets difficult to analyze whether they are one company or 2 companies. Teams play a very important role in achieving the common goals of any organization; the very characteristics of being a team and the ideal requirements to satisfy the core of being a team are stated below:

Task related

Teams are split as per the tasks, different people have different capabilities of doing their jobs, some may do it faster while some may be slower. The complexities and the challenges of the tasks determine the jobs of each team, the actual teams are interdependent on each other for completing their whole project.

The structural team

The structural teams are those who maintain the stability of the team with the perfect input and resources required. Each of the teams are split so as to get the organized work done, the expertise in the team plays a key role in building the team’s future and getting the tasks done from them. The physical proximity of teams helps them interact and also in problem solving agenda meetings. The employees of the company are regulated with a specific set of rules and regulations to be followed. The diverse nature of teams brings in lots of new ideas and creativity in the work procedure.

External support

The actual teams are more prone to get external support whether the process related support or the technical support. The new employees or workers can be easily trained and bring about social and technical skills in the organization along with business understanding of new projects and processes being developed in the organization.

Virtual teams are getting popular where individuals seated at different places can interact and do their work efficiently with the help of communication technology where they can see each other virtually and solve or interact their work methods or processes. The main advantages of having a virtual team are:

• It can work at any time of day or night; there are no set rule that applies to the time they should be working.
• People from different places can bring in their insights relating to a particular subject matter.
• It gets flexible for people to work as per their set schedules; it has a faster responsive system than our actual teams.
• They approach high collaborative methods, which creates great teamwork and high trustworthy relations amongst each other.

Although as much advantages, we might discuss about the virtual teams, it carries equal amount of disadvantages too as there are lots of chances of miscommunication happening, members should be adaptive in taking up different assignments, there is loss of productivity if at all any virtual member resigns, there is no strict adherence to the guidelines set by the parent company. Both, the virtual teams and the actual teams are prone to difficulties while managing them so its up to us, how to cope with the challenges and bring about a change in the working system and supporting your employees to work from different corners of the world if the process, so demands!

If the concept of Virtual Teams sounds to be interesting then lets have a quick run through the types of virtual teams: Network team, product development team, parallel team, production teams, service teams.