The Art of Collaborating Effectively in Virtual Teams

3 thoughts on “The Art of Collaborating Effectively in Virtual Teams”

  1. Great post Luis and one that hits close to home for me as I have been a remote knowledge worker for the last 5 years. I echo your statement about the importance of training and add that in order for this type of training to be effective it must be specific, role-based, and in context of the person being trained. As you state, this is about getting people to adopt a new way of working. Teaching someone how to use a particular tool is just one of many aspects to be covered and seldom creates the type of visceral experience needed for deep-seated change to occur. To be effective enterprise collaboration training should be role-based and/or end-to-end process based and be delivered in context of the trainee’s current way of working.

  2. Nice post.

    The most significant problem is IMO the failure to capture knowledge. Even in “modern” companies that are comfortable already with information sharing tools like wikis and blogs, the amount of captured knowledge is still minimal and that’s why those companies still have to rely on meetings and other face-to-face events as information radiators.

    I really like your idea that we have to get knowledge workers to move from a physical water cooler (coffee corner) to a virtual water cooler. It could be IRC (which can be quite awkward to non-geek users), it could be microblogging as you suggest or it could be something else. I personally don’t believe on using microblogging as a form of narrating your work, just because it requires too much effort from the user, but this is mainly a technological (and therefore simpler?) issue – capturing enterprise activity streams with less user effort.

  3. I agree with Alves unless the microblogging is supported by a enterprise or org-wide tool that enables + motivates participants to easily share and search for content… especially to accomplish greater things together, through the process, than they can on their own….

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