Conference Call Savings

The easy availability of web conferencing is already changing the way we do business, and it is now set to change the ways we work.

Remember how e-mail changed our working habits? You probably don’t because it’s so much part of our lives that we can’t imagine being without it. Twenty years ago, an office memo was written on a piece of paper, inserted in a special envelope, and then make its way from person to person, with each addressee physically signing a form showing they had received the memo. A specially-paid office boy would be required to take the memo from person to person and department to department. Now, a single e-mail performs the same function in a fraction of a second and can contain sophisticated presentations and links to external data sources. The people reading the memo do not have to be in the same building — or even country — or work for the same firm.

Web conferencing complements e-mail. Now, we can hold physical meetings with people in other countries with the ease with which we once sent them a message — and there is a new, associated buzzword: the virtual team.

A virtual team is a team just like any other except that they can be anywhere in the world (as long as there is a broadband Internet connection). It means that when you build a team to work on a project, you are no longer constrained by the skills available in your building, in your company, or in your country. You can now bring people together from anywhere, and they can meet and work on the same project. This no longer means just sending e-mails back and forth with Word documents using change-review tools; staff can now hold proper meetings using web-conferencing technology to discuss issues face-to-face. The virtual team provides great advantages to companies in terms of quality, productivity, and cost-cutting. You can now use the best man or woman for the job rather than those most-easily brought together.

However, to get the most out of a virtual team, you will need to be aware of the ways to maximize virtual-team productivity. Virtual-team members are located in different places, firms, and countries, so they must be able to work independently. Projects suited for this kind of work are those where the results are transmittable documents or software. (You can design a table using virtual conferencing, but during some phases, such as the overseeing carpenters who will actually build the table, employees will need to be in the same room as the wood.)

While there are fewer reasons for friction between staff members when they can’t leave dirty cups all over the office, trust is still very important because people are relying on each other to do things from a distance, and monitoring them may be harder. You will need to be aware of different time zones: the amount of time available for meeting may be limited if one employee starts work when the other is finishing his day. There are different communication cultures which need to be taken into account — some cultures are brash and prone to speaking up, while others may expect the boss to set the tone. So you will need to be prepared for different ways of interacting in a setting where staff aren’t just from different cultures but are physically located within their own countries. Public holidays may not coincide, especially if team members have different religions, and these will need to be noted in advance.

Probably the biggest issue with virtual teams is the need to make sure people are paying attention and not doing something else. It’s very easy during virtual meetings to spend your time working and not pay attention to what is going on, so managers will need to make sure that the staff are fully engaged with the meeting.

What binds a virtual team together is web conferencing. The virtual team will need to hold meetings, and web-conferencing technology is what will make the team tick. Reliable, well-supported, and flexible web-conferencing software ensures that meetings take place as planned without any unexpected snags. Meetings should be about the team and the project — not about the software.