The article “Managing the Virtual World”, by Sadri and Condra is presented in Industrial Management Journal and published in the issue from the January/Fabruary 2012. The article concerns such concept as virtual teaming — it analyses such aspects as prosperity of this invention in management. The authors have tried to look into the next points:
- Advantages and disadvantages of virtual teaming. Among the advantages of “company with no borders” is that there is no need to travel and those money, which would be used on the business trips can be saved. Besides, the company can employ the best staff through all over the world. The disadvantages are mostly connected with human factor. The culture difference, different skill levels of using the newest technologies, different time zones may cause the difficulties among the colleagues and influence the quality of work. Besides, the communication skills of team members are also of great importance.
- How to find the right employees. The members of virtual company should have such qualities as enthusiasm, the capacity of self-organization, responsibility and capacity of team-working. Besides, they should have good orientation in critical situations and quickly react on revisions.
- Leaders. They must provide the enjoyable work process for the rest of the team by smoothing out the conflicts and forming the amicable atmosphere. Saying in other worlds, they are to be real diplomats. Besides, they must encourage the team-members to work for a goal and organize this work skillfully. The leaders’ nominees should be chosen very carefully by taking into consideration all the above mentioned factors.
- The work process. To reach the success in the virtual company one must install the definite rules, which will help to set up the process of work. In fact, all the moments of cooperation (for example, the way of resolving the conflicts, or the type and frequency of communication) should be compounded.
As I see it, the appearance of virtual teams and companies has broken the bridges between the employees of different countries. Since now any company may employ any employee through all over the world and this option has many advantages. For example, the comfort place of work, the save of money and relatively free work-time schedule. At the same time one may work in any part of the planet if he has I-pad or other modern devices, for example. That is really very convenient for the majority of people. At the same time, I agree, that like everything in our world, this has its negative attributes. The employees of virtual companies, or virtual offices should be definitely competent in what they do; likewise they should know the language of business communicating and follow the corporative rules. Otherwise, they should be experienced PC users and keep abreast of the technology specialties. One more of the virtual offices’ disadvantages also concern its employees — one should be highly self-organized and self-reduced to discipline to provide a result of high quality for the company. So, the great part of weak components of virtual job is the organization of its management, so that is a point, which should be accounted the most. The top-management of such companies decides if the work of the whole company will be successful or not, as the major factor, that plays the solving role in this case, is a human factor. For example, sometimes the team members cannot make a decision because of different goals or because they simply dislike each other, or of some other reasons. So, I believe, that virtual teaming may become very useful today, when big companies have their legations all over the world, but their work should be planned in details and controlled in order to be successful.