A while back I was part of an experiement regarding time delay and team. The purpose of the experiment was to analyze how what time difference cause on work quality and efficency. It was stimulated to paralle a company that have offices around the world. For example: one trial would be two office with a 6 hours day. In addition, all the communication between workers is through chats. As one of the workers, I found out how frustrating it can be when I begin my own work and my collegue would be getting ready to "leave" the office.
There was a disconnect between each office. There are many reason for this. One of which is "the difference (location) caused problems in aligning the groups based ont eh alliance agreement."--Robert Cross, 2004. Cross wrote about how the difference cause a lack of awareness of each indivual's experties within the company. Creating a personal relationship with virtual teams is difficult. Not knowing the atmosphere of difference or even the personality of each indicudual can lead to barriers in regards to teamwork. Most of the time we have small talk to people we see. It would be odd to email someone to try to mimic that. Most of the time we email with a purpose or to get information. The question I present this week is how can a virtual team get to know each other through the net and still be strictly professional?
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i agree it's definitely difficult to work with others in different timezones (especially if your day is their night).. for the past 2 years, one of the businesses i've run works and communicates heavily with other businesses/factories in china, which is in the total opposite time zone as us (+12 hours). at first, i found it really frustrating, because there was always a one day delay from asking a question to getting an answer and vice versa unless i wanted to stay up and answer e-mails at midnight. the solution that i found to deal with this was project management/collaborative software (a company called 37signals is one of the leaders in these type of web-based apps). there's nothing we can do about the different in time, but the right infrastructure can definitely make communciation more structured and organized...
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