Ways for New Communications to Improve Efficiency in Virtual Teams

New communications such as video conferencing, audio conferencing, phones and Skype have the potential to increase flexibility in virtual teams. This is because employees can easily give their employers feedback on certain tasks at any time- day or night through phones or Skype. They may also choose to work either during the day or at night depending on their preferences and this may go a long way in increasing job satisfaction. Such choices can only be made possible when the workday has been stretched through new communication systems.

Employers on the other hand can also benefit from these new technologies because the efficiency of their teams will be enhanced through greater focus on tasks rather than the inconveniences that come with commuting. Furthermore, such teams often spend their finances only on expenses that are directly related to the work tasks and this makes them financially strong.

These new technologies can provide an organization with the benefit of twenty-four-hour days by taking advantage of the time differences in different locations. Through audio or video conferencing, it may be possible to tell members in Canada, Tokyo and South Africa about a certain project and then allow those members to continue carrying out their portion of the tasks in their own eight-hour schedules. By doing so, work can get done at a faster pace because one member at a different time zone can continue where another member in another time zone left off.

Companies have the advantage of getting the best teams to work for them irrespective of their geographical locations and they need not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in creating real premises for those units. Alternatively, information sharing and better management can be achieved even when the affected divisions are far from each other. A case in point was British Petroleum which used video conferencing to manage geologists, contractors, and engineers from across the world in divergent locations. This has optimized company performance and made their team more efficient.