Telework leadership practices and virtual team management strategies

Telework / Telecommuting

Business

At Waggoner Edstrom we have discovered that time is one of our most precious assets. We continue to win new accounts over some of the best advertising agencies in the world by allowing our teams to develop their own way of being aggressive and challenging deadlines while still being able to participate in their family life. This competitive advantage that we have discovered will be hard for our competitors to copy as their cultures are more centered on traditional in office functions. By providing our creative and account teams with the independence to systematize their workloads as they choose, and giving them control over their project direction we have created weapon that will allow us to be very successful in the future.

Is Telework/Telecommuting Responsible for a Corporation?

Telework takes place when information and communications technologies (ICT's) are functional to facilitate work to be done at a distance from the place where the work results are needed or where the work would traditionally have been done (What is Teleworking? . . . Telecommuting, n.d.). This idea is an innovative business solution that allows employees to do prolific work away from the traditional office. Contemporary technological advances have made it easier to work anytime, anywhere, and any place (Telework Overview, 2011).

There are advantages of telecommuting for both employees and employers. Advantages for teleworkers include: better administration of time and augmented flexibility of working schedule, productivity development due to the fact that they are not bothered by colleagues or by superiors, better focus on tasks to be done, reduction or even elimination of transportation costs, reduction of time required for going to the office and reduction of stress (Hortensia, n.d.).

Advantages for organizations include:

decrease of operating costs involved by the necessity of utilizing working spaces like rent, maintenance and insurance decrease of utilities expenses like gas, electricity and water decrease of the expenditure of consumable materials decrease of salary operating costs, as the teleworkers are paid for their task and not for their time spent at work possibility to have experts located in any part of the world and possibility to hire low cost but capable labor force, for example recruiting the personnel can be done in geographic areas where the labor force is low cost well trained increase of productivity and performances due to the fact that teleworkers can better focus on the results to be achieved reduction of the number of absentees, because the teleworkers work at home creation of jobs and employment chances in rural or disadvantaged areas (Hortensia, n.d.).

Virtual teams permit for companies to take advantage of on a lot of different things. One of the most significant benefits of a virtual team is diversity of knowledge. People with a lot of dissimilar kinds of knowledge now can be spread out all over the globe. Online meetings, remote computer access, wireless technology, and conferencing systems present a way for participants to connect to a complex discussion from anywhere. With no travel and lodging costs, and no in-between chunks of empty time, people who would be reluctant to be inconvenienced now can provide their informational part of a process, and then go on with other business. Since they're concerned only for the particular knowledge event, they can charge only for that time, not the supplementary travel times that used to be involved (Landers, 2008).

The second major benefit to virtual teamwork is time itself. For instance a company can set up separate groups for development, planning, structure, and marketing, locating each group in different time zones around the world. One group works a usual business day, then closes down and hands off the project to the next time zone. That group also works a normal business day before handing off to the next time zone, and so on. The end result is an around the clock virtual business day. This kind of tag-team hand-off provides a way for a small company of only a few workers to successfully compete with international companies (Landers, 2008).

A third, fundamental advantage of this kind of electronic teamwork is access. Most expert consultants are working on a lot of different projects, aiding a variety of clients. They aren't always accessible by telephone, but can use email to provide access within one day timeframe. Diversity in geographic location, time shifting, and the amenities of communication all add up to being able to put together a very multifaceted skill set at a much more affordable price than in the past (Landers, 2008).