Remote/Hybrid Teams

Challenges / Opportunities

Geographically dispersed teams have become more common in a wide range of organizations and industries. With more people working away from the traditional workplace for a variety of rea-sons, organizations and their teams are faced with new challenges and opportunities. These new workplace realities contribute to recruitment, retention, and engagement solutions, benefitting both organizations and their associates. Multiple terms refer to this shift in the definition of the workplace and new ways of working: virtual, distance, remote, digital, hybrid, and telework, among others. Whatever the terminology, the reality is that work is increasingly done by people who work together from a distance, with occasional interaction in on-site, co-located situations.

In this age of global competition, mergers, acquisitions, mobile workers and distributed business operations, dispersed teams face the critical challenge of achieving results in an effective and timely manner in spite of time and distance barriers. This involves communicating via technology, while managing work flow and performance metrics without the benefit of face-to-face interac-tion.

While there are similarities between traditional (co-located) and virtual teams, there also significant differences, which if ignored, can lead to difficulties within the team and compromised perfor-mance results. VirtualWorks! offers workshops and team coach-ing to develop skills for virtual team success.