What: A New York Times article about Barack Obama’s use of social networking to create a virtual organization to help his campaign. Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Performance Using Technology Bottom Line: Chris Hughes, one of the founders of the popular online social network Facebook, is in charge of Barack Obama’s social networking campaign. This campaign… Read more →
A common problem that office workers face today is email overload. For some, email has taken over their work life and it is damaging, rather than improving, their productivity. In our Leading Virtually Digest of June 20th, we point to an article that reports how the onslaught of email or webmail is hurting productivity. A major reason for email’s negative… Read more →
Author’s note: Project Wonderland has now “forked, ” and the original team led by Nicole Yankelovich has branched off to work on Open Wonderland. Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts… Read more →
What: This past week, there continued to be a number of articles in regional newspapers about companies who are considering or trying out telecommuting. Check out a few from Michigan, Virginia, and Connecticut. There are plenty more available with a search. Posts to which it is related: Journal article cited in the Digest on June 13, Leading in Face to… Read more →
Email is one of the most used technologies in virtual teams. This week’s digest focuses on email, for which I noticed an increased focus in the media. The increased focus may be due to large technology companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., coming together about a week ago to fight information overload – a problem to which email… Read more →
There are three members of the Leading Virtually team who are currently the most active core. Of the three of us, I know Surinder well (he was my teacher and research collaborator when I was in graduate school). But I met Angelo for the first time in person last week. We have been working together for about 8 months without… Read more →
What: Wall Street Journal article (also available at Yahoo Finance!) about embarrassing moments during virtual meetings. Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology Bottom Line: Be mindful of the embarrassment that you may create for yourself if you don’t learn about and manage the technology (e.g., web meetings, video-conferencing, telephone-conferencing) that you are using for… Read more →
For those who are interested in virtual team collaboration, the concept of teamwork is crucial. But rarely is “teamwork” actually defined. Just as the adage goes, we know it when we see it, but we may have trouble explicitly saying what makes for good teamwork. This week, Surinder sent me an academic journal article by Martin Hoegl and Hans Georg… Read more →
As more companies are considering the option of allowing their employees to telecommute (see the recent flurry of news about telecommuting), there is an increasing need to understand how leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face teams. In many cases, people have challenged the idea that leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face situations…. Read more →