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Virtual Collaboration: The Skills Needed to Collaborate in a Virtual Environment

Virtual Collaboration: The Skills Needed to Collaborate in a Virtual Environment
Keywords: Virtual collaboration, virtual collaboration skills, virtual collaboration barriers. Introduction Virtual Collaboration Teams (VCTs), generally defined, are groups of individuals, geographically dispersed, that work together using collaborative technology (e.g. chat rooms, e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, etc.) in order to accomplish organizational goals (Brake, 2006; Cottone, Pieti, Schiavinato, Soru, Martinelli, Varotto, & Mantovani, 2009; Fruchter, Bosch-Sijtsema, & Ruohomaki, 2010; Suduc, Bizoi, & Filip, 2009; and Zhang, Tremaine, Egan, Milewski, O’Sullivan, & Fjermestad, 2009). Many organizations use VCTs because they are inexpensive, independent of time and space, more efficient, more effective, and are better able to share information, than face-to-face teams (Eom, 2009; Muntean, 2009; Suduc, Bizoi, & Filip, 2009; and Zhang et al., 2009). Relationship Building Skills Trust Familiarity Environment and Context Diversity Communication Skills Simple Language Ambiguity

How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate - Keith Ferrazzi by Keith Ferrazzi | 12:00 PM October 24, 2012 I have worked on many teams in which we dutifully did our jobs, and the group fulfilled its objectives. And then I have worked on other teams in which everyone energetically collaborated with one another, and the results were spectacular. Not only did we surpass our goals, we also thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from that process as individuals. In other words, there’s a world of difference between merely working together and truly collaborating with one another. Achieving true collaboration — in which the whole is definitely more than the mere sum of the individual parts — is difficult in any environment. Adjust for size. Don’t be afraid of social media. The chipmaker Xilinx, for instance, has reported an increase in engineer productivity by around 25% thanks to social media tools that encourage and enable employee collaborative activities. Play games. Train for collaboration. Have role clarity but task uncertainty.

Collaboration Success Wizard Creating successful geographically distributed collaborations. The Collaboration Success Wizard is an on-line diagnostic survey for geographically distributed collaborations. The survey probes factors that may strengthen or weaken the collaboration. The Wizard provides both personal and project-level reports to help build successful and productive collaborative projects. We are actively seeking participants! Once a project is approved to participate, we send invitation e-mails to all the project members. And yes – it’s free! At the end of the survey each participant can see a personalized individual report that contains feedback based on their answers and our research. If multiple members of the same project complete the Wizard, we are willing to provide a report to the group about the overall character of the project. This is our research. The Wizard is based on over 20 years experience studying scientific collaborations. An application form is available through the link below. Apply Now!

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE It's also possible for groups of people to work together in ways that seem pretty stupid, and I think collective stupidity is just as possible as collective intelligence. Part of what I want to understand and part of what the people I'm working with want to understand is what are the conditions that lead to collective intelligence rather than collective stupidity. But in whatever form, either intelligence or stupidity, this collective behavior has existed for a long time. What's new, though, is a new kind of collective intelligence enabled by the Internet. Or think of Wikipedia, where thousands of people all over the world have collectively created a very large and amazingly high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control. If we want to predict what's going to happen, especially if we want to be able to take advantage of what's going to happen, we need to understand those possibilities at a much deeper level than we do so far. Why are we doing all this work?

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