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Virtual work still evolving http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/09/01/14/10274898.html 01/13/2009 11:42 PM | By Sanjiv Anand and Rajesh Iyer, Special to Gulf News Globalisation and the Internet have made businesses more mobile. People and organisations are becoming more flexible about how they work and how they deal with new business opportunities. As the number of partnerships explodes, the need to work in virtual teams has increased. Virtual working will not replace traditional organisations and people physically getting together to work, but it has some distinct advantages: In a world where change is rapid, a virtual corporation can allow an organisation, or group of organisations, to address new opportunities or threats quickly and efficiently. The Internet and other telecommunications advances, such as audio and videoconferencing, make it easier for members of an organisation to collaborate more efficiently. More and more people are working from home for at least part of their week as a result of these advances. However, there are some key questions to be addressed. Where does virtual working work best? Where there is a specific output or objective that needs to be achieved. It is, by definition, not 9 to 5 working. Rather, you set someone or some group a task, and they go about achieving that task. They can spend all weekend and then take days off, once they deliver a result. What are the key trends that are driving virtual working? Globalisation, rapidly changing environments, and the advances in the Internet and telecommunications are key drivers. Many of the new opportunities are crossing traditional business boundaries - the telecommunications and content industries are intermingling, for example. Very few organisations have all the skills required to meet these new opportunities. These business changes underpin a social trend for skilled individuals to want more flexibility in how they live and work. The result is that virtual working can bring together a mix of skills and capabilities that would be very difficult to assemble in a single physical setting. How do virtual organisations, collaborative working, and telecommuting differ? Virtual organisations are legal entities that are established with clearly defined objectives, such as developing a product, or exploiting a particular market opportunity. In collaborative working, the focus is very much on knowledge work. This is better suited to small multi-disciplinary teams of five to ten people. Collaborative teams can be established and disbanded according to the current need. Frequently, it may be the case that a person is a member of several teams at the same time. Telecommuting can, of course, support collaborative working, but is also used for processing the data in batches. For example, a hospital's handwritten records may need to be filed electronically every day. Another example is the personal assistant who works from home for an executive who is constantly travelling. Have virtual workplaces been overhyped? Yes. Like many new-economy developments, there were wild predictions that we'd all be working in our pyjamas. The reality is that people still like to go to work to get out of the house. But virtual working still remains an important trend. Sanjiv Anand is the Managing Director and Rajesh Iyer is a Director at CedarManagement Consulting International.