Simon Dickson today made a fascinating post today on the BT Broadband Office blog.
People (e.g. the entire world) suffering from email overload generally understand that work is becoming increasingly virtual. Teams are fundamentally distributed and face to face meetings are becoming the exception.
Makes perfect sense. Therefore, the question is this -- has anyone come up with a prescriptive formula for building and managing virtual teams? Simon Dickson highlights the work of professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School -- who has identified 'ten golden rules' to make virtual teams more productive. Her story in the Wall Street Journal says that the #1 rule is to make it easy for teams of people to get to know one another. To do this, she suggests a variety of social networking and project management tools that can be accessed round the clock where teams can share in a formal context -- and get to know one another in an informal context.
I could not agree more with her. In my opinion, people are multi-contextual beings (especially in a work environment). Sometimes people are formal and scripted -- but, most of the time they are informal and dynamic. Therefore, the perfect software tools are the ones like BT Workspace that blend formal "conference room" style interaction (file sharing, events, and task management) with ad hoc "hall way" style conversations (IM, presence, and rich profiles).
Take a look and give it a spin. See what you think.