Risks associated with Virtual Teams
Virtual working environment is an electronic applied working scenario on where the participants work from different geographical locations working on the same task. It has its own advantages and disadvantages. Knight and Reed (2009) identified some risks associated with virtual working environments.
The greatest risk is associated with communication. There is difficulty communicating with a person over the phone or by use of email as compared to face to face communication. Explicit knowledge can be shared through this means, easily but implicit knowledge cannot be expressed effectively. Residing on different connection environments making it hard for participants to exchange documents. Confusion and misinformation can result due to poor means of communication (Knight , & Reed, 2009).
Another identified risk, is the risk of poor infrastructure. Having non responsive or problematic connections can cause a lot of time resource wastage. Virtual teams rely on electronic communication mechanisms like, teleconferencing and the web. If at any time there is poor or no connection in some parts of the work group, normal work schedule could be interrupted. This could cause delay in the project schedule.
The third risk is the inadequacy of knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer from all round the team is essential in ensuring a good and unidirectional working effort on the project. The in ability of the team to express their implicit knowledge effectively is a setback. Some communication features like facial expression and physical emphasis help in perpetuating knowledge transfer, however because such application cannot be used in the virtual environment, it becomes a problem to express knowledge explicitly (Knight , & Reed, 2009).
In order to overcome the risk stated above a clear set plan has to be developed. Teams working on the same task should be brought from geographical related time zone environment. This would reduce the difference in working times and thus reduce the stress associated with it. There is need to provide robust infrastructure, that is dedicated for the team communication. Having robust communicational infrastructure, would enable the teams to interact visually through video conferencing and other technologically advanced ways. This way sharing and transfer of ideas would be greatly improved (Knight, & Reed, 2009).
Reference
Knight V.L., & Reed, A.H., (2009).Effect of a virtual project team environment on communication-related project risk. Department of Management Information Systems, College of Business, East Carolina University, United States
