Virtual Teams for the Disabled
Michael H. Howland
11921 Freedom Drive, Suite
Reston, VA 20190
1-888-442-2785
Who would you hire? Who would you hire if geography, mobility, time
zones and work schedules were no barrier? Obviously, the candidate
whose competencies were best suited to the job! That question is
becoming more and more realistic as organizations world-wide are
reaching out to hire employees who may work in other locales, in other
time zones, in other countries. They are turning those employees into
members of virtual teams -- teams who work together, coordinate their
individual contributions, who problem solve and brainstorm and plan
all via Internet. The emergence of a variety of collaborative work
tools are serving to level the playing field for disabled workers by
removing geography, mobility, and rigid time schedules from the
requirements for employment.
What is different about the virtual workplace? In the traditional
workplace the assumption has been that for work to take place,
everyone has to be in the same place at the same time. Work is
something that you travel to, that cannot begin until you arrive and
that halts when you physically leave. That paradigm is rapidly eroding
under world wide customer expectations that they should be able to
receive 24 hour a day service, seven days a week and that assistance
should be only a phone call, an Email or a FAX away. In today's world,
the workday literally never ends for 40 million virtual workers.
Organizations are either adapting to this new model, or they are going
out of business. Virtual organizations are those that design their
work processes so that they can be sustained by workers in a number of
locations, operating at different times of the day and night, drawing
upon central and shared knowledge banks to bring the experience of the
entire organization to bear wherever it is needed.
Who are virtual workers? Virtual workers are those people who have
discovered that work can be wherever they are. They know that
collaboration does not have to take place face-to-face or even at the
same time. They have grasped that it is quite possible to be a member
of a team that you may rarely, if ever see. They have learned to
organize their work around expectations, standards and goals, rather
than in response to direct physical supervision and oversight. In the
virtual work place we use tools that enable us to collaborate in the
following situations:
* Same time/same place: Once or twice a year AKG gathers all
twenty-three of us for a group review of our strategy, our goals
and to consider new directions. A handful of us will gather when
we are putting on a training program for clients or consulting
with them on going "virtual".
* Same time/different place: Once a week, AKG holds either an
on-line conference or teleconference on Friday to check in on
progress in each of our core areas, to identify opportunities that
need to be pursued, and to create the "touch" of real-time
contact.
* Different time/Same place: Every Monday, we all check into our
shared electronic bulletin board which we call our Knowledge
ForumÔ to identify priorities for the week, to coordinate on who
will be responsible for what and to get a feel for the critical
activities ahead. Each of us add to the conversation of what we
intend to accomplish over the next five days.
* Anytime/Anyplace: Throughout the week, (at three in the afternoon
and three in the morning depending on our time zone and our
biological rhythms) we are sending Email back and forth, posting
our work where our colleagues can look it over and add their two
cents, transmitting faxes and sending voice mail and pages. We are
constantly adding new material to our reference library, expanding
our shared contacts list, and scanning in pictures, diagrams and
graphics that give each other a better sense of who we are and
what we are doing.
How does this level the playing field? In the virtual workplace
physical capabilities matter less than core competencies. As we survey
the field of virtual organizations we are finding sales people,
physicians, scientists, computer programmers, artists, editors,
lawyers and researchers who do their work and earn their pay through
collaboration on-line. Let me give you an example from our own
experience: AKG has its computer programming staff in California, its
Web designer in Maine, its senior trainer in Virginia and its
marketing director in Colorado. A client in New York wanted to create
an Internet mechanism to communicate with other senior financial
managers throughout the Northeast.
The initial request came through our trainer who put a profile of the
client up on our Knowledge Forum and send a simultaneous Email to both
our programmer and our Web designers scheduling a conference call to
brainstorm ideas for the Web site. Within a couple of hours the
programmers had posted a prototype layout while the designer in Maine
had drawn up a list of specifications for performance and suggested
several ways of creating a look and feel that would match the image of
senior comptrollers. That night, the Virginia trainer looked at the
contributions from Maine and California and wrote a welcoming script
users could follow to make best use of the site and suggested changes
to both the designer and the programmer based on follow on
conversations with the client. Within two days actual work time, the
site was up and on the Web and ready for use.
What made this virtual collaboration possible? Well, besides the
technology, which is readily available, and the software, which can be
downloaded from the Internet, the key factor was trust and training.
We find that the greatest impediment to virtual work is not technical,
it's cultural. If you assume that work is something bounded by space
and that you must be physically present in that space to do it, it's
logical to conclude that teammates are the people you see on a daily
basis and that management is something that requires line of sight
control. These are cultural beliefs that have become imbedded in the
way traditional organizations design work. In the virtual environment
we have developed other means than physical proximity, sight and sound
to coordinate our efforts. Instead, we rely on:
* A shared purpose to insure we are all trying to accomplish the
same thing.
* Shared values about what we consider important to our work, to our
professionalism, to our sense of pride and satisfaction in the job
we do.
* Clear expectations about the standards we need to meet in terms of
timely response, professional courtesy and completeness.
* Covenants about how we will interact with each other and
anticipate each other's needs.
* A common suite of communication tools and technical platforms that
make it easy for us to exchange ideas, information and schedules.
* And an agreement about what roles we are equipped to fill. In
short, we rely on trust. Face-to-face teams need the same threads
to tie them together, but they can compensate (however
inefficiently) by the fact that they are thrown together. Through
training and practiced use of our collaborative tools, we can
overcome the boundaries of time and space by developing the norms
that enable us to operate efficiently despite the fact that we are
rarely together.
What's the future of virtual work for the disabled? As pressure grows
on organizations and institutions to cut infrastructure costs, to
speed turn around time and to make more efficient use of available
talent in the marketplace, we see them turning increasingly to the
virtual environment as the means to achieve these goals. The
exponential growth of collaborative tools and assisted technology
available via the Internet offers disabled workers expanding
opportunities to engage the workplace, and with the use of adaptive
technology, to remove the barrier of mobility from the equation of
work.
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