Conclusion

Working at a distance is very different from working physically collocated. You will have to rely on electronic means of communicating with the rest of the team: asynchronously, for example via messages posted to a forum, or synchronously using instant messaging, conference calls or other media. Scheduling your team activities may require patience as you work around your own and other team members’ time constraints, and wait for them to complete the activities that the team has assigned to them or post their responses to team discussions in an asynchronous forum. However, as shown by a survey of successful virtual teams (Majchrzak et al., 2004), one of the key factors for success is frequent communication. The communication media that you choose to use do not have to be technically sophisticated – your team just has to use them frequently.