Your business has just received an extremely important contract. The work has to be of the highest quality and it’s time sensitive.  Can a virtual team out perform your employees? Do you gather your employees together and split up the work or do you step outside of the box and hire a virtual team?

Virtual teams offer the possibility of a 24 hour work day. You have the pick of the best, from many locations. Lack of distraction will keep these teams focused and improve their productivity. By using quality communication tools and spending less time in meetings, they will use these precious hours to accomplish more of what really needs to be done.

With the ability to choose the right tools and collaboration software, virtual team members tend to be much more tech savvy than their brick and mortar counterparts – knowing when to collaborate and how much is extremely important. Their soft skills are kept current while many of their onsite counterparts may lack the newest software and the skills to go with them.

While daily interaction, face to face, builds trust between co-workers, just the fact of having geographical distance between members of a virtual team gives them an advantage because of differing viewpoints. This can result in higher quality results. However, team members of any virtual group need to feel that they belong and share a common goal. This can be done through definitive processes and good management practises.

One problem virtual teams can improve on, is feeling that they have to work in the same way as corporate employees – boundaries should be redefined so as to differ from the office mindset and team members left to do their best work on their own as much as possible. The best virtual team members learn by hands on methods and while video conferencing and video learning has become a large part of some team education, unfortunately this is, for the most part, still reminiscent of employee based learning.

Virtual team members tend to excel at certain skills and managers need to review and reassess upgrading of all skills on a regular basis. While brick and mortar businesses tend to send staff for training there can be a lack of funding for remote workers and this is one area where companies who operate virtually need to improve and where corporate employees may have the advantage.

One thing that is noticeable is that a high percentage of highly valued remote workers tend to be introverts. They excel at this type of work so when looking for the next member of your virtual team, set aside those who do best in the corporate world and take a closer second look at applicants who have spent a large percentage of their time learning on their own. What it really comes down to, is that good employees are good employees, whether virtual or on-site

When the decision is finally made over whether to use local employees or a virtual team for important projects, it will usually fall in favor of a remote team.  A virtual team can outperform your employees! The ability to access 24 hour employees who are working within their genius abilities and the best in what they do far outweighs that of accessing what is available at the office just because it is most convenient geographically. Remember that quality employees tend to excel at setting and meeting goals. To get the best possible results, hire the workers who can meet the goals set and give you the highest quality work within the outlined timeframe.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc 2013

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