Virtual Workgroups: Hidden Challenges to Supporting Distributed Teams

Project teams are often distributed geographically, commonly spanning multiple time zones, working environments, cultures and languages. Effectively leveraging dispersed resources yields significant returns for organizations, yet executing initiatives within a distributed environment presents significant challenges. There is broad agreement that collaborative software is critical to the effectiveness of distributed teams, however most implementations meet with only limited success. How can an organization improve the effectiveness of distributed teams? It is our experience that organizations tend to neglect certain issues that are critical for the success of any collaboration tool, virtual workgroup solution, or other support for distributed teams. Virtual workgroups can be difficult to understand because there are layers of challenges associated with them. First, there are unique challenges facing distributed teams that arise from the loss of rich social and physical interactions. These are the challenges most virtual workgroups have been created to address. Second, a new layer of challenges arise as virtual workgroup software is introduced within an organization. These are the " hidden challenges " commonly overlooked by organizations. These challenges are not easily solved by the introduction of additional technology, and must be addressed through efforts at the management and organizational level. The goal of this paper is to raise organizational awareness of often overlooked challenges that impact the success of virtual workgroups. As demand for more effective and less space-dependent collaboration increases, understanding the challenges presented by distributed work will allow organizational leaders to make more informed decisions with respect to supporting the needs of their distributed project teams.