SOCIAL TOOLS AND VIRTUAL TEAMS

INTRODUCTION

Most people seem to first think of social technologies as tools used for external
marketing and advertising, when the truth is the volume of usage is probably more internal to
organizations.

The majority of case studies and stories in the traditional press concern businesses
that are driving revenue and relationships with customers through Facebook, blogs, Instagram or Twitter.

If
we could see the overall use of social tools on some kind of color-coded infographic, where one
color was front-end marketing and networking applications and the other color was internal use,
we might be surprised at what we’d see.

This is much like the area of computer security where outside hackers get most of the
press, when it’s actually the internal security breaches that far outweigh attacks from outside.

We spend more time communicating with the people we work with when compared to people
outside the organization.

 This is an important distinction. You need to be aware that if you’re
managing a team involved in the organization’s back office, you still have many valuable uses
for social tech tools.

So that leads us to a discussion of another high-value area for using social
tools and that’s their application within virtual teams.

There’s been a quiet shift in how many people perform their jobs over the last 20 years
or so. We’re moving away from the model where the majority of knowledge workers reported to
one location and worked with a team of people in the same building.

We’re moving toward a
model where more people are working from their homes, remote offices, or contracting out their
services as freelancers.

Even within large organizations with lots of people and many buildings,
we see the formation of teams that cross geography so people aren’t physically working with
others on their team.

Although there are economic and business reasons why this change in work structure
makes sense, the catalyst is technology. The Internet provided the first leap forward because it allowed people to connect to corporate servers more easily, so working from home was a step
simpler.

E-mail became common and this provided a free, efficient way for people to
communicate across the hall or around the world. Then new Web-based communication tools
like instant messaging and Skype went a step further and allowed people to communicate over
distance as if someone were sitting next to them— again, for free.