個案資料

In recent years, professional service firms have seen considerable senior talent (often women with children) leave work. Many of these individuals leave their career due to the unwillingness of their employer to provide them with the flexibility to achieve a work-life balance. Virtual teams — often the answer to this problem — are those in which not all members are physically assembled; they share complementary skills and are enabled by technology such as the Internet and telephone. This format, which is especially suitable for individual, knowledge-based work, is on the rise due to employee demand. The lifestyle-driven virtual team model allows practitioners to be selective about their hours and projects, increasing employee satisfaction. Employers benefit due to virtual teams leveraging the best talent more easily and workers facing fewer office-related distractions. Unique challenges, however, include the absence of non-verbal communication, working across time zones, difficulty of building rapport, overreliance on e-mail and telephone communication, and managing conflict at arm’s length. After describing the paradigm of lifestyle-driven virtual teams, this article outlines the best practices: institute strong leadership, choose the right team members, set expectations from the start, implement strict protocols, use proven processes, manage timelines and budgets carefully, establish meaningful project milestones, encourage interaction, communicate more efficiently, and minimize team conflict.

• Virtual Teams
• Communication
• Work-Life Balance
• Employee Satisfaction
• Productivity