Tools for Virtual Teams

Ericca Hughes

Tools for Virtual Teams

October 14, 2015

Introduction to Business

Virtual teams are a great way to enable teamwork in situations where people are not sitting in the same physical office at the same time. It is also a team whose members simultaneously work together to a common purpose, while physically apart.  A few examples of how many Virtual Teams are effectively ran are through knowledge worker teams, communication technology teams, computer supported or computer mediated teams.  Technology is the lifeline of a virtual team. Communication such as emailing, teleconference, web conferencing, and webcam all help the team to collaborate. Team collaboration has a lot of challenges and there are many things that can help companies and most of them are free.

Skype is very popular and it is free to use across any device such as smart phones, tablets, computers etc. Skype has become the standard for voice calls over the internet, chat, video conference and file transfer. There are many benefits to these features such as quick questions to other team members, all of our phone calls (including to clients), video conferencing, daily meetings for our development team, simple screen sharing. Screen sharing is one of the keys to having a successful team. It is perfect for presentations, sharing photos or what is on your computer screen. In that way, it enables people to see exactly what you are doing.

Google Docs is an online word processor that lets you create and format text documents and collaborate with other people in real time.  You can create spreadsheets, presentations, and shared online documents. Google Docs has many uses not only sharing with users, but it also has a built in spell checker with grammar support, auto save and revision of every editing that we do. Google Docs can also connect the gap between the writer and the editor, no need to exchange emails and lose track of necessary changes.  The drafting tools allow the document(s) to be translated into 50 languages. You may download the document as HTML, Open Office, PDF, RTF, Text, or Word. Furthermore, you can insert images, drawings, tables, links, equations, comments, footnotes or tables of contents.  It is another source of collaborating.