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Managing the risks of virtuality Virtual teams are a fact of modern business. Organizations must adapt or risk mass management burn-out, warns Richard Finn Around the world, the number of people who work in virtual teams is increasing every year. In the US, there are an estimated 2.9m virtual workers, up 61% since 2005; in the UK, there are reportedly 1.3m full-time virtual workers, with another 3.7m part-time. The attractions of virtuality are clear. Virtual teams can be highly creative. They can bring together experts from all around the world and increase geographic coverage – for example, for a sales team. But there are significant possible downsides: loss of trust, isolation, Dialogue Q2 2019
disengagement, and hidden performance issues. Too few organizations and leaders have adapted to this relatively new fact of business life. It’s high time they did. Consider a typical global manufacturing and sales company. It has over 50,000 employees, with production facilities all over the world, customer and distribution centres in many countries, and sales and service technicians wherever they have products, for each of their brands. Senior executives have global responsibilities and sales technicians often