Question Tag: Virtual Teams

Apatrapa is a successful international telecommunication company with over 100,000 employees and a headquarters in its base country’s capital city, Accra. A recent report concluded that Apatrapa has been successful because it has seized the opportunities of globalization through a series of initiatives including using virtual work teams spread across continents, cultures, and time zones. These initiatives helped to improve staff productivity and maximized Apatrapa’s use of technology. Key features of Apatrapa’s operation include:

• Achieving fast communication and saving some travel costs through email, videoconferencing technology, and VoIP (voice over internet protocol) combined with webcam equipment.
• Working hard to improve communication through its own social networking sites with blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, and the use of instant messaging software.
• Offering a scheme of flexible working practices and home-working to its headquarters staff (10,000 employees have opted to work from home including accountants, Information Systems (IS), and Human Resource (HR) staff). Those switching to home working ‘give back’ 50% of the time they previously spent commuting in the form of extra working hours. Apatrapa estimates that home-workers get 20% more work done than those based in the headquarters building and have comparatively lower absence and staff turnover levels.

Required:
Explain FOUR (4) ways in which managers with responsibility for teams might meet the challenges of teams being geographically dispersed. (12 marks)