Working in the Virtual World

Strategies for keeping your staff from slipping into technology and out of communication.

Feb 08, 2007

By Gerry Davis, Heidrick & Struggles, CIO.com

Executives are grappling with new ways of managing their staff as the world grows flatter and leadership teams are decentralized and virtualized. The old “face-oriented” offices have given way to virtual communities of outsource partners, offshore teams and globally distributed workforces.

On any given day, 42 percent of IBM’s workforce of 330,000 workers does not report to the location where they are based. The company’s human resources head Randy Macdonald says the past 10 years will be characterized as the fall of the traditional business empire and the rise or emergence of global collaborative and virtual empires.

This new paradigm is enabled by the proliferation of communications technologies, broadband and changing business models. In a faster-paced, more competitive world, executives must be more flexible and agile, and must acquire new communication and management skills. Paradoxically, a virtual world calls for greater relationship-building efforts than in traditional teams or organizations.

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