Keeping Up Long Distance

This article discusses managers who must not discount everyday collaborative tools—like phone calls and instant messaging. To help far-flung team members bridge the distance and feel like part of a team while they hash out ideas, engineering managers must call upon a rich technological arsenal of collaborative tools. To keep up with personal events like that and to let team members have the water-cooler confabs necessary for team building, Garton advocates instant messaging. This type of quick back-and-forth messaging encourages relationship building. To ensure participation, trainers call upon a number of interactive features offered within the tool itself. With all advances of the Web, it can be tempting for managers to overlook hardware advances as they seek to build virtual teams. But new approaches, like a recent newly introduced HP Blade Workstation, which allows all team members’ designs to reside on a server rather than on their individual desktops, can keep teams functioning at top speeds.