Management Communication in Virtual Teams

This memo discusses the benefits and challenges of virtual teams in management communication. It highlights the reduction in cost, diversity in recruitment, and wide coverage as benefits. It also identifies time management, trust, and other considerations as challenges. The memo concludes that virtual teams can yield significant benefits to the organization if managed efficiently and effectively.

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Management Communication
Virtual Teams
11 August 2018

MEMO
To: The Managing Director
From: Communications Manager
Regarding: Virtual Marketing Team
Date: 11 August 2018
Globalization and the information technology development have made a significant impact on
the organisational communications (Barney, 2011). Human interactions between the dispersed
individuals of the teams across the globe have been made easier with the aid of the virtual teams.
The same practice is going to be implemented in the organisation, with the introduction of the
new virtual marketing department at the Sydney headquarters. Accordingly, the team members
would be dispersed in Sydney, New York, Beijing and Mumbai. The memo is aimed at
communicating the critical areas in the leadership and management of the virtual teams, to the
management and the members of the organisation.
Even though there are several critical areas that need to be addressed before the implementation
of the virtual teams, there are also a list of the various benefits from the virtual teams.
Reduction in cost: The major benefits that the virtual team yields to the organisation are drastic
reduction in the travel time and the cost of conducting meetings physically in terms of the
accommodation, food and more (Ferrazzi, 2014). Therefore, there is an allowance of the real
time conversations and team meetings on urgent and key issues. In addition to this, since the
employees are connected with technology, the cost for the office space and the infrastructure is
also saved.
Diversity in Recruitment: Another major benefit of the virtual team set up is that it allows the
scope for hiring the best minds across the globe on the lines of the skills, capacities, knowledge

to solve the complicated issues. Recruitment of the most talented minds irrespective of the
geographical barriers would strengthen the expertise of the organisation as a whole (Hoch and
Kozlowski, 2014).
Wide Coverage: In addition to this, the different time zones would allow the entity to work
round the clock and thus the range of services and customers would automatically get widen.
This will give the company a competitive edge and the ability to sustain in long run.
Other benefits: Some more benefits of across the same line are discouragement of the racial
discrimination, high degree of creativity in work terms of the heterogeneous backgrounds,
competitive advantage and creation of equal opportunities at work place. The employees may not
support the initial shift to the virtual team set up, but the learning curve in long run yields
positive results. There is an enhanced internal communication, high skills development and the
creation of stronger foundations among the organisational communities in the later years.
However, the major challenges to the establishment of the virtual teams are as follows.
Time Management, Trust and other consideratons: As decided by the top management, the
team would be dispersed at four different geographical areas and thus the four different time
zones would mean a very little scope for the overlapping of time. There lies a little scope for
allowance of the real time conversations between the teammates (Serrat, 2017). The second
major consideration to implement the virtual team is that there is a lack of trust among the
members because of lack of face-to-face interactions. The low level of trust among the virtual
team members further creates hindrances in the productive capacity and the team discussions
(Lockwood, 2015). In addition to this, absence of the face-to-face communication may result in
misunderstanding and the misinterpretations because of lack of facial expressions, voice tone and

other physical aids to communication (Binder, 2016). The lack of informal meetings and the
cultural and the background differences across the globe, makes it difficult to inculcate personal
relationships and mutual understanding among the team members. Leaders must therefore
consider the ways and means to issue resolution process to be able to implement successfully the
virtual marketing team in the organisation. Few other critical considerations are budgetary
constraints, technology and expertise involvement and possible psychological resistance from
employees.
Thus, the discussion made in the previous parts would help to conclude that the virtual marketing
team at the Sydney headquarter may yield significant benefits to the organisation, provided the
technology and the processes are used efficiently and effectively. However, the management
must first consider the critical areas that may pose significant issues in the leadership and the
management of the virtual teams. The major critical areas that have been identified are time and
language differences, varied cultural backgrounds and thus the trust issues, absence of
interpersonal relationships and difficulty in conflict handling. Management must devise
strategies to resolve the same to get the maximum benefit from the planned endeavour.

References
Barney, D. (2011) Communication technology. Canada: UBC Press.
Binder, J. (2016)Global project management: communication, collaboration and management
across borders. Oxon: Routledge.
Ferrazzi, K. (2014)Getting Virtual Teams Right. [online] Available from:
https://hbr.org/2014/12/getting-virtual-teams-right [Accessed on 10/08/18].
Hoch, J. E. and Kozlowski, S. W. (2014) Leading virtual teams: Hierarchical leadership,
structural supports, and shared team leadership. Journal of applied psychology, 99(3), p.390.
Lockwood, J. (2015) Virtual team management: what is causing communication breakdown?.
Language and Intercultural Communication, 15(1), pp. 125-140.
Serrat, O. (2017) Managing virtual teams. In Knowledge Solutions. Singapore: Springer. pp.
619-625.