Distance teamwork: The realities of collaborating with virtual colleagues

Your intranet team has been working on a site redesign for months. The new site looks great-it just went live tonight, and you'd really like to take the team out to celebrate. But how can you get the team together? Your HTML programmer is polishing up the site from his home office and your branch-office representatives, who worked so hard on the usability testing, are in different locations and different time zones. You could schedule a teleconference or send them all a congratulatory email, but somehow it's not the same as treating them to a spontaneous pizza party.

As organizations become more global, we frequently find that our colleagues and clients are across the country rather than down the hall. Communications and information technologies are changing our modes of working, altering the structures of our workplaces, and blurring the lines traditionally set by time zones, national borders, and nine-to-five workdays. They're enabling us to work from remote locations while we stay in touch, electronically, with supervisors, clients, and co-workers.