Enhancing Organizational Performance: Virtue Teams

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Teamwork
Virtual Teams
Contributions of Virtual Teams to the Mission of the Organization
Sustainability
Risks Associated With the Investment in Virtual Team
Conclusion
Reference List

Introduction

In the context of an organization, performance is a very broadconcept and is synonymous with productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and competitiveness. A high performance workplace aims at increasing the influence of the workers on the business and their impact on processes, methods, the surrounding, and also the technology and the tools that improves their work.

Organizations apply several holistic approaches that feature a flat hierarchical structure, rotations of duty, responsibility, multi-tasking, and the involvement of the lower-level employees in the process of decision making (Calzi 2010).

This paper attempts to propose a substantial investment to improve the performance within BNY Mellon Bank through the creation of virtual teams. It looks at the possibility of investing in virtual teams with the aim of enhancing service delivery and eliminating informational imperfections.

The paper will also look at how this investment will contribute to the mission of the bank- to create an environment where the clients expectations and where our values drive the decisions of the bank.

Teamwork

In the modern world, the biggest challenge for organizations is to deliver quickly and effectively better quality products and services to be able to respond to the ever changing demands of clients. A feature of traditional work organization is standardization and specialization where work is allocated into different segments from initial stages to the support level (Berry 2011).

Increasing demands do not seem to go well with this method, and may at times lead to coordination problems and rigidities. Teamwork is considered one of the core elements in the new form of work organization replacing the traditional work organization.

Teams and teamwork are a very necessary part of making work done in most organizations. A team is made up of a group of individuals who interact interdependently and come together voluntarily to achieve a common goal.

Enhancing teamwork increases capability, responsiveness, and flexibility within organizations. This is partly due to the synergies that are created among participants in the team who bring different types of their knowledge and expertise.

Teamwork in organizations can be increased by use of computer mediated communication technologies. This move will profoundly change how team members collect and distribute information and will also change dynamics and relationships between members of the organization (Berry 2011). This move will enable team members to make use of networks.

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams within Mellon Bank will use computer assisted communication technologies to work interdependently in both space and time and outside the boundaries of the bank. The members will be able to communicate within the office and anywhere across the globe.

Although the bank already applies technology to some degree, virtuality will gain acceptance as the degree of reliance on electronic communication rises. Enhancing virtuality within the organization will make our teams dispersed all over the world have no choice but to communicate electronically.

In order for this strategy to work, the bank will need to invest heavily in the development of the new communication methods and to retrain its employees across geographical settings (EFILWC, 2007).

Contributions of Virtual Teams to the Mission of the Organization

Development and spread of better practices will be spread much faster
Virtuality will enable connecting of different knowledge bases spread across the globe into self-organizing and knowledge sharing networks of professional bankers
It will enable cross-functional and cross divisional collaboration
Virtual teams will raise the ability to initiate and contribute to projects anywhere in the world.

There are several other things that the management of Mellon Bank will need do in order to make effective use of virtual teams:

Team management processes have to be developed, designed, defined, piloted, tested, and refined
Team managers will have to be trained in the new team management approaches
The team members need to be trained on the use of the technology
The bank will have to reshape in order to support the new structures
The organizational structure of the bank will be modified in order to reflect the changes
Systems or reward will also need to be modified so as to show the new structures of team
This change will require management, measurement and control systems to be designed

The bank should realize that new technology forces us to rethink these changes because we do not have to stick to the familiar approach. This will be an opportunity for the organization to manage its employees and customers in general (Berry 2011).

Some of the structures that need to be put in place will include computer-supported face-to-face meetings, audio conferencing, electronic mail, asynchronous web-conferencing, and document sharing through intranets.

Virtual teams will enhance a shared understanding and commitment to the banks vision and purpose. The use of electronic collaboration technologies will help the company lower travel and other facility costs and improve decision making time and communication.

This is a measure that will assist the bank increase on foreign markets in the process increasing the customer base. Through this move to improve performance, the bank will automatically tap into large pools of labor available in foreign lands.

Sustainability

To stay around the purpose for a lengthy time, frequent and more explicit check-ins about purpose will be necessary.

This may not be a challenge because the technology environment has a way of reminding team members about the company’s purpose as well as goals, tasks and timings as part of their daily communication media.The company will have to establish a technical support, knowledgeable archivists and different media specialists.

Risks Associated With the Investment in Virtual Team

As members in virtual team will not be collocated, communication will become more difficult. A part of the message received will always lack body language which is an integral part in human communication. This will create a potential for misunderstanding and confusion between members of the same team in different locations.

Virtual teamwork will lead to the loss of informal communication which is a key source of information and transfer of knowledge. Virtual team mates have no opportunity to walk to coffee shop at the corner together.

They have no chance of turning to a member and ask them how they did something in the past but rather have to either write an email or call them on the phone. This is not as efficient as informally asking a team member a question in passing.

Some form of virtual team communication media such as emails may pose a significant delay between when the message is sent and when it is read or responded to. Time differences across the globe mean that there will be only a few hours in a day where certain team members can communicate.

This is quite risky because a miscommunication could lead to slow process. Over a lengthy period of time, this could become even more risky when task deadlines are missed due to inefficient communications.

Asynchronous communication is also challenging because the sender of the message is not sure where the recipient understood it or even received it. The uncertainty that arises when for instant an email is not replied may lead to increased levels of confusion for the team.

Conclusion

Teamwork is an important instrument in improving organizational performance. Virtual teams are vital in increasing an organization’s employee involvement and commitment, lowering the cost of conduction meetings and availing foreign labor pools to a company.

Improvement of the organizations assets to support virtual teams calls for adequate resources in terms of finance and human skills. Investment in virtual teams has profound benefits to the company, employees and its customers as it is possible to reach them in any part of the world.

Developments of virtual teams come with risks especially where asynchronous communication forms are used by the team member. Organizations aiming to maximize service delivery have no choice but to embrace virtual team. These teams are no different from other teams as they have a clear mission, an explicit statement of roles and responsibilities. The only difference is in the communication methods.

Reference List

Berry, G., R. (2011). Enhancing effectiveness on virtual teams: understanding why traditional team skills are insufficient, Journal of Business Communication, Volume 48(2).

Calzi, L., M. (2010). Progress in Artificial Economics: Computational and Agent-Based Models. New York: springer.

EFILWC. (2007). Teamwork and High Performance Work Organization. Retrieved from https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/sites/default/files/ef_files/ewco/reports/TN0507TR01/TN0507TR01.pdf

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