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Great teams can, at least in part, be defined by the quality of communications between the members, open, timely and clear dialogue that supports crisp decision making is a great benefit to the effectiveness of these teams. Why then is there such an obsession with the technology not the people?
Technology is a wonderful thing. The various forms of technology enable us to live our modern lives. To eat safe food, drink safe water, travel quickly and reliably between locations and, in the context of virtual teams, to work and communicate between individuals and groups practically frictionlessly.
In the past couple of decades, technologies around communication; the internet, mobile phones, computers, webcams and similar, have made such enormous progress it feels like they are no longer a limiting factor in any of our communication desires. Technology has become so powerful and appears to solve so many problems that, in effect, most companies believe the deployment of technology is all they need to do to ensure communications between their personnel will run seamlessly.
Similarly, employees themselves become so wrapped up in the technology needed to deliver their job’s that they also feel these technologies used for communications are all they need. They can send instant messages, broadcast statuses and join and leave video in the belief that these are all effective communications. They can become more interested in the digital background on their call than the quality of the conversation, the timeliness of information and the enduring relationships around them.
In this podcast episode I discuss how keeping people at the forefront of the discussions must remain core.