For most of the time the virtual teams approach has been used in the modern industrial world, which is really since the internet and computer technology reached a point where it could support multi centre work, one of the key aspects most heavily exploited has been to outsource the more labour intensive, less technology or knowledge driven work to high volume, lower cost centres, this has taken the forms of call centres moving to India, back office support functions moving to Kuala Lumpur, computer coding for relatively low tech functionality moving to India, Russia, China, and in some cases the work has been outsourced domestically to a centre where there is a larger pool of labour that will do the work for a lower cost.
While this form of outsourcing has been very disruptive to the employability of the lower skilled members of workforces in developed, so called first world countries, it has not been such a great threat to the higher skilled workers there who have typically seen their work-flow change to adopt to the virtual team approach, but for them it has meant that the people they manage are now in another location, their peer group is still typically co located with them, speaks the same language, has the same cultural outlook and “feels” vary familiar.
All of this is, however, slowly changing. The aging workforce in these developed nations is now starting to become too small to provide even the relatively small pool of highly skilled workers for many projects and the workers in the countries to which the work has been outsourced for so long are starting to mature their skills to the point where they can now compete on a level playing field with the first world high skilled workers, couple this with the side effect of outsourcing the relatively simple work that in previous times was performed in the colocated team by the new graduates and developing personnel, where those low grade personnel have not had that exposure that would have let them develop to become the higher skilled members of the project teams and things are starting to change.
For organisations set up to manage this changing centre of gravity this migration of skills is a relatively minor threat, they still need to maintain quality and pursue their new developments, only now much of this new development can be undertaken in what has been and for many still is seen as the developing world. Where this change is now being felt the hardest is in the hearts, minds and in many cases the bank accounts of the employees in the high skills centres who are now having to come to terms with a world where they are no longer always the manager, managing down to a virtual team of high volume lower cost personnel, now they are faced with working across to peers located in these high volume centres and in some cases even finding themselves working for the people from those centres, people who have, over the last two decades gone from being the apprentice to now being the master.
How the individuals and their organisations will react to this could be one of the defining points in the global workforce over the next few years, as the high tech jobs follow the low tech jobs out of the first world and into the developing world, leaving behind a range of lower skilled less transportable jobs.
So, what does this mean for the world of virtual teams communications, well, in some ways things will still be the same, the existing issues of communicating across cultures and time zones, communicating with people with different power distance and individuality expectations, different views of long term and short term investment horizons etc. these issues will exist as long as there are different cultures, which is to say they are here for at least the foreseeable future. What will change, I believe, is the directions of communication and the centre of gravity of many organisations, suddenly people working in Europe or the USA, who have been used to dictating the times of international video and telephone meetings to suit their routine may find their meeting agenda being set from Asia.
Recognising and accepting this changing relationship will bring many additional skills and strengths to the global workforce, organisations will, out of necessity evolve from being mono-cultural to multi-cultural, but for many in the western world it will not come easily in the latter part of their careers, and unless the more costly nations can find a way to up skill the new starters in their organisations such as the new and recent graduates, over the next few years the reversal of roles could start to become very pronounced.
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