ERICA DHAWAN: There's a common misconception that a face to face team will be more productive than a virtual or remote team, but actually that's not true: remote and virtual teams can be just as successful.
Here are three key benefits of being part of a remote team that you can share with your boss.
Number one, remote teams save time. How much time do you spend going to the office everyday walking around, trying to fix your laptop, trying to take calls, dealing with inefficiencies, walking down the hall? In many ways remote teams will allow you to reduce a lot of that inefficient day time that you spend not actually doing productive work. It allows you to work from home, to work from wherever you might be and in different geographical regions and contribute through our connected digital tools.
The second benefit of a remote team is it saves you money in your company. How much money do we spend on the annual big corporate event to bring everyone together? We all know that's important and those are useful things, but we can't always do that all the time. It's not practical, especially if we're leading global teams around the world. So leading a remote team will allow you to save a lot of that traditional money you spend on travel and bring your team together to fund the most important things, trust and teambuilding activities that may be virtual, ways of sharing stories with one another, one on one time with one another.
The third benefit of leading a remote team is that you get the ability to bring the best and the brightest truly together. There is a huge immense wealth of expertise and knowledge around the world, but often times, and for the last series of years, we've thought about only enabling people who are traditional employees who come to our offices to be able to contribute to our own companies. And what a remote team will allow you to do is find those that are the true experts not just in your region, in your city, but around the world that will allow you to bring those best and brightest together to generate the solutions for your organization.