An e-team is a group of individuals who work across space and organisational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology. Members have complementary skills and are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent performance goals, and share an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
Geographically dispersed teams allow organisations to hire and retain the best people regardless of location. An e-team does not always imply telecommuters, individuals who work from home. Many virtual teams in today’s organizations consist of employees both working at home and in small groups in the office, but in different geographic locations.
The benefits of an e-team approach are:
- Workers can be located anywhere in the world
- Virtual environments can give shy participants a new voice
- Members have less commuting and travel time, so they tend to be more productive
- Companies gain an increasingly horizontal organization structure, characterized by structurally, and geographically distributed human resources.
There are a few caveats when using e-teams. They frequently operate from multiple time zones, so it is important to make sure that there is some overlapping work time. In addition, unless a camera is used for meetings, working virtually means that there is no face to face body language to enhance communications. Therefore, intra-team communications must be more formal than with a team whose members meet physically. Care also needs to be taken to make sure no one is left out of the communications loop just because he or she is not visible. E-teams demand a high trust culture.