A basic requirement for teamwork is human skills, such as leadership, trust, motivation, mutual respect, motivation and so on.  Of course it is possible to start a successful team with people who never meet but we would expect this to be more difficult than when people already know each other.  I am not convinced that this is always true: existing teams may need a lot of effort to give up some of the excess “team building activities” such as long coffee breaks!

In any case, existing teams should already have the teamwork dynamic which can be applied to the Scatterwork^® (i.e. virtual teamwork) environment.  The freeing of at least some work from fixed location by existing teams is likely to be the dominant evolution for some time to come.

Scatterwork^® is particularly suited for:

• Knowledge Work, to increase the productivity and green credentials of activities such as:
  • Financial Services
  • Computer Programming
  • Engineering Design
  • Planning (operations, finance, marketing, travel etc)
  • Publication
  • Help Desk  Support
  • Journalism, Broadcasting etc.
• The Knowledge Work Part of businesses which need physical presence for their main operations, such as manufacturing, transport, services, broadcasting, telecommunications, fashion etc.
  • Scheduling
  • Book-keeping and Accountancy
  • Order Taking etc.

When deciding which work to migrate to virtual teamwork there may be other issues such as confidentiality which are more important.

The challengeis to review our own businesses and find what really could be done by virtual teamwork.