Benefits of Virtual Collaboration

Virtual teams – groups consisting of workers in numerous physical locations – are on the rise. With the geographical expansion of many companies, and an increasingly mobile workforce, work groups frequently utilize multiple offices, shared workspaces, residences, and hotel rooms. Thanks to laptops, readily available Wi-Fi, and smartphones, many employees can now complete their work from anywhere.

The ability to pull in talent from all over the world frees your company from geographical chains. Teams can be formed based on the participants’ expertise, rather than being limited by the physical proximity of collaborators. Team members located in different states and countries increase the diversity of your organization, giving you numerous points of view on the problems you are tackling.

While salaries in large U.S. cities are frequently quite high, pay rates for workers elsewhere remain much lower. Reach outside the U.S. and labor costs can be reduced even further. Virtual collaboration reduces overhead, as well, through lower costs for office space and parking for employees.

Virtual collaboration is far less costly than face-to-face meetings of geographically dispersed team members. Since employees can work from any location that has internet access, virtual meetings free up time lost in travel between work and home, to and from meetings, and to and from wherever employees have lunch. Virtual collaboration allows businesses to work quicker and more efficiently, eliminates the need to mail documents to additional office locations, and reduces printing costs.

Since the majority of documents used are in a digitized format, the need for physical storage facilities is reduced, and documents can quickly and easily be accessed or archived for later retrieval. This has a positive environmental impact, as well, reducing the carbon footprint and quantity of consumable materials used by the business. Any updates to a document are immediately viewable, and there is no need for different versions to be emailed back and forth, since team members can easily find the latest version anytime they need it.

Using a good online collaboration tool makes it easy to quickly generate detailed reports that include all of the activities associated with a certain project, giving team members more time to work on result-generating activities. It also creates a much more complete paper trail, since you can easily record and save discussions for future reference. If you need to know what someone said during a meeting, you can simply review the recording or chat log.

Intel Unite provides real-time collaboration for more productive meetings. It transforms traditional conference rooms by allowing users in multiple locations to have a secure means to interact. This animation shows how secure, connected meetings make collaboration easy: Intel Unite

Originally, virtual teams were created to enable communication among top experts worldwide who lacked time to travel. Today, teams of physically dispersed employees are frequently just the routine way of doing business. Thanks to powerful virtual collaboration tools, diverse groups of employees can now be closer than ever before.