Challenges Faced by IT Departments When Supporting Virtual Teams
IT departments face an array of challenges when offering support to virtual teams. These challenges all have different implications for the company. This paper focuses on some of the challenges faced, the advantages and disadvantages of virtual teams, and gives a comparison between virtual and traditional teams. As explained in this paper, teleworking offers big companies more benefits than the challenges it imposes on IT teams.
One such difficulty is ensuring the virtual network’s security that allows access to the company’s resources. IT experts ought to develop measures to avoid data phishing and brute force attacks. Another difficulty faced is users not being conversant with the use of certain virtual tools. Despite efforts by IT teams to train users, users might still not be conversant with the use of these tools (Barbara 1). In such cases, troubleshooting issues remotely becomes a huge challenge. Moreover, IT departments may also have insufficient budgetary allocation. These finances are used to acquire better software, hardware, and licenses. Companies have to spend more to acquire these better resources to maintain a competitive advantage.
Software issues are another challenge that IT departments face when offering support to virtual teams. Corrupt or outdated files may often hinder users from accessing the company’s resources. IT departments often have to do thorough checks on PCs and firewalls to ensure that corrupt files are easily detected. The last issue that IT departments may face is hardware internal short circuits. Such hardware problems, together with a degree of negligence on the users’ part, cause problems for the IT departments.
Advantages of Using Virtual Teams
The main advantage of employing virtual teams is that both the company and the employees save money. The remote teams are not dependent on the company for workspace and several utilities (Erica 2). Additionally, remote workers do not spend on work-related expenses such as daily commutes and new office clothes. Another advantage of this type of setup is increased productivity. Instead of having a forced, rigid nine-to-five schedule, workers decide when they can be most effective. When workers have the freedom to choose when to work, they show increased productivity.
Fast-growing companies get access to a global pool of talent through remote work. Virtual teams enable employers to look for human resources from the whole world (Barbara 1). This way, the company gets to employ the best candidates in various fields. As remote employees are distributed across different time zones of the world, they can cater to customers’ needs across different time zones. Having employees working at all times enables companies to have increased productivity.
Using a remote workforce makes scaling easy and budget-friendly. For a company to grow in revenue, more human resource is needed. For on-site teams, this translates to acquiring more office space and computers, among other work-related tools (Erica 2). However, most of these additional expenses can be avoided when using remote workers. As such, scaling up can be done easily and in a budget-friendly way.
Disadvantages of Using Virtual Teams
Remote coordination poses a challenge to most virtual teams. Not being in the same physical location often causes a backlog of unattended messages holding people up, thus hindering the company’s progress. Tracking employees’ progress on various assigned tasks also poses a challenge. An additional effort may be needed to help achieve this. This may include using charts or status updates to show progress on different tasks. Lastly, monitoring employees’ productivity is also a problem when using virtual teams. Employees may get distracted and this reduces their productivity rates (Erica 2). As such, employers may need to use browser extensions to track virtual time work.
Challenges Imposed by IT/IS National Standards
Certain requirements, like having full licenses to operate, may hinder the growth of companies. Licenses are sometimes expensive and companies may need to find ways of overcoming this (“Employer’s Guide…,” 3). One way is to start with the company’s current budget and then scale up slowly. Employers may also be required to provide workers with certain equipment needed for their work. One way to overcome this is to ensure that the terms of employment state that employees will cater for some of these expenses.
Challenges Imposed by Protocols and Procedures
Company protocols and procedures may delay some work in a remote working setup. Access to certain files or resources may need some level of clearance. Since workers are in different geographical locations, they experience delays in getting responses from the coworker with that needed clearance level. IT departments should devise methods of efficient communication between workers to minimize time wastage. The use of ClickUp allows coworkers to respond to each other in a timely way.
Comparison Between Virtual and Traditional Teams
In terms of communication, traditional teams have the edge over virtual teams. Seeing people face-to-face makes it easier to communicate. In terms of technology, virtual teams are often more conversant with various technology than traditional teams, especially in settings where the use of technology for traditional teams is not mandatory (Barbara 1). On matters of team diversity, virtual teams are often more diverse compared to traditional teams since they come from different parts of the world. Traditional teams are often employees from the same country with quite similar cultures.
Summary
Despite all the challenges that having a virtual workforce may pose to the IT department, it is clear that such a workforce is effectively better than traditional teams. With enough budgetary allocations, IT departments can easily overcome most of the hurdles that have been specified in this paper. However, further research needs to be done on the best ways to solve the challenges identified in this paper.
Works Cited
Barbara, Larson. 2022. A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers.
Erica, Chappell. 2022. The 7 Key Benefits of Virtual Teams.
“Employers’ Guide on Working from Home.” (2020) International Labour Organization.