Virtually Pregnant!

Several years ago, I passed a poster whilst crawling in heavy traffic getting into London. The image transported me to holidays I had enjoyed, as it showed a man in shorts swinging in a hammock on a shady veranda against the backdrop a blue sky and turquoise sea. Only when I looked again did I see something extra which gave me a slightly conflicting emotion. Perched on his knee on the hammock was a laptop, and the strap-line of the poster was 'With our software you can work anywhere'.

Time is becoming a rare commodity; we've all read statistics that tell us most people are working longer hours than our parents did, all made possible by the extension of our brains and ears and eyes through various clever bits of technology. The problem is there's only one of me to go around and I haven't been able to multi task sufficiently to read one document properly whilst having a phone call with somebody else, whilst in a meeting with yet another different group of people, or at least I can't do any of those in a satisfying way. Something has to give.

Often the thing that does end up giving is the quality of the relationships in our lives. I could talk about work life balance and the importance of relationships outside of work but I'll leave that to another time; for the moment I want to talk about the importance of relationships at work and the time it takes to keep work relationships real, gritty and up to date.

I've just delivered a two-hour talk at the European sales conference of a large computer company. The group of people I talked to were proud of their virtual team between each other and the network of virtual teams they manage, however after I'd talked to them about the importance of making time to talk to people face to face if relationships are to stay real, one delegate confessed that his virtual team was just that - virtual, it didn't really exist.

Sure, the people were there as far as he knew and they had rushed conference calls regularly and they got through agendas just about and goals were achieved (although it's a tough market), but when this guy stopped to think he realised so much of his team were going through the motions and nothing was a substitute for spending time with each other, a commodity they had got little left of to spend with each other.

It gets to a point in virtual working where the word crosses the boundary between being an expression of how a team reorganises itself and becomes an expression of the absence. Somebody once said to me there are certain things in life that are black and white and I remember saying is that true, surely most things are various shades of grey and the reply was "no, you're either pregnant or you're not." In a lot of cases you've either got a robust relationship with your colleagues or you haven't, you've either got a team that really works or you've not.

Virtual can be a modern excuse for emperor's new clothes.

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