How Social Media Created a World of Virtual Teams

Multinational corporations work nowadays with virtual teams. That means that employees from all over the world are working on the same project and have never met in person. They form a virtual team. This is a progressive way of working and brings the best people together without moving them physically around the world. But it got its challenges. There are different time zones, different mentalities, different cultures, different languages and they actually only got in common that they work on the same project. That leads to misunderstandings and collisions that have big influence on the result of the project. In order to focus on the core of what they are doing, the project, photography can be utilized. Images are a universal language and when a photo shows a wheel it’s for everybody clear it’s a wheel, whatever name each person might have for the “wheel”. Well, there might be content difficult to show as an image, but there is a big opportunity in utilizing photography in the communication of virtual teams. And if no photo can be taken create one, create visual content. How great that works show the social networks. We are all part of virtual teams.
The photo sharing is the main fun on social media, because we all understand them, wherever we live and whatever our cultural background is. A flower is a flower and when we “like” the flower we join the community of all people who “like” the flower, we became a team, virtually over the image of a flower. And we feel as a team, because we all love the same flower, so we are connected in the love for the flower, just like the people working on the same project. Our world has become a world of virtual teams, with no physical distances anymore to overcome. An image goes around and connects who ever likes it wherever in the world. We meet people we got something in common with, although we might never physically meet and we are not alone in our love for the flower anymore, we became part of a team.

Ute Sonnenberg, www.rohoyachui.com