Image by: Tatu Pakarinen, 2015
Virtual collaboration has been taking much bigger part of our daily work activities for some years now. As a term and a concept, collaboration is really wide. In physical world, collaboration can be anything between two best friends planning the bachelor parties to debate between different parliamentary parties. And even if virtual collaboration is just usual collaboration with virtual aspect, the diversity of activities is huge. So how would we define the collaboration in order to learn to collaborate virtually?
Usually, term “collaboration” is used to define activities varying from ad-hoc face to face meetings to formal and structured meetings. The common purpose is to reach some agreed target. We all know how to behave in meetings when they happen in physical environment. That is something we have learned from the day one at school. By defining virtual collaboration, in this particular case including virtual aspects to our collaboration activities at work, we have a sandbox to play further in this post.
In many cases, moving towards virtual collaboration and virtual world just means installing the programs to our laptops and smartphones. Our companies expect us to know how to use them. Education for these tools is rare in business world, and that was really visible from interviews conducted for this project. That leads us to the first half of the topic - most of us know how to use virtual collaboration tools. We know how to set up the program and connect the headphones, and yes, we know how to call to a colleague. Problems start to appear when we need to have more participants or other participant is from different organization. But even then we manage to get over these fences, we just know how to use these tools.
The second part of the topic, knowledge of virtual collaboration is trickier. When we have been stripped off from the meeting rooms, white boards, pens and papers we are many times quite clueless how to collaborate. Same tools and practices which we are using in the physical environment, do not work in the virtual world. We have to learn about new places and spaces, tools and ways where and how collaboration is happening. And that’s where we need the education. Not for connecting the headphones or selecting the right app but for learning new practices and new possibilities in virtual sphere. As well as understand that ways we are familiar with are not working everywhere.
And why do we need that? The wisest answer to this came from one interview – we need that in order to be as productive in virtual world as we are in the physical environment! And that is the reason, in my opinion, why we need the education for virtual collaboration. We don’t want to waste our time with new tools, we want to profit from them.
This is my first blogpost for PATI – and sadly possibly the last as well. Tuning the idea just took some time, but let see if it leads into some more fruitful thoughts that I’ll have to write later. Thanks for the journey, and enjoy the ride!
Tatu
