Introduction to Successful Remote Teamwork

Overview

Tele-working is becoming a more and more popular topic amongst modern organizations. However, it also comes with some challenges for both: tele-workers and management. This course will make you and your team fit for virtual collaboration in geographically distributed contexts. You will learn about the benefits and risks of driving a virtual team culture and how guided remote work drives to success. Furthermore, you will learn how to use intercultural competences as a key factor of interaction and communication. In the hands-on part of the course you will learn how to select appropriate online collaboration tools and how to employ them in a practical task. Working with a “real life” virtual team, you will gain first-hand experience about the opportunities and challenges of tele-working.

Syllabus

Week 1:

We will discuss the meaning of remote work and contexts in which it is appropriate or not. Furthermore, we will discuss the reliability of remote work for organizations, including infrastructure and data protection issues. Finally, we will introduce a set of tools that might come handy for the practical tasks in this course as well as for your daily 'remote working' life.

Week 2:

During this week, we focus on "The human side of the remote work" and we will particularly consider two aspects that help defining how the management of the remote environment can be addressed. We first consider characteristics of personal profiles in order to build and empower remote teams. In addition to that, we also define some guidelines to understand the dimension of the remote interaction and how can organisations successfully overcome the challenges of the remote environment.

Week 3:

During this week, we will get to learn about the meaning of “international competence” and why it is important to have such a competence nowadays; especially when working in a virtual team. We will also introduce the different elements of international competence and go through some exercises that help us better understand our own culture, as well as other cultures.

Week 4:

The focus of this week is already on your hands-on work in the project. We hope for interesting discussions about your experiences. You will have additional time after the "official" end of the course to finalize your project submissions.