The impact of virtual office work is amplified when it begins to affect not only personal productivity, but also team and organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

People work with other people all the time. Such work may not always seem like team work. For most people, it is just work. The ability to connect with colleagues -- to share ideas, to conduct analysis, to get quick answers to questions, to make decisions, to track and manage deliverables ? is just the way work gets done. But as the virtual office becomes the norm, it has become more and more difficult for loosely defined teams to connect in a rich context that lends itself to real business getting accomplished.

Increasingly, work is conducted outside of the office itself. Participants in a business activity are working from home more frequently, including after hours or during flextime. Increased reliance on strategic partnerships and outsourcing relationships has brought with it the challenge of keeping multiple companies in synch. It has also placed a premium on spending time outside of the office and onsite with those partners, not to mention with customers. Even those workers who spend most of their time at their desk with a high-speed connection to the internal network and to the Internet find themselves frequently working directly with others who are occasionally disconnected, bandwidth constrained, and/or not part of the same company.