WASHINGTON, US: Globally distributed businesses cannot rely entirely on technology or e-mails to overcome time and space barriers; they still need to talk, says a new study.

The teams spread globally should work some overlapping hours, it stresses.

Jonathon Cummings, associate professor of management at the Duke's Fuqua School of Business, developed these specifics based on a study of 108 project teams at Intel.

Along with J. Alberto Espinosa of American University and Cynthia Pickering of Intel, Cummings assessed the effectiveness of various technologies in helping Intel teams overcome the challenges of different time zones and locations.

"Although technology can tremendously improve productivity, the Intel experience demonstrates that live communication made possible by overlapping work hours is still critical for a distributed team's success," Cummings said.

The 675 Intel employees included in the study worked in 53 locations in 22 countries. They completed an online survey about their project teams, reporting how closely they worked with each team member.

Also the frequency with which they communicated with team members using different technologies (e-mail, phone, instant messaging and web conferencing), and the extent to which their work suffered from "coordination delay," or time lost while waiting for responses or information from another group member.

Teams whose work hours did not overlap at all experienced the most coordination delay, despite the use of e-mail and other technologies that do not require live communication, said a Duke release.

"While it may seem that e-mail is a great way to keep projects moving around the clock, none of the current communications technologies was effective in preventing delays when teammates did not share overlapping work hours," Cummings said.

"The engineers need to work together to talk through problems," one Intel employee explained. "So, when there are significant time differences, they just can't make good solid progress without being able to talk."

"This is not to say that technologies aren't important to corporate productivity," another engineer said.

The findings appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Information Systems Research.
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