Virtual Work and Social Psychology

As a twenty something college graduate a large portion of my social interaction happens on Facebook and Myspace.  During college I was under the impression that these sites were only useful for socializing, until one of my Spanish professors created a profile for our Spanish class where she could post assignments.  The students loved it because some of our assignments could be turned in by posting them to the page.  This not only made it easier for students to turn in the papers but because we knew that our papers were going to be posted on a public web site where the whole class could read it, we tried that much harder to write a good paper.  If you had a question you could post it on the wall and not only get a response from the professor but get a few different points of view from other students.  The transparent characteristic of social networks and other web 2.0 tools make virtual work environments attractive to business organizations.  When I first started my Internship at Applied Knowledge Group I had never heard of SharePoint.  But came to find out that SharePoint enabled companies to virtual work environments where collaboration is easy to do from miles away.  You can see everyone’s tasks and their progress on each task. 

With the sky-high costs of gas, the whole question of telecommuting and virtual work environments is being taken more seriously than it has been in years.  In this new day and age where many people work virtually from home using software like SharePoint quite a few experts are saying that we are missing out on the social aspect of work that we experience from going into the office every day,  I disagree.  Our definition of socializing has been evolving ever since the introduction of the internet and through the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 internet programs.  Web 1.0 sites are only controlled by their owner and that person decides what will be posted there.  Web 2.0 is more transparent and anyone can post comments, blogs and pictures.  This has changed the way Americans socialize. We can now IM with our friend in another country instantaneously so our friendships are no longer bound by geographical limitations.  When studying social behaviors researchers now have to include virtual societies and relationships because they have started to display the same characteristics and follow the same norms of non virtual societies and relationships.  In my Spanish class using the Facebook page for the class made the class more cohesive, not only did we know each other’s name (yes, you can sit an entire semester in a class with people and not know their names!) because it was posted with their picture on the page but we could look at each other’s profiles and felt like we knew each other better.

This transparency can make up for the lack of trust some employees feel which is the reason why a lot of companies won’t let them work virtually.  In an article called “Trust and the Virtual Organization”, by Charles Handy, he describes this issue, “If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to run organizations based more on trust than control.  Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology is not enough” (Handy 1995).