How to manage virtual machines at work – Guide
Supervising a team comes with its own challenges, let alone a virtual one. In today’s world, traditional teams (physical teams) are obsolete. More and more employers are using the flexibility of remote work to onboard the right people to form teams. As a result of globalization, virtual teams are a common way for companies to do business as they strive to create competitiveness with scalable capabilities. However, working in a virtual environment creates barriers to collaboration between globally diverse team members. Therefore, managers must implement work systems and training programs for virtual teams to be successful. Hypervisors work by consolidating multiple VMs onto one server, reducing the amount of hardware needed to run your business. This is particularly useful for minimizing the number of physical servers, whose cooling costs alone consume more than 40% of data center power consumption. With fewer machines running in your office space, this further reduces your already low energy bill! All these factors also enable greater productivity. Many offices now offer remote or flexible working arrangements, and virtualization allows employees to access their desktop from home. While smaller office environments typically mean lower energy bills and lower rental rates, the downside of less space for hardware remains.
How to manage virtual machines at work
Prioritize asynchronous communication
“This meeting could have been an email.” Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows the frustration of unnecessary meetings. But virtual workspaces only add to that frustration because they needlessly limit the flexibility that makes them attractive and valuable in the first place. It is much more difficult to coordinate meetings and phone calls when employees have different hours and work in different locations. You can’t just walk down the hall to someone’s office, yell across the open floor, or take the elevator to a coworker’s workspace. And depending on your job-home policy, you may not be able to count on everyone being available at the same time. Synchronous communication is especially difficult when your workforce is spread across multiple time zones. It’s certainly not impossible, and impromptu video calls can still happen. However, you don’t want to rely on these channels for conversations that might occur asynchronously. Slack, email, and other asynchronous channels should be the default communication methods in a virtual workspace. video conferences, phone calls and other channels that require employees to drop everything and go online should be reserved for urgent conversations, lengthy discussions, and other complex interactions that would take a lot of time via text. Prioritizing asynchronous communications limits interruptions for employees during their most productive periods, ensuring your virtual workspace is as flexible as possible.
Create space for virtual collaboration
Sometimes asynchronous communication is not enough. When people need to work together on projects or discuss their ideas, face-to-face (or perhaps more accurately, camera-for-camera) may be more effective. Our faces, body language, tone and emotions appear more clearly, which can allow people to articulate their thoughts more quickly, more fully, or in response to another person’s non-verbal communication. Collaboration is also an essential part of developing professional relationships with colleagues. These periods of strategic synchronous communication eliminate textual ambiguity and reduce the work of interpreting the tone, emotion, and intent that can complicate text-based communication. When your company is working entirely remotely, it’s important to ensure that all employees have access to virtual collaboration tools and devices for one-on-one meetings, brainstorming sessions, and other applications where they need access to colleagues. Quality microphones, internet connections, headphones and webcams can go a long way in relieving some of the difficulties associated with video calling. You also need to regularly identify situations where virtual collaboration is ideal. While you don’t want to discourage people from collaborating when necessary, you do want to ensure your employees develop a shared understanding of when virtual collaboration might be unnecessary. This will help prevent people from feeling like “This Zoom call should have been a Slack message” or “I really just needed to share this document.” If your company works only partially remotely, part of your office should be dedicated to virtual collaboration. Of course, anyone can join a meeting from a laptop, but dynamic workspaces—those that combine face-to-face and virtual workers—can encourage collaboration by equipping each conference room with the screens, microphones, cameras, and other technology your employees need to effectively serve . Whether joining a virtual meeting from the office, home, or elsewhere, employees must have easy access to technology that enables a quality experience.
Promote greater transparency
If you share an office with someone or work in the same building, it’s obvious when someone is leaving for an errand, a face-to-face meeting, or a break. You are not at her table. And they probably told someone what they were doing when they left, in case anyone needed them. But that’s not how it works in a virtual workplace. And with asynchronous communication channels, you don’t always know how quickly someone will see your message, let alone when they’ll respond. Part of effectively managing a virtual workspace is ensuring that everyone’s calendars reflect their actual availability, and that means non-work related events are included if they affect the employee’s availability. Depending on the nature of a person’s work, they may also want to allocate time to specific tasks and processes that need to be completed so they can be confident that this time will not be interrupted by a meeting. As with most things, there are a number of flexibilities in terms of how transparent everyone needs to be. Short, impromptu breaks and activities are unlikely to justify blocking a calendar. But it might be worth sending a quick Slack message – the virtual equivalent of letting the person sitting next to you know what you’re doing. “I’m going to the gym. I’ll be back in an hour.” And you may or may not require someone to put on their calendar that they choose their children. up from school to 3:30 every day – blocking time may be enough. The point of this transparency is that in a virtual workspace you need to know when to schedule meetings and it is not always possible to message everyone individually about your preferred availability. You want to create an expectation that if someone has an appointment open on their calendar during their normal working hours, people will be able to schedule meetings during that time. In a virtual workspace, you need alternate channels for things you would normally learn from sharing an office or workspace with someone, and greater digital visibility into their availability. While this should be part of your WFH policy, it is also an area where leading by example really helps directors, managers and team leaders.
Check in with employees regularly
Part of a healthy management strategy is keeping an eye on how employees are doing, what they are struggling with, and How to best support them. If you want your employees to grow, stay productive, and continue to strengthen your company’s investment in them, they need short-term and long-term goals, meaningful milestones, and guidance. This can and should happen in the virtual workplace as well as in personal contact. Whether team leaders schedule formal meetings with their employees, offer virtual office hours, or are simply accessible via Slack and email, employees need to know that someone is listening, engaging, and supporting them. To the extent possible, senior management may want to create similar opportunities for teams and departments to discuss and share their own desires, goals, and vision. Employee check-ins can take several formats. For large organizations, surveys are an excellent way to gather aggregate information about the overall well-being of your company’s employees.
Schedule an in-person appointment
As we all experience the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no substitute for personal interactions. Digital communication channels are great tools, but relying entirely on them makes it much more difficult to foster team building and deepen professional relationships between colleagues. Part of managing a virtual workplace should include dedicating time to face-to-face meetings where teams can create meaningful shared experiences and have richer interactions. It can involve things like: How important this is will depend on the percentage of employees who work remotely and the number of days they are remote. In a 2007 meta-analysis of 46 academic studies, employees who worked remotely for more than 2.5 days a week saw greater damage to their relationships with co-workers. Of course, there have been several advances in virtual work over the last decade, but the principle is still basically the same: if you see people less and only have isolated interactions with them, it is much more difficult to develop meaningful relationships. And those relationships have a direct impact on employee satisfaction and less tangible qualities like team synergy.
Use hospitality for shared physical resources
If your workspace is only partially virtual, you need a system to allocate your physical workspaces and ensure your space meets your demand. Dynamic workspaces often include shared workspaces that are not dedicated to specific employees and that anyone can reserve as needed. This is known as hospitality and this is how most large companies already manage the use of their conference rooms and other resources. Depending on the composition of your virtual workforce and your organizational goals, you might want to reserve just a few workstations for the hospitality industry, or you might need entire rooms. The decision is solely for your property, your employees and your corporate culture.
Final note
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