Virtual teams in the digital age

t stable with a bad quality of sound 
and image. Besides, using the employees’ private accounts may reduce their professional 
working style during online meetings with their partners [55]. Therefore, FPT becomes a leader 
who has changed the traditional working method by experimenting and developing a solution 
named the Virtual meeting room to solve the connection demand in different areas since 2017. 
7.2 Benefits and difficulties of virtual meetings in virtual groups 
Opening virtual teams in virtual meeting rooms is simple in usage and cost saving. With this 
application, it is easy to invite users to join the online conference through a simple URL. 
Besides, an online meeting room is set up with many functions, such as meeting chat, live 
stream conference, saving conferences by videos for documents purpose, desktop sharing and 
presentation [55]. Moreover, this innovation brings more choices for users with two different 
systems, including internal meetings and public meetings [56]. The quality of image and sound 
is improved and the meetings can be applied in smartphones [56]. Furthermore, virtual meeting 
rooms are a great way to solve the shortage of space in the company. 
This application is used for many purposes, such as conferences between two big regions 
monthly, setting up online meeting rooms with the same functions as traditional ones, and 
opening a virtual meeting room by a far-distanced journalist to exchange information. This 
innovation helps FPT Group save hundreds of million VND and increase the performance of 
information exchange over 30%. Therefore, virtual meeting rooms are being daily applied in the 
Engineering department and the Business department in FPT online and electronic newspaper 
Vnexpress [56]. 
It can be seen that this is the first step of FPT Group for its building and applying virtual 
worlds and e-commerce. Besides, the 4.0 industry revolution and artificial intelligence are 
bringing many opportunities for innovating and creating perfect tools for virtual working. With 
its vision to lead new technology, FPT Group tends to follow the trend of virtual working. Due 
to the new working environment, managers should improve their ability to guide their virtual 
teams, in which the members can be different in thinking, working style, and backgrounds. 
Therefore, they should have many skills, including conflict resolutions, time management, or 
how to encourage or train their team members when they are in a far distance. 
8 Conclusion 
8.1 Conclusion and discussion 
This research examines the virtual collaboration in the age of technology and the practical 
example of this kind of work. The paper aims to help leaders, team members, and organizations 
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76 
have a clear and bright perspective on the virtual context to implement the virtual environment 
for remote cooperation and creating competitive advantages. In the first part, the paper defines 
virtual teams, ICT and their emergence as well as the summary of their benefits and drawbacks. 
In the second part, IBM and FPT practices highlight the same views for the benefits of virtual 
teams on the development and success of their organizations. 
In the future, virtual teams will become a “natural way“ [30, p. 241] and commonly used 
in many organizations [33]. The cooperation between virtual teams and technologies brings 
opportunities to reshape the shared world by affecting the effectiveness, value-based 
performance, expenditure, and decentralization [30]. However, it can be a difficult task to 
implement and manage a virtual workforce because the organizations are unique in terms of 
challenges and demands [11]. The decision of working virtually should depend on the 
specificity of work and points of views of organizations. 
Although FPT Group is the pioneer in following the trend of revolution by creating 
innovation in virtual cooperation, it is not difficult to recognize that this Vietnamese high tech 
company still stands behind the companies from developed countries for a decade. While IBM 
created virtual environments for virtual teams in 2007, a virtual meeting room did not appear at 
FPT until 2017. Therefore, Vietnamese companies should have their own strategies to keep up 
with the trend and bring it into their opportunity to gain the best result. 
8.2 Limitation and further research 
The research is conducted via the secondary research and explores the literature from every 
industry. For future research, it would be interesting to enlarge the study scale by looking at 
more international and national companies and comparing the differences among them in terms 
of virtual collaboration issue. Then, quantitative research should be carried out to collect the 
response of team members and managers during working in a virtual team and find the factors 
that affect the performance of such teams. 
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