Virtual Training

The military has been training soldiers using synthetic environments, which I think business should take notice. The literature on virtual work (i.e. using email, chat, wikis, blogs, etc) show that the first thing a virtual group should have is training together. Start training your virtual workers in synthetic environments to give people a sense of esprit de corps, facilitate trust, and to understand their 'real world' reactions:

"Face-to-face communication is usually the benchmark for what communication should be. 'Why do we want to train people using a virtual environment?' generals ask me. The reasons are this: You can record the environment. You can elevate the levels of stress and moderate the other variables. You can record and play it back to see the human performance in real-time. You can use that as a talking point to illustrate later all these training objectives that are tied to non-kinetic engagements and objectives. The tools we provide help them train faster."

I wish I could have said it better. :-)