Telstra is Australia’s principal telecommunication and information provider, with 16.7 million mobile services customers, 7.3 million fixed‐voice services and 3.1 million retail fixed broadband services by 2016. The company also has a presence in 15 other countries, including China, and is committed to digitally connecting businesses, government, communities and individuals. Some of the challenges Telstra faced in meeting this goal were the need to improve ways to communicate and collaborate — existing email technologies being too slow and often without context — and enable more effective team collaboration. Therefore, in 2015 Telstra adopted Cisco’s new service Spark, which allows collaborative teamwork via a ‘chat service’ rather than through the slower use of emails.

Spark, the new software application, enables users to work from any mobile device as well as desktops. The application aids teamwork through chatrooms, voice and video calls, virtual meetings and screen sharing, and can manage 25 callers in a single video call. Telstra’s unified communications director, Boris Corluka, said ‘the platform had been designed to have the look and feel of a consumer platform, because that is what employees are demanding now. Now that Telstra are using Spark, a Telstra senior product manager, Akash Jattan, describes how team members can be more forthcoming in Spark stating that ‘with Spark I say it as it is . . . It takes me about 30 percent less time than composing an email’. The ease by which Spark also allows sharing of photos and whiteboard sessions also contributes to the efficiency of collaboration, ‘The information in a Spark team room provides the context for the conversation . . . Outcomes have improved, and meetings that used to take me an hour can now take 20 minutes’.  All in all, the Telstra–Cisco relationship enables a new approach to teamwork in a faster pace digital age.

QUESTIONS

1. How might the use of digital resources aid or hinder the development of team relationships?

2. Would team relationships be improved by the faster flow of information provided by digital technologies?

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