eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Nowadays ICT enables employees of different companies to work from multiple different location in addition to the typical office space: remotely from home, summer home or from the other side of the world. This might indicate that the classical idea of a physical office is turning to be obsolete or the notion of office is changing. Certain companies embrace the possibility and encourage their employees to work remotely. Some will not even acquire a physical office anymore but trust that their employees will do their work effectively from home or other locations.

The aim of this study is to identify the reasons why other companies embrace the opportunity to work without a physical office and others not. In addition, the aim is to identify the factors in organizational environment that hinder and/or? on the other hand support functioning without a physical office.

This research was done by interviewing three different Finnish accounting companies. Finnish accounting firms all using same accounting software. Two of the companies have a physical office and one does not. By considering boundaries that lead to discontinuities in the target group's everyday work life I aim to identify causalities that can explain the phenomenon. Moreover, I consider how temporal organizational structures affect the notion of time in virtual team's work and make the environment more dynamic. This along with the lack of team awareness in the systems cause considerable boundaries and therefore increases the possibility of discontinuities inside the virtual team.

I argue that the more temporal the team is the more the possibility of boundaries increase and hence the possibilities of discontinuities grow. If the companies will not carefully choose the collaboration tools team awareness will also cause discontinuities. However, the ICT choices should follow the business - not the other way around. These systems should be able to tackle the problems that arise when the physical space is taken away and the team functions in a virtual environment. Given the above mentioned, virtual teams can function without a physical office if the ICT choices are well aligned with the business needs.

This research does not consider the social factors that physical office space includes.