Managing employees in a virtual enterprise

The new business surrounding and the rapid progress of information and communication technology (ICT) enabled the creation of (and made a demand for) new organizational forms that fit better to new conditions. Because of development of ICT, workplaces are not fixed to a location, and employees can fulfill their duties practically from anywhere. In that sense, new organizational forms brought many new potential benefits: cost reduction (transport, offices), time savings, attracting young workforce that likes to have freedom of flexible working hours. At the same time, the question how to transform randomly scattered employees into a strong, cooperative, creative and productive structure became a biggest problem for human resources, so in this paper we will try, by contemporary literature and successful examples review, to answer this question. Although “virtual organization” is not a new concept, in Serbia it is still not recognized as a beneficial concept in long term for organizations in unstable context, so this paper is created with an intention to give guidelines to Serbian virtual organizations’ managers to overcome problems with their most important resource. The dominant theoretical nature of this paper is, at the same time, its biggest limitation.