Organizational challenges brought on by the increase in remote work and virtual communication resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID–19 has hastened an increase in remote working and virtual teams, disrupting communication norms, presenting new challenges to organizational engagement and management of employee stress. This has required leaders and managers to respond with new strategies and solutions.
Chanana, N., & Sangeeta. (2020). Employee engagement practices during COVID‐19 lockdown. Journal of Public Affairs, pp. 1–10.
This article focuses on employee engagement during the COVID-19 Pandemic. For this commentary, the authors were able to draw from existing organizations that are constantly developing innovative and effective means to engage the employees during this tough time. Some of these engagement activities that are evolving consist of online family engagement practices, virtual learning development, and other activities like team meet ups and webinars. Many companies nowadays are developing numerous employee engagement practices that help strive for the company’s main goal. That is why businesses must look forward to keeping their employees satisfied and motivated through the engagement of employees during pandemic circumstances.
Newman, S. A., Ford, R. C., & Marshall, G. W. (2020). Virtual team leader communication: Employee perception and organizational reality. International Journal of Business Communication, 57(4), 452-473.
The authors, professors at Rollins College, use data from a study on leader communication effectiveness in a large human resource outsourcing firm to test their hypotheses that leaders whose use of communication tools and techniques are perceived by their virtual team members as more effective will have higher levels of team performance than those who are perceived as less effective, and that leader’s virtual team performance will be stronger in teams whose members have higher levels of trust in their leaders versus teams that have lower levels of trust. The hypotheses were partially supported, with the data showing that both sets of variables resulted in perceived high levels of performance by the teams. There was a discrepancy between the objective measure of performance and the subjective measure (the teams’ perception), which poses the organizational challenge of leaders being able to both engage their teams and communicate the information important to the organization.
Pazos, P. (2012), “Conflict management and effectiveness in virtual teams”, Team Performance Management, Vol. 18 No. 7/8, pp. 401-417.
Pazos hypothesizes that since virtual teams suffer from various hardships that in-person teams don’t (increased ambiguity, less work accountability), there is an increase in team conflict, which creates a need for greater conflict management. They expected that if teams “[support] positive and goal-oriented behaviors”, perceived team performance and satisfaction would be mediated via conflict management. Through analysis of their results, they found that “goal commitment is a significant predictor of team performance and satisfaction in a virtual setting”. Suggests that establishing team processes, operating principles, responsibilities, goals, metrics, roles, etc., are important to team outcomes. Also specifically states that “team contracts or charters can be extremely valuable in supporting team goal setting, and clarifying norms and expectations”.
Sull, D., Sull, C., & Bersin, J. (2020). Five ways leaders can support remote work. MIT Sloan Management Review, 61(4), 1-10.
The Authors, a senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, Co-founders of CultureX and a global industry analyst founder of The Josh Bersin Academy, conducted two online surveys of Global HR Leaders and employees. The goal was to determine the most pressing issues faced during the rapid increase in remote workers brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the creative solutions to solving these issues and which are having the most positive impact. In contrast to other works cited the data provided and conclusions drawn are more recent and deal directly with the rapid expansion in remote work and virtual teams on scale not previously studied. Some of the data and conclusions deal with challenges faced during the initial stages of moving a work force to remote work, while others bear out the challenges found in previous studies that will be long term as we transition from a remedy to work during pandemic to a long-term change in the way work is conducted in the future.
Schoeneborn, D., Kuhn, T. R., & Kärreman, D. (2019). The communicative constitution of organization, organizing, and organizationality. Organization Studies, 40(4), 475496.
The authors, professors at Leuphana University Lueneburg, University of Colorado Boulder, Copenhagen Business School, and University of London, dissect the “Communication Constitutes Organization” (referred to as CCO) scholarship and explore how organization happens in communication. The main takeaway that the authors provide is that communication acts as a major force creating, generating, sustaining, and constituting what we consider organization to be and different practices involving organization. Communication is more than something that happens within organizations but rather the process of organizations being constituted is communication. This overarching concept explains the importance of communication in the workplace environment and serves as an excellent introduction to the forthcoming blog.
Equal contributions by: John McFarland, Julia Olmstead, Alex Shaw, Jalen Watts and Michael Whittley