Due to Covid-19, seventy-one percent of employed Americans are currently working from home, according to Pew Research Center. One major problem faced by virtual teams in the workplace is miscommunication. According to a blog from Chanty, sixty percent of what we communicate is expressed through our body language (Vu, D., 2020). With an online form now, communication through body language has been difficult to convey. Good team dynamics are necessary in this new way of life. Building employee trust is key for effective communication in virtual teams and one solution to this would be creating a sense of collective identity. For personal and professional relationships to be successful, we all must rely on strong communication skills.
The Challenges
A group is only as strong as its members. In order to cultivate a healthy group, you need to start with healthy individuals. A leader or manager coming into an online group setting with the intention of maximizing productivity, needs to keep a utilitarian or an ethic of care mindset (Robbins, Hintz, Moore, 2014). Managers and group members need to remember that people are on the other side of the screen, and treat them as such. Employees, especially those working from home, often must juggle multiple hats all at once. For example, many parents working from home right now also must teach or watch over their children because of delays on returning to the classroom (Couch, O’Sullivan, Malatzky, 2020). Due to the transition online, many employees have witnessed friends or family members receive reduced hours or lose their jobs all together, causing increased stress and uncertainty that they might be next on the chopping block. Also, internet function for group members could be unpredictable or be unstable throughout a full workday.
Trust is vital in all relationships, particularly in a working environment. Trust is built through open communication and reliance on one another, which is much more difficult to accomplish when teams cannot work together in an intimate face-to-face setting. The Covid-19 pandemic has taken away the ability for groups to form these relationships and minimizing groups’ trust in each other, as well as the organization. Face to face communication helps establish effective problem solving skills, and the lack of this form of interaction prohibits one’s ability to notice social cues and create productive working relationships (Bin, Branson, He, 2015).
Perhaps the most difficult thing about remote teamwork is the increased aptitude for conflict (Behfar, Peterson, Mannix, Trochim, 2008). Without the relationships and common goals and struggles of being together every day, there is less of an understanding of your coworkers’ personalities, and a higher likelihood for team members to miscommunicate, misunderstand, and conflict with each other in an unproductive manner (Behfar, Peterson, Mannix, Trochim, 2008).
The Solutions
Promoting inclusivity within a team is crucial to create resilience within the individual, the group and the organization as a whole. Teams that engage in reflection and action mechanisms are more likely to become resilient to handle difficult situations (Degbey, W.Y. and Einola, K., 2020). By extension, diving into each individual’s reflections, regulation of emotional expression, and engagement of concrete actions can all help to promote this inclusivity that translates to team resilience. From a leader’s perspective, in order to gain team resilience, they must take certain steps to create this resilient team. By building bridges with upper and lower level employees and letting the passive employees step up to take on tasks, this will help with individual self reflections. Regulation of emotional expression and engagement will be obtained by letting people either speak up or let go of constructive criticism (Degbey, W.Y. and Einola, K., 2020). This will allow an upward influence on the team to build this resilience.
One solution in order to avoid conflict and to combat the missing sense of team comradery is to simply spend as much time interacting with your teammates as possible. Try hosting virtual happy hours, game nights over zoom, or screen sharing and watching a movie or show. Anything that you can do to safely spend time with the team, outside of work-focused activities, is encouraged (Behfar, Peterson, Mannix, Trochim, 2008). By spending time with your group or team outside of work, naturally the relationships and levels of understanding grow deeper, which is a positive thing for teamwork in the professional setting (Behfar, Peterson, Mannix, Trochim, 2008). Promoting a positive work environment and good team dynamics inside and outside of work will help create a sense of belonging and identity that goes beyond the person and their team members.
The aspect of a collective identity is to transform a group of individuals into a cohesive and focused team. To achieve this, employees must gain others’ trust and mutual respect through communication. Considering the Covid-19 global pandemic and the quick widespread switch to virtual teams, companies face greater organizational problems than they normally would have. As addressed earlier, the common problem faced by virtual teams is that the status and identity of a person can be ambiguous, as many basic cues that exist in the physical world may be absent (Kimble, 2010). An individual can have as many virtual personas as one has time and energy to create. The loss of these social intelligence skills has a wide arrangement of impacts, including loss of patience, miscommunications, and loss of active engagement in discussions. It is important for groups to take the time to reassure members of the party of their intentions, as well as establishing a way of communicating that allows all parties to feel that their voice has been heard and that their participation is where it should be. The transition to working from home is the complete blend of home and work life, in order to stay efficient as a team, they must recognize that this transition is hard for everyone and communicate in order to adapt. Once people feel as if they are able to trust their team, they are more open to collaborating with one another and sharing their thoughts and ideas, ensuring good team dynamics during the hardships of a global pandemic.
In conclusion, online communication greatly hinders the ability for workers to build upon skills necessary for a healthy work environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has left the business sphere in a difficult situation where an online platform is the primary source of communication, minimizing the ability for groups to form trusting relationships, notice social cues, and build resilience. The lack of face to face communication has led to a greater quantity of conflict in the workplace due to a lack of empathy and understanding of the hardships many individuals are facing outside of work. Companies must work through this hardship on an individual and collective level to encourage team members to work together and create a productive, understanding team dynamics for workers to creatively think and communicate.
Authors:
Grace Michaels, Ben Fox, Brooke Geffe, Simon Serwold, Morgan Kaloudis
*all authors contributed equally to this paper
References:
Behfar, K. J., Peterson, R. S., Mannix, E. A., & Trochim, W. M. K. (2008). The critical role of conflict resolution in teams: A close look at the links between conflict type, conflict management strategies, and team outcomes. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(1), 170-188. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.170
Bin, F., Branson, L., & He, F. (2015), International Journal of Business, Accounting, and Finance Volume 9. Face to Face vs Computer-Mediated Communication.
Couch, Danielle L, O’Sullivan, Belinda, & Malatzky, Christina. (2020). What COVID‐19 could mean for the future of “work from home”: The provocations of three women in the academy. Gender, Work, and Organization, Gender, work, and organization, 2020-09-17.
Degbey, W.Y. and Einola, K. (2020), Resilience in Virtual Teams: Developing the Capacity to Bounce Back. Applied Psychology, 69: 1301-1337.
Kimble, C. (2010). Building Effective Virtual Teams: How to Overcome the Problems of Trust and Identity in Virtual Teams. SSRN Electronic Journal, 6–15.
Parker, K., Horowitz, J., & Minkin, R. (2020, December 09). How coronavirus has changed the way Americans work. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/12/09/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-has-and-hasnt-changed-the-way-americans-work/
Poirier, D., Sink, S., & Tompkins, J. (2020). Navigating your Business through the COVID Crisis, ISE Magazine.
Robbins, P., Hintz, J., & Moore, S. A. (2014). Environmental Ethics. In Environment and society: A critical introduction, critical introductions to geography (pp. 66-79). West Sussex: Wiley.
Vu, D. (2020, September 29). Covid-19 has changed the business communication game – here’s how to adapt. Retrieved February 24, 2021, from https://www.chanty.com/blog/business-communication/