Prior to COVID-19, 17% of people in the United States reported that they work from home five or more days a week. However, after COVID-19, that percentage increased to 44% of people working from home for five or more days a week (Statista, 2021). This drastic change has revolutionized the work environment and has presented new challenges to virtual managers. While COVID-19 will not be around forever, the virtual environment will, and managers need to make sure that they can keep their employees engaged and motivated in their work. Some key challenges in maintaining employee engagement are managing technical barriers and team dynamics. Solutions managers can take include increasing employee self-efficacy as well as establishing trust and respect amongst the team. 

Technical Barriers and Self-Efficacy 

One of the best current examples of the issues some employees face with the virtual environment is through the COVID-19 pandemic. Employees are being put into a new workplace environment that many are not used to and must deal with the mental and emotional stressors of being quarantined at home and staying safe during a global pandemic (Newman, 2020). Management and company leaders had no choice but to adopt the latest information technology (IT) systems, while others had to completely reanalyze and rebuild their business models, shift their products and services online, and engage new business channels that were affected by the pandemic (Carroll, 2020). Similarly, to lacking materials, some employees may lack the necessary technological training in a remote access work environment. Less familiarity with technological information leads to employee productivity decreasing dramatically (Staples, 1998). When faced with difficult tasks in the remote work environment, employees begin to lose motivation and reach out for assistance rather than attempting to tackle the problem. 

 One way to help solve the issue of employee’s lack of motivation due to lack of resources is to increase their self-efficacy. This can be easily accomplished by providing additional training for information technological experience. A higher level of self-efficacy in information technology and other remote work-related tasks were associated with higher levels of efficiency while remote. By increasing the self-efficacy of your employees, they will become more engaged with their work as well as be able to self-manage themselves when there is no manager present. Given the remote nature, this is especially important. Paired with regular communication and frequent updates with your employees, the greater level of connectivity provided to an employee working remotely, the greater their performance results will turn out (Staples, 1998). 

Trust and Team Dynamics 

In a team-based environment, trust, respect, and shared goals are normally accumulated and built over time spent with another individual. However, virtual teams and communication have challenged team members to establish these connections without ever physically meeting anyone. Levasseur includes in his article a list of the highest-ranked challenges for virtual teams. Some of these challenges include cultivating trust, overcoming the lack of face-to-face interactions, overcoming communication barriers, and aligning the goals between individual team members (Levasseur, 2012).  

To create good connections between team members from the start, it is important to establish the team goal and success criteria (Levasseur, 2012). This includes identifying each member’s role and finding a way for everyone to communicate, contribute, and collaborate to their team goal. By establishing a team goal and creating clarifying roles, individual team members will be motivated and held responsible for their share of the efforts. Keeping regular communication between team members so everyone can stay up to date on their project and contribute their opinions can assist the team in properly fulfilling their goal.  

A study done by the University of Waterloo on establishing trust in virtual teams identified tools that are effective for creating and developing trust in teams that lack face-to-face interactions: expertise, recommendations, social capital, willingness to help, and validation of information. The presence of expertise in a team, or a member that the rest of the team identifies as an expert, can create trust behavior as it can boost the team’s overall feelings of competency. In the case of a manager, offering your background in your field as both a manager and employee offers validation to your expertise. Paired with the social capital of the position, and a willingness to assist your employees, trust will come naturally to the team (Pelegrini, 2014). 

An additional layer to the challenges of maintaining trust in a virtual setting is managing the dynamics of a culturally diverse team that must remain engaged with each other in a virtual environment. Cultural diversity presents specific challenges when moving through Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development: forming, norming, storming, and performing. Increased primary tension and communication barriers can lessen the team’s ability to get through the first two stages of development. While there is a plethora of research on virtual teams and culturally diverse teams, there is still not enough research on the teams that are both virtual and culturally diverse. This leaves it up to managers to rise to the challenge without the benefit of extensive academic research to support them (Gibson 2014).  

When it comes to managing a culturally diverse team virtually, it can be helpful to experiment with different “levels of virtuality” to see which works best for the team. For example, starting a diverse virtual team with low–level virtuality and having them communicate via email or electronic bulletins can reduce some of the barriers of breaking through primary and secondary tension that diversity and virtuality can create. This can get a team engaged and build trust more quickly than starting the communication with high levels of virtuality such as videoconferencing (Gibson, 2014).  

Concluding Remarks 

As COVID-19 has swept the world into an unprecedented level of remote work environments, it has only highlighted the present issues managers face with virtual teams and further exacerbated them. Employee engagement can be disrupted by increased stress and anxiety due to technical barriers and changes in team dynamics. However, through the usage of research and models, virtual leaders and teams can strategize ways they can increase engagement and overcome presented obstacles.  

By increasing the self-efficacy of employees with their technology, managers can avoid potential sources of stress or anxiety due to unfamiliarity with the materials needed to succeed. Managers should also strive to ensure that their teams have elevated levels of trust and respect amongst themselves. Due to the lack of interpersonal interactions, teams are easier to fall apart and slow down progress within the organization, and never accomplish organizational goals that are easier achieved by an in-person workplace. As virtual environments become more common, the challenges and solutions outlined in this blog will enable managers to maintain effective employee engagement when working in virtual teams. 

References 

Carroll, N., & Conboy, K. (2020). Normalising the “new normal”: Changing tech-driven work practices under pandemic time pressure. International Journal of Information Management, 55, 102186. doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102186 

Department, P., & 22, J. (2021, January 22). Remote work frequency before/after covid-19 2020. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122987/change-in-remote-work-trends-after-covid-in-usa/ 

Gibson, C. B., Huang, L., Kirkman, B. L., & Shapiro, D. L. (2014). Where global and Virtual  MEET: The value of examining the intersection of these elements in twenty-first- century teams. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational  Behavior, 1(1), 217-244. doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091240 

Levasseur, R. E. (2012). People skills: Leading virtual teams—A change management   perspective. Interfaces, 42(2), 213-216.  

Newman, Sean A, & Ford, Robert C. (n.d.). Five Steps to Leading Your Team in the   Virtual COVID-19 Workplace. Organizational Dynamics, Organizational dynamics.  

Pelegrini Morita, P., & Marie Burns, C. (2014). Trust tokens in team development. Team Performance Management, 20(1/2), 39-64. doi:10.1108/tpm-03-2013-0006 

Staples, D. S., Hulland, J. S., & Higgins, C. A. (2006). A self-efficacy theory explanation for the management of remote workers in Virtual Organizations. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(4), 0-0. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00085.x 

Authors: Madison Emry, Lisa Lee, Hannah Meister, Jack Thornton, and Anthony Tulloch 

(All authors contributed equally to this paper)