Virtual Team Dynamics - The Ulfire Podcast

In this episode I speak with Sharon Koifman the founder and CEO of Distant Job, a specialist recruitment firm working to identify and help clients recruit remote workers and find great jobs for people wanting to work remotely.

Sharon has spent much of his career in the remote work environment. Running his business from his home in Montreal with a workforce spread across many different countries, Sharon has had the opportunity to think deeply about the benefits and challenges of remote work and how to manage organisations comprising remote workers to give every employee the best working environment and opportunity to contribute.

We discussed many different areas of remote work including the need to treat remote work as a real job, managing engagement and supporting remote workers in ways that engages them and provides a stimulating and healthy working experience, all while ensuring the business is effective and successful.

Sharon can be contacted via Distant Job

In this episode I consider the need to establish some boundaries in your work from home workplace and how and how frequently we communicate with colleagues. This would include finding a place at home to establish your workplace, how you dress for working from home, putting some sensible boundaries around your time spent working from home and managing the volume of video and phone meetings we are all seeing a surge in.

With so many in the workforce new to working from home and working remotely to colleagues it is highly likely that there will be a strong percentage who will either be loving or hating the experience. This extreme reaction is not unlike the experience of personnel when they are sent deployed as expats to other cities or countries, something I discussed specifically a while ago in a previous article.

In the expat environment these extremes are referred to as xenophelia (a love for the new) and xenophobia (a distrust or dislike of the new), so could we introduce some new terms into our vocabulary for this love and hate of working from home and working virtually? If so, I would propose virtuophelia (a love of working virtually) and virtuophobia (a dislike/hatred for working virtually)? After all, any new terms like these can’t be any more pervasive than some of the new expressions that are finding their way into our vocabulary, terms like social distancing and flattening the curve.

So , below are a few thoughts as to why someone would love or hate working from home.

Things to love about working from home

Working from home (or at least working outside of a corporate office) has many benefits and reasons to love it:

* Freedom to work more flexible hours – working from home allows the individual to have a lot more flexibility around their working hours and the location they undertake their work. This can be easily seen in those who work from coffee shops, public libraries, airports and hotels.* Working from home enables people to care for family members as part of a flexible working structure – whether caring for dependent children, partners, parents or extended family members, the closer proximity and ability to juggle work hours means it is much easier for those working from home to look after their relatives.* Reduced commute time frees up more personal time – regardless of the length of commute, we all give up a portion of our time to travel to and from our traditional office. Working from home means the commute is quite literally fro the kitchen table to the laptop. Those extra minutes can be used for rest, exercise or any other activity.* Working from home is more inclusive – in theory at least, working from home should make access to work more inclusive for those who otherwise may have been restricted by their ability to access a traditional office for standard working hours. This would include, for example, those caring for young children, elderly relatives or dependent family members, or those with an impediment that may have limited their movement.* Freedom to travel while still earning a living – in the pre COVID-19 world it was relatively common for people to adopt a digital nomad lifestyle, working their way around the world as digitally enabled consultants. During the COVID-19 pandemic this ease of travel is clearly not an easy option, but there are still more options available to people who have adopted this style of working.

Things to hate about working from home

Equally, there are a number of things to hate about working from home:

* It can be very isolating – Working remotely to your team and your colleagues can lead to an ever increasing sense of isolation. You may get to spend more time with your family but from a work sense, you are not able to have spontaneous and organic discussions with colleagues which can lead to a sense of loss of connection.* There are more distractions – Most of us have set up our home environment to include all of the social distractions we use to enjoy our time away from the office. This can include TV,

Working from home is a balancing act. Each and every one of us are balancing our home and work lives, our family and personal commitments, the education and well being of our family and our commitments to out companies, our obligations to deliver reports on time and our physical health, our relationships with our colleagues and our mental well being. It is not easy and it is not a skill that can be learned from a book, article, training course or classroom. There is no one size fits all. Every one of us must determine for ourselves how we need to balance our time, and we need to do it constantly over time as our situation evolves.

Finding balance over time

At different times in a period of working from home, to maintain balance in life will mean shifting priorities and focus between the various roles and responsibilities we each hold. This will mean changing how you prioritize your work, family, personal and social commitments so that you are able to remain healthy, sustain your family and meet your employers expectations.

Balance when starting to work from home

Working from home in conventional times

When people first start to work from home, if it is in more normal times when they may be working from home alone while colleagues and family continue with their normal lives, with family members leaving the home for work and school and colleagues still gathering in their workplace, the normal pace for working from home is that the home worker would typically work similar hours to their office based colleagues. This matched pace makes it easy for the home worker to maintain a contiguous relationship with work colleagues. Instances of this kind of working from home may be establishing a new office, recovering from a medical procedure, having home renovations undertaken or similar. It is typically for a finite and often relatively short period, and, as it is stand alone, is easiest managed through simply a location displacement.

Another example of this situation may be for the home worker to be caring for a family member such as a child, partner or parent. In this instance, there would be an expectation that the home worker will adjust their working pattern to allow flexibility to provide the care they need while still delivering against agreed work commitments. This situation can be require more adjustment than a more simple working from home undertaking as described in the previous paragraph, but again, generally the rest of the community are still going about their normal lives.

Balance when working from home during the Corona virus pandemic

We are however living in highly unconventional times. Rather than having small numbers of the workforce working from home we now have large portions of many businesses in this situation. It seems that in many organisations, if a task can be performed from home (or from off site), then that is happening, huge portions of many parts of the workforce are now working from home, balancing their lives with those of their partners, children, relatives and colleagues.

The simple times of working from home, which for many meant having a peaceful day in the home office completing a piece of work without interruption are now gone. The working day for many of us is now completely blended with the personal day, family and work rolled into one, a hugely complex, interconnected challenge. Parents are learning how to home school children while holding down a job. Couples are fighting for space and the quiet needed to participate in video calls. Adults are worried about the well being of parents as well as finding the goods and provisions they need to continue their lives. All not knowing when the next change will come,

As we all adapt to our new situation of working from home rather than working in offices it can be hard to work out how much to share. Finding a balance between under sharing and over sharing is a challenge in more conventional work times, now that we are all separating from our co-workers, knowing the boundaries becomes even harder.

Incidental sharing

As we all start to hold video meetings, regardless of the technology, there is an inevitable degree of additional sharing of our personal lives and environments happening. People are joining video calls from their kitchens, lounge rooms, home offices and bedrooms with all kinds of personal content suddenly on show to colleagues. To a degree this is unavoidable and may even help build a sense of community between colleagues, but it is still a good idea to give some thought to the background before showing everything to the world.

This degree of caution is particularly appropriate given the number of times I am seeing pictures of group calls on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, often taken without the consent of all participants and definitely without thought to what is behind the faces on the call. I for one would not be happy to see pictures of the inside of my home being shared on social media without my express permission.

To try to mitigate this, some platforms allow the use of virtual backgrounds which conceal most of the background behind a picture of a beach, city, landmark or sunset, others have functions that blur the background when on a call. Clearly its a personal choice as to your approach, but I would definitely recommend at least considering just what and who else may be in frame on any video call.

Intentional sharing

Alongside the incidental sharing through video calls, the big challenge for many can be to know how much sharing is enough and how much is too much.

From my research into virtual teams, the establishment of relationships and through them trust were very strong themes behind building and maintaining a strong team culture. In a more conventional virtual team environment this would include sharing small parts of your personal story to help build a sense of rapport with colleagues. However, with so many moving to a work from home situation this concept can be quite new, with relative strangers who may have worked in close proximity for a long time now working from distance there is real value in adopting a similar approach, sharing some parts of your life with your fellow work from home co-workers will help everyone better collaborate.

Knowing where to draw the line can be a difficult question though. Each team and each individual will have their own views on this, and one point of difficulty can occur where one person shares more than a colleague may want to know, this could be more personal information than may be conventional, it could be information on family, friends or co-workers.

Finding the right time to either push back and request a toning down of the sharing or just accepting it as a coping mechanism by the sharer is not an easy decision, but is something that should be carefully considered. Some people who are trying to find their personal balance may appreciate the feedback and adjust their behaviour to reflect it, but for others, sharing and over sharing may be a way to deal with the stress in their lives at the moment, and being asked to keep some of this to themselves may add to their burden and cause them personal difficulties.

Establishing a sharing environment

One possible mechanism to help team members deal with the personal and professional challenges of sudden work from ...

As personnel move increasingly from co-located office working to working from home there will be a gradual adaption to the new way of work. This adaptation will be different for everyone and every business, some will quickly settle into the new way of working while others will struggle with any number of different facets. Much of the pace and direction of this adaptation will be dependent on a combination of the organisation and individual circumstances and demands.

Organizational adaptation

Organisations are working to understand how best to maintain their businesses and workflows now that their personnel are scattered across towns and cities. They are making multiple business critical decisions on a daily basis, in some cases simply to keep their business alive, working in a more fluid and complex environment than many will have ever seen or even conceived.

Moving staff to work from home

One of the many early decisions businesses made will have been to move staff offsite to work from home. This will have involved migrating technology and ensuring staff can access corporate networks but may not have considered changes to workflows or embracing flexible working processes for staff. Once staff are reporting in that they are happily set up with computers and phones at home, and have completed an ergonomic and environment checklist for their home workspace, many businesses will move on to other pressing matters, leaving their staff at home but stressed and confused as they navigate their new workflows.

However, the technology is only the enabler in a virtual team environment. Without adequate technology everything else is very difficult, but technology needs to be supplemented by changes to practices and processes, particularly when organisations are inn this for the relatively long haul. Having a staff member work from home for a day or a week alongside a traditional co-located office staff, as has been the case, previously, typically means that the work from home staff align their hours and workflows with the home office, nice and easy, little to no change required. In this current situation, where many if not most staff of many businesses are working from home, and doing so for an extended period of weeks and possibly months, there is a real need for companies to review their expectations and processes.

Organizational factors for adapting to work from home

As I discussed in the last article in this series, there are a number of factors to consider here.

* Many companies have a formally structured “9 to 5” working day, 5 day a week simply to provide structure to their operations. In many instances employees only perform their duties within this framework because that is the cultural norm and aside from tradition, there are often few reasons that structure needs to apply when personnel are working from home.* Many managers and business leaders are comfortable with these traditional structures as this is what they have always known. Performance measurement and client billing is also often structured around this attendance model, building a self fulfilling and for some virtuous circle.* Employees have built their life styles around this 9 to 5 model. This applies as much on the non working hours as well as the working hours, it applies to family time and how parents will divide caring for children.* Organizational reward structures, overtime and different pay rates for hours worked associated with numbers of hours and hours worked at traditionally non social times are also designed around these conventional business hours.

But, none of that applies now.

With increasing numbers of people working from home, the work from home landscape is changing from the situation prior to COVID-19. Prior to the virus precautions it was not uncommon to have one family member working alone from home in a day job that either gave them flexibility over location or where their job was home based. As more businesses have moved from centralised office locations to having large numbers of staff working off site and typically from home, this situation has changed dramatically.

It is possibly now, during the COVID-19 measures, more common to have multiple family members all working from home together, looking after children and supporting extended family either within the one home or remotely, than it has ever been. Having children and relatives in need of support will place different pressures on family members, pressures that may result in the need to decide between family and work commitments. These extraordinary circumstances should therefore call for some significant adjustments in organisational and individual expectations of one another.

Do we need a 9 to 5 life when working from home

The traditional 9 to 5 style of working arrangement has been in place since the early era of industrialization. Factories relied on regular working hours to ensure machines were serviced and those servicing the machines, so the concept goes, needed constant supervision. All of this led to the development of a regimented working day and working week. Over the same period organisations began monitoring the attendance of personnel, particularly those undertaking manual work, to use attendance to calculate reward. This same attendance metric has also been long applied to knowledge work, where many companies calculate and sell work by the hour, essentially forming a self fulfilling ‘virtuous’ circle of expectations.

However, for many, particularly knowledge workers currently breaking the bonds of organisational oversight and working from home, the question really needs to be asked about how flexible or otherwise should peoples working from home lives be. For instance, personnel caring for school age children who are also now at home are likely to need a high degree of flexibility in their work expectations to ensure the children are accessing their education needs, eating and have a sensible amount of exercise, most of which would generally occur at school under the guidance of teachers. These parents should not have to decide between attending a meeting at 8am or providing their children with breakfast.

Similarly, two or more family members working from the home may need to share a home computer (if one or more of them is not provided a company computer) or may have limited internet capacity, constraining their ability to have concurrent video meetings, or even have limited physical space to work. Our home lives and environments were generally not designed to accommodate an entire family unit all working from home for more than perhaps a day or two.

Options for flexibility

In the initial flurry of moving from a working in an office to a work from home situation it is entirely understandable that companies will have retained their meeting pattern and simply gone virtual. However, as time passes it is likely to become increasingly important to review some of the timing to provide flexibility for working from home staff such that they can balance their family and work.

Examples could be to constrain large team meetings to between, say, 9:30 or 10 am and 12 then from 1:30 or 2pm to 4pm, this would allow employees the flexibility to take care of children without feeling pressured to join meetings. Smaller meetings, when needed, could then fit in some of these gaps at the start and end of ...

Working from home can, for some, be an incredibly empowering and liberating experience, they are able to work the hours that suit them and align with the other pressures in their lives while also being productive. For others, the work from home experience can be a socially isolating and stressful experience as they battle the sense of separation from their colleagues and struggle to maintain focus in an unfamiliar situation.

Which ever side of the work from home experience individuals find themselves, the challenge of avoiding marginalisation can be real and show up in many different ways.

What is marginalisation

Marginalisation, both in the broad virtual teams and the specific work from home context of these articles, refers to the intended or unintended disconnection of one or more team members from their normal decision making involvement and participation in the collective group. It can occur through unintended activities such as when team members are physically or virtually distant from their colleagues and are omitted from discussions, it can occur when a team member, though personal choice or workload to disconnect from their colleagues for a period of time, it can occur when a group, by mistake, excludes a team member from discussions and decisions and, in the worst of situations, it can occur where a group intentionally chooses to exclude a team member from discussions.

Whatever the cause, marginalisation can become a stressful and socially isolating experience for the individual or individuals involved and can quickly lead to losses of team effectiveness. Yet, it can happen slowly and really without notice, a team member misses a meeting because they are busy, at the meeting decisions are made and subsequent meetings calendared without the team member being involved, more meetings and discussions happen, time passes and suddenly the individual has been disconnected from the rest of the group for weeks and potentially has missed critical discussions.

Causes and management of marginalisation

Marginalisation in more conventional virtual team situations can occur where one individual or group calls in to a meeting, the meeting concludes, those who have called in leave the call and those who are physically together continue to discuss things, perhaps reaching additional decisions without the participation of the personnel who have left the call. These creeping marginalisations can rapidly lead to personnel feeling isolated and disconnected from their colleagues and organisation.

In the new work from home environment many businesses are adopting the opportunities for marginalisation are similar, but in some instances different.

Self marginalisation

It is relatively easy for an individual to marginalize themselves through not participating in group meetings when they are held on line, no end of reasons can be presented for being unable to attend, none of which can be tested since everyone is working remote from their colleagues, and over time their absence becomes normal, with them potentially dropping off other meeting invitations.

As a manager or colleague in this situation the first thing is to realize that someone is missing. This can be challenging in larger teams, but once identified it is important to reach out to the individual and endeavour to bring them back into the group. For some, the causes may be discomfort with the technology or social awkwardness which others may have deeper reasons to cease participating. As such it can be hard to identify the root cause of this behavior, but through ongoing dialogue, possibly offline of the main meetings,

Conflict in any social environment is inevitable. Whether it occurs within a family, between friends, over sporting events or in the workplace, disagreements and the resulting tension are simply part of who we are and how we function socially. In a conventional social or workplace setting, where personnel are co-located and able to discuss their differences, or are even forced to do so by proximity, conflicts will generally be resolved quickly and with the minimum of ongoing tension.

However, once individuals are separated, particularly in situations such as we are currently navigating, with personnel sequestered in their homes, with minimal social contact outside of their immediate family, with the background tensions of health concerns and long term employment viability, the smallest tension, misstep or disagreement can quickly escalate into major a falling out.

Conflict in work from home situations

As organisations are increasingly moving from co-located to work from home situations in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, staff are suddenly finding themselves in unusual and challenging situations. They are physically isolated from their social groups, closed away in whatever room in their home they have been able to convert into a home office, potentially finding themselves working alongside partners, with children home from school and supporting relatives. All of these additional tensions will build up in their minds, leading to internal stress that will make them highly susceptible to mental triggers that otherwise would have not registered.

“In virtual team environments, perception really is reality”

A glib comment on a phone call, a poorly expressed email or even the absence of a message can all suddenly take on a much greater perceived meaning in the mind, and in a situation where perception is frequently reality, these little events result in sudden conflict between co-workers. Sadly the triggers for these things are the part that is hardest to control. As individuals it is not within our power to control the things that can trigger our reactions, it is, though, completely in our power to control two other things.

* We can control how we react to things that may trigger conflict* We can also control how we behave relative to others where our actions may initiate conflict with them.

Reacting to triggers

In the second part of this series of pieces I discussed the need to assume no wrong on the part of your colleagues when they are communicating with you. To enter into every discussion, whatever the topic and whatever the medium, with the belief that they intend what they are saying and how they are expressing it in an innocent and non confrontational manner.

This “assume no wrong” stance is hard to maintain when you are under stress from many different directions, but it is essential to maintain a relatively conflict free working environment. If, on a call of any kind, someone says something that you disagree with or that feels like it is directed at something you have done, try not to react in a negative manner, ask for clarification rather than attacking, or pause before responding. Even a short pause can deescalate the need to react in your mind and asking for clarification will generally result in a much clearer picture of the intent from the other party.

If the potential conflict comes from written correspondence, you have much more latitude over how and when you respond. Your gut reaction may be react immediately with a response that will escalate whatever you believed was being said and turn an innocent comment into a full co...

Trust between members of a virtual team emerged as one of the strongest themes in my research and a constant challenge for virtual teams of all sizes. It is of particular concern in newly formed teams and situations where people are finding themselves in unusual situations, such as suddenly working from home after a career of co-location as is happening increasingly as organisations navigate the COVID 19 situation.

Trust was seen in virtual teams, as in the rest of life, as slow to build, easy to maintain with the appropriate behaviors on all sides yet so easy to break through even the simplest and seemingly innocent actions. It is a difficult and challenging matter in a more traditional virtual team and in this new world of work from home, the risks to trust between personnel is probably even greater.

Even a seemingly innocent email that is very blunt and out of context can begin to erode a trusting relationship, making the recipient begin to feel defensive and to withdraw their level of commitment, so, as an opening comment, be careful how you communicate!

Forms of trust

Trust is generally formed in a working situation through one of three mechanisms:

* Transactional trust – This is the most common in most workplaces. The trust is developed over time based on performance of both parties. The person delivering the work shows that they can be trusted to deliver the work by delivering on time, to the anticipated quality and with no surprises, the person receiving the work establishes their side of the trust relationship by working in a predictable manner, not surprising the person doing the work and allowing them to work without excess supervision.* Relational trust – This is a less common way of forming trust though still applicable in the environment where companies are suddenly fragmenting their workforce into a work from home regime. In relational trust the trust is established through the enjoyment of working with colleagues. In this situation personnel develop a trusting bond with people they enjoy working with and through this are more inclined to trust the work performed, the person performing the work and the person for whom the work is being performed.* Group trust – In group trust, team members are inclined to trust one another because of common backgrounds, experiences or relationships. It is particularly common in cultures where different social groups feel a strong sense of internal cohesion. This form of trust may actually be quite important in organisations suddenly moving from co-located to work from home as the common experiences being faced, such as the sense of being in this situation together, may lead to a greater feeling of social cohesion.

Each of these three forms of trust will impact an organisations workforce when they find themselves working from home differently, transactional work must still be maintained and delivered on time without the emergence of unnecessary levels of micromanagement, relationships must be maintained or if possible strengthened, this can be challenging when physically separated but, with the social media and communications tools now available (see my first post in this series), it is relatively easy to at least stay in touch, and a sense of group cohesion emerging from everyone being in this situation together and all trying to make the most of what they have may strengthen that mechanism.

Maintaining trust when working from home

So how does all this discussion of trust relate to a work from home scenario. Essentially, trust is the glue that will hold a team together as well as the lubricant to getting work done productively.