While virtual working has been around for nearly three decades, there is no doubt that it has become a widespread everyday practice for many workers around the globe following the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Nearly four years later, virtual working continues to be an everyday practice for many of us. In fact, the most popular term used nowadays is ‘hybrid working’ which refers to working partially from the office and partially from home, coworking spaces and cafés.
Research currently being conducted in this area offers some fresh practitioner takeaways:
Leaders should ensure that instead of replicating things we know from the physical world, we are transforming ourselves digitally. This may involve the development of completely new practices at both the team and the individual level.
New virtual working environments are structurally different
While traditionally the literature has spoken about ‘virtual teams’ with a standard lifecycle (welcome phase, working phase, closure), we now see that virtual working is much more fluid and dynamic (i.e., members coming and going half-way through the virtual team lifecycle). In dynamic virtual teams, there may therefore be a need to onboard someone new when the rest of the team is already in the working phase of the project. In a recent study, colleagues and I argue that onboarding has now become an ongoing practice throughout the lifecycle of a virtual project, instead of a one-off activity that takes place at the beginning.
Team leaders should use the affordances of synchronous and asynchronous technologies to enable onboarding as an ongoing practice. This may include using synchronous technologies (e.g., Zoom) for introductions and socialisation purposes, and asynchronous technologies (e.g., cloud technologies) for making necessary information available to new joiners irrespective of when they join their new team.
New virtual working environments provide new leadership opportunities
The literature tells us that in virtual teams, leadership is usually more shared and emergent. This means that in addition to the formal team leader, we see members emerge as leaders and often share leadership responsibilities with others. Although incoming members in dynamic virtual teams may be seen as a ‘disruption’, creating new onboarding needs, an ongoing study of ours seems to indicate that incoming members can also be beneficial to the receiving team, oftentimes bringing new know-how and offering to undertake leadership roles.
Formal leaders should therefore be open to new leadership configurations in their teams. Instead of seeing incoming members as a threat, they should encourage them to undertake a leadership role, often sharing leadership responsibilities with others.
New virtual working environments require new types of practices
During the pandemic, we saw workers essentially ‘living in their office’ since our homes were transformed into offices. We learnt how to work with digital technologies overnight and we also learnt how to juggle work and domestic/family commitments simultaneously. This led to burnout and technology fatigue; although the sudden transition into virtual working worked, this was often at the expense of our own wellbeing. Instead of aiming for ‘digital transformation’, what we essentially did was ‘replication’. For example, a two-hour meeting in a traditional office environment became a two-hour online meeting while working virtually during the lockdowns.
While colleagues and I have recognised recently that workers’ well-being and work-life balance should be looked after by leaders, new research of ours highlights how individuals can use the properties of digital technologies to manage their work-life boundaries the way they desire. Leaders should ensure that instead of replicating things we know from the physical world, we are transforming ourselves digitally. This may involve the development of completely new practices at both the team and the individual level.