Experimenting during the shift to virtual team work: Learnings from how teams adapted their activities during the COVID-19 pandemic

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100343Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The shift to virtual work created an unprecedented opportunity to study teams.

  • During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted 51 interviews.

  • Informants were knowledge workers within the same professional service firm.

  • Learning from the shift to virtual work illuminated essential team work activities

  • Informants reflected on and adapted their technology use for team work activities

Abstract

Past research has focused on understanding the characteristics of work that are fully virtual or fully collocated. The present study seeks to expand our understanding of team work by studying knowledge workers' experiences as they were suddenly forced to transition to a fully virtual environment. During the height of the US lockdown from April to June 2020, we interviewed 51 knowledge workers employed on teams at the same professional services firm. Drawing from in situ reflections about teams' lived experiences, this paper explores how the shift to virtual work brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the fundamental activities that team work requires, facilitated and undermined the performance of team activities, and prompted employees to adapt and reflect on their use of digital technology to perform these activities. Using the shift to virtual work as a unique learning opportunity, our findings demonstrate that team work entails several core activities (task, process, and relationship interactions) that require additional adjustments to successfully enact in the virtual (vs. collocated) environment.

Keywords

Team work
Activities
Virtual work
Digital technologies

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