It should have been a straightforward event. The Israeli embassy in Berlin wanted to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day with a talk by Zvi Herschel, a Holocaust survivor. He’d tell the audience his experiences and keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. It was typical of the kind of work that embassies around the world do. But it was the age of the coronavirus. The ambassador had tested positive and recovered, and while Germany was beginning to open up, the embassy thought it prudent to hold the event virtually. They used Zoom.
It wasn’t long before the meeting was interrupted by anti-Semites waving pictures of Hitler and shouting slogans. The event stopped. The trolls were removed and the event continued “in an appropriate and respectful way.”
It’s a familiar story to anyone who has been using Zoom to hold their teams together as offices shut and staff switch to working from home. The New York Times has uncovered evidence of organized “zoombombing” groups, some run by teenagers hoping to disrupt distance learning with images of pornography and gore, others managed by trolls and neo-Nazis who target online conferences and meetings. One member of Alcoholics Anonymous told the Times that every one of the 30 meetings he had attended virtually over the previous three weeks had been interrupted by trolls.
It isn’t how the switch to virtual work was supposed to have taken place. The coronavirus lockdown should have been an opportunity to showcase the ease of building virtual teams and creating more flexible work practices. It should have shown businesses that it was possible to create workforces made up of people anywhere in the world and still keep them engaged and productive. While necessity has forced companies to cope with the challenges that the new way of working has produced, the move has also shown how difficult creating a virtual workplace can be.
Technology is the Easiest Challenge
The first challenge has been dealing with the limitations of virtual team tools. Zoom was designed for internal use by companies with disparate offices. Before the coronavirus, it had never hosted more than 10 million people at the same time, usually in small groups that bring together separated teams or board members. By March 2020, as the virus spread around the world, that number had jumped to more than 200 million as schools and universities brought together entire classes at the same time. That figure was large enough to expose the application’s security vulnerabilities. As trolls swapped links to target meetings, companies that thought they had found a solution to remote working had to adjust quickly.
Those adjustments have taken a number of forms. Some firms have just walked away. Elon Musk’s SpaceX sent a memo banning staff from using the application, which had “significant privacy and security concerns.” Other users have become smarter about sharing links, making meetings public, and controlling who can share screens. Zoom itself has revamped its security settings to make Zoombombing harder. The technical challenge presented by virtual working may be the easiest one to solve.
Matching the Message to the Channel When There’s no Watercooler
Much harder is dealing with the human aspects of building a team, and in particular, keeping members working together when they can only see each other as small boxes on their screens. Communications are limited when conversation is restricted to group meetings held online, and there’s no watercooler or shared lunch to exchange ideas or put across points casually.
“One of the biggest challenges all companies face is making sure their team members feel heard from afar,” says Leah Walters of Monday.com, a kind of team management operating system that helps businesses keep remote teams aligned. She suggests that managers hold fifteen-minute check-ins with the entire team each day. “We find that committing to this time together builds trust among the team.”
Harvard’s Extension School goes further. The organization suggests providing written guidelines that explain which kinds of messages should be sent through which mediums, and lays out how team members should interact.
That’s important. Office workspaces usually have multiple channels of communication. Your company might have held daily stand-ups or weekly meetings but it would also be possible to buttonhole another member of staff in the corridor when someone needs something or has a question. Good managers keep their office doors open. When a team is forced to become virtual, those informal communication channels break down. Organization shifts to a single, new tool that doesn’t suit everyone’s way of communicating or every kind of message. Just as some team members tend to dominate team meetings so some will also be more comfortable than others taking part in virtual conferences. And just as some problems can be solved by poking a head around an office door, so some issues can’t be addressed with a Zoom meeting.
Ensuring that other channels of communication remain open—whether they’re through email, a chat application, or even a phone call—will help to ensure that everyone has a way of making themselves heard. Even before the coronavirus forced everyone to work in spare bedrooms and at kitchen tables, almost half of successful managers checked in regularly on remote employees. As teams switch to virtual work, managers will need to adjust their own methods to make sure that communication remains fluid and can extend beyond even a secure Zoom chat.
They’ll also need to make clear what staff should be doing with the time they spend working at home. The biggest challenge that Monday.com’s customers have struggled with, says Leah Walters, is setting expectations. With everyone scattered and communications broken, it’s not always easy for team members to see the destination that everyone is working towards. Staff focus on what’s in front of them and lose track of where everyone else is on the same path. When you’re sitting at home, and everything’s closed, there’s a weaker sense that what happens outside the house has the same importance that it used to have. Development slows.
“It’s important to continue to establish KPIs for all teams, so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to what the goals are,” says Walters. Harvard recommends embedding the company mission in everything it does but that becomes even more important when home is comfortable and the world outside unwelcoming. As companies shift towards developing their virtual teams, one challenge will be maintaining everyone’s sense of a shared goal. Managers need to be reminding staff why they’re doing what they do and the value it brings beyond the good fortune of having a salary when so many are unemployed.
Time Shifts Out of the Office
Many of the issues that companies have encountered are predictable. Adjusting to new tools is never easy—and it’s harder to do it out of necessity (because the office is closed) rather than out of choice (because you want to improve productivity.) Finding new ways to communicate when team members aren’t in the same room, or even the same building, was always going to be a challenge too. However problematic both those issues might be, time will help to fix both of them. Team members will become used to using Zoom—or whichever tool they choose to replace it. They’ll figure out how to make the most of those group meetings and which channels are best to get the other answers they need.
But one result of virtual team-building has been more surprising. Since the lockdowns began, Monday.com has seen a 55 percent increase in website visitors, a 25 percent increase in new registrations and a 150 percent increase in new signups from the education sector, including students, faculty, and administrators. But it’s also seen a 60 percent increase in platform usage in the US between 5am and 9am compared to pre-COVID-19 work days.
That shift, says Leah Walters, indicates that people may be adopting flexible work hours as they work remotely. That does raise another important issue: team members aren’t just working in different places; they’re also working at different times. Some workers may be rising early and completing work before their kids get up. They can help with home-schooling through the morning before heading back to the home office in the evening. A few team members may be making the most of the opportunity to work as night owls then sleeping through the first part of the day. Coders, for example, might appreciate the new opportunity to spend undisturbed hours in the dark writing lines of code. If you can see team members still wearing pajamas in the afternoon Zoom meeting, you’ll know who’s doing what.
For some work, that time-shifting won’t matter. It may even be beneficial, allowing early risers to hand off to late workers just as the second shift fall out of bed. One benefit of switching to a virtual team could be the creation of a 24-hour office. But other tasks will need everyone to be working at the same time. Copywriters will have questions for the marketing team as they write. Managers may need to update everyone about a shift in direction or a change of emphasis.
Just as a new virtual team will have to figure out how best to communicate, so it will also have to cope with new office hours while still providing team members the workhour flexibility they want. A manager might find that they need to state that they want everyone online by eleven or set the afternoon as a group work event, backed by Slack and Zoom.
What quickly becomes clear as companies build their virtual teams is that in the current environment there are no hard-and-fast rules. The nine-to-five workday doesn’t have to apply when everyone is at home 24/7. Businesses need to figure out the best ways for their team members to communicate. They have to decide which tools work best for them, and get used to those tools. And they need to figure out the best times to work too, bearing in mind the demands of a home office filled with children and family—all while keeping an eye on productivity and coping with the changing demands of the new economy.
None of this is easy, and at the moment, it’s impossible to say how long it’s going to last. Monday.com notes that it conducted a survey which found that 45 percent of workers believe that working from home is the ideal work setting. They thought it would help them stay focused and inspired, and suggests a future where remote work continues to grow in popularity.
“As we hope for a speedy end to this crisis as soon as possible, it’ll be really interesting to see what happens next,” says Leah Walters. “We’ve always viewed remote work as a huge part of the future of work.”
One of the consequences of the adjustments involved in building a virtual team could well be the exact opposite. Having figured out the tools, dealt with the trolls, learned how to communicate when you can’t see your teammates, set targets and key performance indicators, and arranged the hours that make a virtual team effective, we may well find that once the office reopens, we never want to work from home again.
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