1.1 Background
In light of the COVID-19 crisis, the use of digital tools and online communication has become increasingly important. While people have been gradually shifting to working virtually in the past decades, the pandemic has forced businesses and workers to work full-time remotely at an unprecedented speed. With the outbreak of COVID-19, virtual working has opened a new range of opportunities in terms of the way’s businesses work and structure themselves with flexible working environments and improved work quality. In this context, Nydegger and Nydegger (2010) argue that these flexible workplace models allow for knowledge-sharing across the globe, foster cross-divisional collaboration, and provide higher cost saving opportunities. Similarly, the pandemic has resulted in a rapid transformation of new working environments where new technologies have fostered and shaped the world of virtual communication amongst teams (KPMG, 2020). However, with this change, businesses need to understand and support their employees in order to efficiently adapt to the new digitized working environment (Deloitte, 2020).
Despite the significant advantages virtual teams currently have for businesses, there are some challenging factors. Here, Nydegger and Nydegger (2010) state that the lack of physical interaction and non-verbal cues cause major problems. Further, research shows that a lack of trust, loneliness, ineffective communication, and cultural issues are prominent challenges in virtual environments as social interaction becomes more problematic (Wang et al., 2021). The absence of physical interaction makes virtual teams form new organizational structures where digital communication is used as the medium to connect with people. One of the many impacts of remote working is the increased utilization of virtual technologies in meeting the now new and different work context. As businesses are forced from their established operational working structure, they are exposed to a completely new working environment with technology as their teammate (Frost & Duan, 2020). The new setup of virtual teams involves a changing landscape with new workplace adaptation and different premises of interactions between team members. Consequently, the interactions in virtual teams and the challenges and benefits this entails are worth further investigation.
1.2 Purpose
The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to a broader understanding of the virtual experiences of employees during the pandemic and shed light on how they handle working full time remotely. First, it should be noted that the rapid transformation of the workplace has led to a majority of employees working remotely. However, with the high levels of uncertainty and digitized working environments, businesses and workers face great difficulties in adjusting to their new workplaces. Moreover, it remains challenging to successfully facilitate remote working in order to build effective virtual teams. For these reasons, it is interesting to examine and investigate the key challenges and benefits virtual teams face as well as analyze how they experience transitioning to a new virtual landscape.
Thus, in this thesis I will aim to shed light on the following research question:
How has the transition to a virtual workforce been and how do employees handle working full-time in virtual teams?
This research question lays the foundation of the thesis and forms the basis for a qualitative study of virtual teams in an established case company. By conducting semi-structured interviews and observations, a well-grounded database will be analyzed and discussed in relation to existing literature in an attempt to shed light on the aforementioned research question.
1.3 Motivation
The motivation for writing a thesis related to employees’ experience of transitioning to a virtual workplace is strongly connected to the changing environment of increased globalization, better technological solutions, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Further, the use of technological tools for communication has developed significantly during the past decades, which has led to new challenges for businesses and workers. These hardships have not yet been experienced at this magnitude before, and many parties do not know how to handle them. Meanwhile, as technological development leads to new ways of interacting, it also remains important to have updated research based on the specific time and situation.
Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an immense spike in uncertainty, particularly in regard to the new and changing workplace environment for the majority of
businesses. This master’s thesis serves as a tool to uncover and analyze how employees have experienced this transition and how they handle working full time remotely. Although research has been conducted with these motives before, the working environment has undergone unprecedented change as a result of COVID-19 and hence, needs to be studied and evaluated once again.
1.4 Structure
This paper is divided into different chapters that aim to answer the aforementioned research question. The second chapter provides an overview of relevant theory from existing literature, while the third chapter explores the study and its methodology in a more in-depth manner. Subsequently, the fourth chapter presents the findings from the study before these are elaborated and discussed in chapter five. Last, chapter six discusses the limitations to the study and suggests areas for further research, followed by the conclusion.