The Virtual Team Experience

The employee’s experiences of working virtually were explored and analyzed in their entirety to gain insights and in-depth information. Primarily, there was less informal communication and socialization with colleagues, but positive experiences are also highlighted—namely increased flexibility and time to focus on individual tasks. First, it should be noted that the employees from the case company are solely part of one virtual team with different roles and responsibilities. Some of the teams have members in different locations, including the UK and Lithuania, where they worked remotely before, but are now restricted to meeting occasionally at the headquarters in Norway, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the pandemic has resulted in a rapid transformation of the workplace in which the digital and advanced technology already available within the case company made the transformation easy and adaptable for team members. An employee described it as

follows:

(…) I didn’t have to pretty much do anything, I just picked up my screen at work and had everything that I needed at home, so I think the fact that we were pretty digitalized before kind of didn’t make the transition that big.

Although the transition to the new working environment was perceived well amongst the team members, the transition went through different cycles in which the pandemic uprooted most of their routines and interfered with their motivation over time. The new era of work led to struggles with managing new constraints and hurdles amongst the team members:

(…) I feel like at the very beginning I was still kind of maintaining that really good morning routine. I would still kind of wake up and still go for a walk even though I am not going anywhere I am still going for a walk. But then later on its kind of became a little, just waking up an hour before you can actually open up your laptop.

The sense of excitement was high in the beginning of the virtual work phase, but employees shared the sense of tiredness and decreased motivation with time in correspondence with stricter lockdowns enforced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the uncertainty of not knowing when normalcy would return led to shattered expectations of regaining routine, decreasing the team member’s motivation to a higher degree:

I think that most people had believed that we were going to see like, something improving, but then, when we had the lockdowns again after Christmas, I feel like a lot of people including myself got really, feeling the sense of Corona fatigue, like, we really want this to move on.

Moreover, the new remote working arrangement raised a vast array of challenges for team members, and they found the physical distance harder when being geographically dispersed.

An employee that operates alone overseas described the feeling of being left out and the relationship with the rest of the team as distant:

I can highlight again that when you are working remote, and you have people sitting in different countries, (…) and the headquarters is where most of the people are, it’s very easy to feel left out in that sense because you are not being taken into account.

This employee was not alone in relating the physical distance to other team members with the virtual teamwork. Several noticed a difference from working physically at the office as compared to working virtually from home: “I think just for our one-on-one meetings that we do quarterly, I think that’s even kind of difficult because you are talking through a screen.

It’s much, its far less personal.” Thus, the transition to working virtually has been experienced as less personal when communicating virtually rather than having face-to-face interactions. The consequence of a large physical distance is related to the opportunity to get responses straight away, which according to an employee, also impacts the efficiency level:

(…) I wasn’t able to kind of turn to a colleague and ask a question and get a response right away, so my efficiency was definitely impacted, because I was waiting for responses from people to be able to finish the tasks that I was working on for example.

The larger physical distance also resulted in some virtual team meetings drifting between topics particularly in the beginning of the meetings. For some, this meant that the degree of social interaction with team members in virtual meetings acts to compensate some of the office talk: “(…) sometimes the morning meeting can run like 45 minutes, it’s just because we chat about whatever, like non work related. But I do think it’s very very very important cause people don’t have that social (…).” For others, the meetings tended to have less small talk and were instead more structured and time bound. An example of this is cited by an employee: “I think we are quite structured in our meetings, like we’re always quite efficient and concerned about the time we spend on meetings. Like we always have an agenda (…).”

This is also supported by the observation data that meetings that start with an agenda, which is followed throughout the meeting, rarely exceed the time planned. Here, the degree of non-work-related communication between team members was also limited and lasted for only a couple of minutes before they continued with the agenda.

The lack of physical presence also appears to be positive in terms of how virtual teamwork is experienced among the employees. Some employees drew attention to greater flexibility along with less distractions and interruptions by colleagues. The majority of employees stated that there was more time to focus on tasks due to the lack of informal communication:

“(…) like when you sit down you actually do stuff because there is nothing else to do. Like there is no like coffee machine or walking around with colleagues (…).” Furthermore, some employees enjoyed the calmness in the mornings, in which they can start work straight away without needing to spend time on commuting:

(…) not needing to spend like 30 minutes to commute (…), so obviously you are done when you are done, and you start kind of right away when you are ready in the morning. I also kind of like the calmness of it.