SWOOP Chat with Jessica Lipnack, author of Virtual Teams

Jessica Lipnack is the author of Virtual Teams, a book written in 1997 but one that describes how most people are working during the COVID-19 crisis. Jessica and SWOOP Chief Scientist Dr Laurence Lock Lee discuss how to keep teams productive while working virtually and the new challenges facing leaders around the world.

Out of the office and into the virtual fire

By Jessica Lipnack

Now that the world as we have known it has been cancelled and Zoom has become the word of the day, hundreds of millions are working exclusively online, often with laptops literally on their laps.

If this had happened 20 years ago, before online social networks had overtaken our daily routines, we’d be in even more dire straits than we are. Today, it is hard to find someone without any experience communicating online, if only by participating in an email group that circulates silly gifs. Here are some relevant stats: According to a 2017 study by the Society for Human Resource Management, 60 per cent of companies then offered work-from-home options. Almost 60 per cent of the global population (7.8 billion) is online, numbering 4.5 billion people; in the U.S. that number is close to 90 per cent of the population. We’re no longer a nation, or a planet, of digital naïfs. The first generation that’s grown up online is now in the workforce.

But Tweeting or Instagramming or hitting the “wow” emoji doesn’t mean we know how to work productively online, especially when we’re also adapting to never leaving our houses. This is a first in human history: A majority of people around the world are only working online.

It turns out that working solely online is its own skill, one that countless people are abruptly being called upon to master in the face of extreme social isolation. In addition, many also have kids running around saying they’re bored (or fighting). Some have no designated workspace at home. Others are struggling with unstable technology - WiFi that doesn’t reach the bedroom where they’re working, for example, or, as with one corporate board chair, working from his dirt-floor basement where the ceiling is so low he can’t stand up. And those are just the logistical problems.

Organisations without work-from-home policies are busy drafting them; those that already have remote employees are rapidly expanding processes, tools and IT infrastructures to support exponentially more people. Meanwhile, school teachers and college faculty have been expected to adapt to online classrooms within mere moments, many with no previous experience regarding how to adapt to digital learning or even how to use the technology. One major university is madly working out its schedule so as not to have too many of its 20,000 students log in at once for their online classes. Another decided to lower the panic level and award Pass/Fail to all students. (Hint: If ever, everyone should get a pass, this is that moment.)

What to do?

How can people become fluent in working, and learning, virtually instantly? The very good news is that it’s not that hard, and it’s largely intuitive.

How do I know?

23 years ago, Jeff Stamps and I published Virtual Teams, among the handful of very first books on this topic. Our research focused around principles that the best organisations use for work-at-a-distance. Several years later, we joined two business school professors in a detailed study of what makes distributed teams successful. “Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?” was published in Harvard Business Review in 2003. That study answered its title’s question in the affirmative: These teams, which were almost exclusively virtual, felt that they were more productive than they would have been face-to-face.

Those pieces of work were precursors to what others have confirmed in the intervening years—during which time the advance guard of remote workers has occupied companies around the world.

In numerous research studies conducted since, the overall findings are consistent. While technology to support work-at-a-distance has improved dramatically in the past two decades, the primary design principle remains the same. Virtual teams thrive by adhering to this principle: It’s 90 per cent people and 10 per cent technology.

So if you’re among the hundreds of millions now going to work in your slippers, put your creative energy into focusing on the group’s sociology, not its technology. Software platforms, regardless of their sophistication, basically serve the same overarching requirement, enabling people to work together better online.

Specific product proponents will argue feature distinctions tirelessly but, honestly, they all work well enough - and none is perfect. Thus, this warning: Be prepared to be a little frustrated if you’re called upon to use something new. No matter how elegant the interface, almost everyone will struggle a little bit when faced with new technology, even the pros, whether because of a URL typo for the site you’re trying to log into or forgotten passwords or applications that freeze. Inhale a good dose of patience and trust that despite the frustrations, mainly these technologies work, however imperfectly. Remember some meeting rooms are so cold that you don’t want to go into them and somehow they never get fixed. Yet we meet.

What’s important is this. Though it doesn’t matter significantly which technology you use, it is advisable to resist introducing a lot of new technology right now. Instead, accept this as the standard: If you can hear and/or see one another during meetings, if you have a common repository for storing, sharing, and working on documents, and if you behave like adults (admittedly a challenge for some), you’re in good shape.

Once the new online group is convened, its first job is to clarify what it’s doing. Even if your team started meeting last month, it’s not too late to introduce the basics. Convene a conversation around the ultimate purpose of what you’re doing. It both produces a common picture of the work and exposes differing points of view that require resolution.

And how do you encourage people to speak up during such a conversation? That overused word facilitation is appropriate here. Animating participation while managing air time (no one dominates; everyone is heard) is the facilitator’s job, and the participants’ responsibility. Online facilitation requires even more vigilance than required for face-to-face meetings, which is already sometimes too much. You really have to pay attention to every word, the tempo of the meeting, where comments can be woven together, and whether everyone is participating. Which points to participant responsibility: No furtively playing solitaire while the meeting is going on. (And, stop looking at yourself!)  Everyone has to get used to asynchronous call-and-response. A comment made at 9am may not receive a reply for another day or two. That’s okay. If it’s not, stay calm and - shriek - call the person. On the phone. In this distracted, ADHD, partial-attention world, mindfulness, the term du jour, needs to be our mantra.

Use your imagination to design ways for people to get to know one another better. Schedule a mix of whole-group and person-to-person interactions. Have an all-group meeting and follow it up with debriefs in pairs. Then rotate the pairs and soon the whole group is better acquainted. Friendships form. Trust develops. Everything goes faster and work becomes more pleasurable for everyone. (If your online meeting software has breakout rooms, use them; if not, have the pairs chat via test or, imagine, call one another!)

Everyone is a leader in a virtual group—otherwise, what are they doing there? Rotate leadership as the norm.

Let people, and this applies to students too, take on roles they feel most comfortable with and which involve them for the session’s duration. In addition to traditional meeting roles - facilitator, notetaker, timekeeper, tech support, subject matter expert, today we have a new one: ZJ. Like DJs who know just what vinyl to spin to keep the audience engaged, ZJs know how to electrify Zoom meetings, how to open with energy and fade out with grace. Meetings like this may sound fantastical but they are possible given what screen meetings offer.  

And the more diverse the team - gender, ethnicity, expertise, personality - the better its results. This seems obvious, that more differing perspectives and varied life experiences make for richer thinking.

Ultimately, the key to making virtual work work is almost ridiculously trite. Communicate, communicate, communicate - frequently, consistently, and via multiple media. We have so many options now - from texting, to in-app messaging, to online groups, to collaboration software, to, imagine, calling a colleague just to say hello. The more you communicate, the sooner you build trust. And trust is an indelible bond of working at a distance.

With luck, and more importantly with intention, what will emerge from this global crisis is a significant uptick in our ability to work collaboratively across boundaries of space and time. For all the virus takes from us, it also gives us something that we could not have intentionally made happen. What could be more important at this moment in time?