September 07, 2021 - Technological Change, Remote Work, Telework, Work From Home, Work From Anywhere, Work From Everywhere—These concepts all have an impact on team social interactions for individuals and organizations. 

Hi everyone, welcome to Leadership Daily. My name is Kyle and here, I’m excited to kick off the first episode where we help coaches consultants, educators, practitioners, and students to hone their leadership craft, especially in ed, tech, and entrepreneurship. So, super excited today. I wanted to talk a little bit about social interactions and technology, especially virtual teams.

One of my papers just submitted is about virtuality, team virtuality, and how to both be a team member as well as lead that team. So my specific kind of lens was culture communication and relationships within virtual teams. Which is huge in the work from anywhere, work from home, work from everywhere culture that we have entered over the last 18 months or I would say like overnight, we practically entered it, right?

So, one of the things that I’m starting to look at is what are some of those dark sides? What are some of those issues where we really need to recognize the gap and work on it and build a bridge. And social cohesion is one of those things with virtual teams that can be problematic and as well as with collaboration, because there’s a gap, right?

I said it before, there’s something that isn’t effectively communicated over a virtual construct and a lot of this depends on the tool. There’s some ways to build the bridge to overcome that gap, right? And I was just listening to a Harvard Business Review article and I was listening to it on audible

That’s one of my cool tech tips. You can go and learn so much capitalizing on time, that’s otherwise spent in mundaneity. So driving to work, running-I would say running is not mundane it has so much more, so many more benefits to it. But the article I was listening to is “Are your DNI efforts helping employees feel like they belong?” and they really differentiate between the including an individual versus including and having a diverse representation of groups.

You know, this is important, there’s multiple identities that people can hold. It’s not just that, you know, I’m a white person. Oh my gosh. Like, if you just included me with every single person ever and said, we were the exact same. I would be like, “well, that’s not fair.”

Same as, you know, having a "diversity and inclusion" class, and there’s one or two people of a certain background in there, and you call on them and be like, hey, so tell us what it is for all people of that background, right? But no, they’re an individual, maybe they have entirely different set of experiences.

That preconceived idea right there, prejudging them pre disposing, your beliefs that they fit into some bucket you already hold. That’s, you know, super problematic. And you know, what’s that look like in a virtual team? Well, also, the opposite happens. Like, we forget that people are different, that they aren’t like us.

And this can happen in a lot of different ways. Like one time zones are a huge issue. We forget about, we forget about time, super easy. Like we start sending messages and like, oh, people aren’t responding. In fact, time zones are more problematic than you would cognitively be predisposed to recognizing.

Because and I’ve experienced this working with different global virtual teams. Because even being cognizant of the time difference, we forget about the routines and how those time differences interact. Like there are peak sort of time orbits, right, where people are available and you can see this in marketing training too.

It’s like oh make sure to post that this time of the day because your market segment your market segment has their phones out at this time like lunch time right after work or right before bed, first thing in the morning can be for certain group for certain things, right?

These are, these are sort of what are the Lagrangian points. Those are optimal orbit points. I think around the Earth. Don’t quote me on that. I’m not an astronomer, astrophysicist, or anything like that, but these peak orbits, I’m going to use the term where people naturally gravitate to certain activities.

And, you know, with time zones, like they don’t match up, you may not have orbits that are in harmony, you know. So I worked with a group that in Munich and, you know, here’s the the crazy thing like I’m going to bed at night so they’re typically, nine hours ahead.

I’m going to bed at night and they’re getting ready for the day, okay? So I can either stay up late and capitalize on that first part of the day. That’s productive me, okay, but I need my sleep too, or here’s the thing first thing when I wake up. So I’m waking up about five am so was seven, nine two pm.

So they’re finishing up at work. They may have a little bit of free time and the the natural nine to five because that’s still a pretty consistent schedule for the majority of knowledge workers, professional workers students, government workers, so that that’s another little orbit. You can capitalize on that into a slump where they’re cognitively drained and they neither release.

And then, of course, the the after work right before dinner, people catching up on some things. So, here’s the deal though, that, that’s like what 10 am for me? That’s like peak work. Time at my job doesn’t work so well. So that’s when a lot of their conversations start happening.

Actually, I am at work, super focused, tons of people working on tons of things, meetings, presentations training and not really able to engage and it’s not until I hit my orbit, right? That end of day slump where I can check out if you things and it’s late at night for them.

So I may be able to get a couple messages in or that after work, guess what? So, I’m getting off work at 1600 you add nine, that’s what when I am. So their sleep unless either out late right? So maybe on a Friday night, I might be able to hold them but welcome to the pandemic world because people don’t go out late.

I don’t think bars exist anymore. I don’t know that takes us to the next thing so that was the issues with time zones and those natural, orbitals that happen around certain times a day based on common schedules. Now here’s the thing, not everybody fits in those schedules. The individual may have a different schedule, ask what works for them.

If you’re looking to set something up, that’s another tech. Tip tool, use a scheduling tool that allows bookings and provide a variety of booking options. So, the next thing, the geographic instance is this kind of queued from that statement I made about lockdown. Hey, guess what? Every country may be in a different place, right now, that’s one of the new realities with the pandemic.

World that like they may have an entirely different set of rules happening that are drastically different than what we would expect. Okay? That happens, we can’t assume that they’re going out to work anywhere. Can assume they’re staying home. Like a lot of people stayed home for long periods of time.

Lock down over the pandemic. Yeah, I didn’t have that. Experience at all, central, worker national security, blah, blah, blah, right? So I had to go to work every day at the, the place I work and do the things I do for national security and guess what? The roads were super clear.

Folks, that’s my perception zero traffic. That’s what I saw. Not a lot of people in the office because we still one of the tasks I had to do was help get 3,000 people out on telework over a two week period, we we hit the 2000 mark rapidly, and then over the next couple months, we actually increased that number it over seven thousand telework, folks.

They all telework that different times not not 24/7 or five days a week or whatever. But yeah, each country little different place. Each person’s experience a little different so that diversity, inclusions really important. Here’s the general condition that a lot of people can relate to. But how do you make sure to repertoire the individual recognize?

The individual more correctly? Represent the broad category, recognizing include the individual. So that’s huge. Now what’s another layer on this, okay? With a virtual team, you don’t necessarily have the ability to recognize the diversity of group diversity. So you don’t know whether you’re hitting it or not. Like unless you have visual elements, which zoom video chat, others, those help with that.

Having you know, uploaded images people smiling. I love those avatars, you they’re smiling at me every time I see them just like oh that’s nice. I have horrible pictures. I mean, but like other people’s pictures, it’s weird that cognitive effect that of smiling picture has when somebody’s talking, even if they’re not smiling, that’s another little tweak psychological thing there to recognize with virtual teams, the the visual element.

Super important, being able to see people being able to see body language gestures motion. That’s helpful for communication and relationships, right? So, the the flip side of that, those, we only have these limited time windows where we are on together. Like meetings are the lifeblood of virtual teams, but we don’t necessarily see the other habits or routines or things that maybe associated with cultures, which both good and bad.

It limits our connection to others are relationships because once we’re able to understand we’re an individual is coming from, we can also build to those strengths in our relationships like, oh wow, that’s super fasting. I would love to learn more about XYZ about your specific, identity and culture. That’s, that’s important.

People can belong to multiple cultures and hold multiply identities depending on the space. They occupy a certain time. Okay. So, that’s another one of those big things with virtual teams, like there’s this, certain disconnect, and how do you bridge that gap? Okay. Now language language is another one especially if you’re working Western European or other supernational groups where English is a primary language for interaction and you see this even within business, interacting with eastern countries like okay China, they talk in English a lot or you’ll see another technology based sort of gap that might need to be bridged.

Is with translation software, there is research out there showing that you know, artificial intelligence machine learning software that trained off large data sets. That’s publicly available AKV internet like the GPT3 protocol like they are gender biased. So for example, you know, some of those those language processing tool sets will translate a gender neutral language.

So I mean a language that literally does not have a she or him, his or her, they just have these, the pronomial identifier like for the pronoun of yet, basically, which is he/she at. And yet, when they translate to English, you’ll see that they’ll translate like the doctor. He went to work or the nurse.

She went to the hospital. Right? Right there. A nurse is a, she a doctor’s a heat, very gendered. And it could be the exact opposite, but that’s what the natural language processing induced. That’s one of the problematic issues of artificial intelligence and machine learning that you see, okay? They create gender bias in language and those are becoming more common for global virtual teams.

So, if you’re on a global virtual team that’s problematic language itself is still problematic. Just with any virtual team because communication, we use different words to mean the same thing all the time. If you’re somebody who’s in tech and you have a family member, who likes to call you to troubleshoot issues all the time you’ve dealt with this where they call and the thing major is broken and you’re like, okay I got to figure out what thing to jigger and how is it broken and whether it’s actually broken or not and what the fix is.

And you start talking through to figure out what specifically are they referring to? And what is it specifically doing when they do certain actions? So that that problem when you remove the face to face element and when you remove the video element using a synchronous communications like chat post email other type of content interactions task lists for example that are super common.

You you lose that real-time feedback on the language, synchronicity the similarity of the language you know, you’re you mean the same thing and can you report back? So those lags can be problematic, and there’s typically a tendency not always not everybody to reduce the communicated content because it takes a lot to type a lot.

It takes a lot to read a lot, that’s where you can use like voice messages as an example. Still, you don’t get the back and forth, but it’s another level of richness, the voice and text, or the voice, and visual leaving a visual voicemail, that’s of course, another level.

So, there’s some certain ways you can overcome that gap language, though, both from intercultural aspects, as well, as with individual communication aspects. Those can be somethings you have to bridge. So there’s a lot of this, these things that are problematic with virtual teams and you there’s this need to recognize them.

So we covered a couple, there’s others as well, and that’s one of the things that I’m super excited to be exploring because the issue is, if you don’t recognize those different it is, if you don’t recognize the different strengths and differences that your team has, you know, one, it’s going to impact the communication to.

It’s going to impact your relationships and three, your individual team culture is going to be less less connected, less engaged, and that can be problematic. Because what happens when the team isn’t synchronized, well, you start getting inefficiencies gaps friction things that reduce the overall team performance towards your shared common goals, and that’s why this is important.

And I’m super excited to be talking about this today. I’m curious about your thoughts, right? So I’m not doing this just for my benefit. Yeah, I’m using it for my PhD work. Yes, I’m using it for my work work. Yes, I’m using it for a lot of other things for so I’m curious though even more is to learn how your experience been with it, what are some other things, other gaps, other experiences you’ve had and what ways of you overcome so put it, put it in a comment, put it on your place for posting on social media and tag leadership daily, #leadership daily.

And I’m curious here, your thoughts. So I really appreciate you listening in. Good bad and different. Let me know what could be better. What did you like? And let’s keep the conversation going. Thank you, everybody.