Constantly using synchronous forms of communication can be overwhelming. “As companies struggle to go remote, what ends up happening is companies begin to try to simulate the office remotely, which is not really the right way to do things, although it’s the natural way to do things,“ says Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, in a recent Q&A about remote work.įried is saying that we shouldn’t just be turning all our in-person meetings into Zoom meetings. The challenges they’ve been tackling all these years are now ubiquitous. Many companies, like Basecamp, have been remote since day one. Now with the accelerated rise of remote work driven by the global pandemic, many have been forced into remote work, and with that, we’ve seen what’s different and challenging about work when more teams are virtual. In the current era of constant connectivity, the research looks for ways to help workers disconnect and disengage to maintain wellbeing. With the widespread adoption of more interactive technology such as teleconferencing and messaging apps over the last decade, Gibbs’ research transitioned into how teammates can best collaborate using these technologies. So Gibbs’ research focused on how to help virtual workers become more connected with one another. There were assumptions that virtual team members were disconnected and isolated because they’re behind the computer screen and the technologies that were available to communicate were pretty much limited to email. The concept of having teams of people who were geographically distributed across time and space was just beginning to form. Gibbs’ research starting in the 1990s coincided with the growth of the world wide web. “The study of virtual work has changed over the past couple of decades, as communication technology has become more socially oriented and interactive,” says Gibbs. Her focus is on how teammates can collaborate across different kinds of boundaries, what communication challenges they face, and how they can use technology to overcome those challenges. For the last 20 years, she’s been studying global virtual collaboration.
Jennifer Gibbs is a professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The ubiquitous use of technology had made virtual teams simply just teams. No longer defined by the limited context of differing geographical locations, virtual teams now exist in a much broader context of any team that uses some form of technology to work together. Many companies have responded to the de-centralization of work processes by introducing virtual teams that collaborate across geographical, temporal, cultural, and organizational boundaries. The rapid growth of electronic information and communication media in recent decades has made distributed work much easier, faster, and more efficient.
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