The unimaginably disruptive crisis the world is facing in the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented uptake of virtual teamwork. Workers in many different fields are solving problems and doing their jobs together through video conferencing tools and software in ways that were perhaps optional before the pandemic but are now essential Moreover, many of the members of countless disparate teams are collaborating and conversing online when they may well never have even met offline.
Archana Shrivastava and Pooja Misra of the Birla Institute of Management Technology in Greater Noida, India, have looked into the effect of the pandemic on home-based learning in detail and touch on the parallel world of corporate remote working. The COVID-19 pandemic, as we know, has not been only a global medical crisis but a social and economic crisis. However, there is no history of pandemics that fits with the situation in which we find ourselves today and the tools that are available to us that were not even invented when previous pandemics struck humanity. The team offers details in the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations.
The team turned to qualitative methodology for capturing responses related to the pandemic and its impact on the higher education communities, they explains. “Qualitative methods are valuable given their open-ended nature and focus not just on ‘what’ but on ‘how’,” the team explains. They add that the method proved to be “extremely useful” given how rapidly the situation surrounding COVID-19 and socioeconomic and educational responses are to it. They were also rather aware that personal perspectives and researcher bias can influence the results that might be gleaned from such studies they made a concerted effort to pursue objectivity in evaluating their results.
“The goal of our study was…to provide insights for higher education institutions, faculty, education policymakers, and corporate organisations to understand the prevailing situation and formulate suitable long and short-term policies for the attainment of optimal performance in this unprecedented time,” the team concludes.
Shrivastava, A. and Misra, P. (2021) ‘COVID-19 and its impact on global virtual teams: exploring the unexplored’, Int. J. Networking and Virtual Organisations, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, pp.217–231.