Effective remote collaboration

Working remotely has become the new norm and digital transformation is being accelerated because of these trying times. Zoom is now seeing 200 million daily meeting participants. Cisco’s Webex has seen over 14 billion meeting minutes in March. That’s more than double where they were before the crisis.

From the UK to the US, Japan to South Korea, there are all global companies that have, rolled out mandatory work-from-home policies. However, the importance of virtual communication has been rising in the past years, long before Covid19. In 2019 there was 41% of team-members from remote teams which have never met face-to-face.

Although virtual communication has its benefits, our research suggests that the lack of individual communication is coming at a cost to team performance. Completion of a task takes more time. Its harder to make a snap decision, to lead a team, build trust and to incorporate new members. Studies on virtual teams also show that high virtuality reduces the frequency and quality of communication. All these can strongly affect results.

Keeping an eye on the team dynamics and supporting the team members in collaboration to keep the things going can be crucial. In cooperation with NASA and European space agency, we have been performing long-term team isolation experiments since 1989 to learn how a space crew is able to cope with long term isolation and manage remote collaboration with the control centre. These research projects have proved the importance of ongoing monitoring of team communication to prevent misunderstandings and maintain team agility.

4 Essentials for Teams

Following our research during space and military missions, we have examined what human behaviors create a healthy culture for living and working remotely in small groups and established a CREW network system.

Managers are struggling with the remote/hybrid work environment more than anyone else. Managing healthy team dynamics is extremely difficult. Therefore we have developed an online coaching tool for the leaders and their teams.

Where does Sociomapping come from?

Our CTO, Cyril Höschl, PhD., and Associate Professor Radvan Bahbouh PhD invented Sociomapping, to visualize interrelationship data. This powerful science, also used by NASA and Army in the military missions, reflects social and team dynamics in a way the human brain can understand, and within seconds. Whether you want to develop a remote, agile, or leadership team, Sociomapping visualizes the current and optimal team set-up and reveals potential issues within collaboration culture.