This blog has been quiet for a couple of years, but it’s time to start writing about my projects and adventures over that time. First on that list is that I have completed my PhD in Socio-Informatics from Stellenbosch University!
I studied how remote teams communicate; more specifically, how they use tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack and how that affects employees. As part of that, I published an article in the South African Journal of Business Management which explored how we define ‘remote’ and ‘distributed’ work and what the implications of that are. You can find the academic article here.
I’ll write more later about the findings and outcomes of my whole PhD, but I wanted to bring up a key concept from the aformentioned article: distributed work means different things at different levels of organizations, and many companies are more distributed then they think they are, especially post-COVID lockdowns.
We can think about distributed work as a combination of two factors: distributedness and virtuality. Distributedness includes the physical or time distance between coworkers or teams. Virtuality is the proportion of communication that occurs virtually between coworkers or teams. These can each be considered at the individual, team, or organizational level. The COVID-19 lockdowns forced many workers to increase their virtuality and forced teams and organizations to adopt new norms for virtual communication; it also temporarily required individuals to be physically distributed from their colleagues. Now that the lockdowns are in the past, many organizations continue to have increased virtuality but haven’t necessarily remained in a more-distributed state. However, this has effects on organizational communication; for example, watercooler conversations can occur virtually now rather than in-person.
This has lots of interesting implications on teams at work. An increase in virtuality can make hybrid work (partial work-from-home) more feasible. Even as many companies are encouraging employees to return to the office, increased virtuality enables a variety of distributed work situations not typically described as ‘remote work’. I speculate that this will lead to an increase in distributed work more generally even if the ‘remote worker’ who works from any location does not become much more common (e.g. Network).
There are lots of other implications of increased virtuality; more to come in future posts.
Michael Henry's blog 