Work from Home and Virtual Team

Group 8
Chosen Industry: Education Industry

Introduction
At this time of the pandemic, the concepts of work from home and virtual teams have
emerged everywhere including the business environment. Different organizations have
pooled their workforce having different talents from different geographical localities. If we
talk at the individual level, this virtual teams phenomenon has many advantages like higher
flexibility including time control, work motivation and ability to get the expertise from any
part of the world.
These concepts of Work from home and virtual team are very relevant in today’s context.
Companies sees this as a perfect cost saving opportunity and emerging technologies are
only making this process easier and smoother. Global problems like the pandemic that we
are facing right now emphasizes the fact that a good work from home and virtual team
setup is a necessity for every company. However, it is not necessary that such setups would
work always. We need proper leadership, proper communication, clear goals and
cooperation for this setup to work and be effective.
We, as a group decided to choose education sector for the project. Education is one of the
sectors that has never been completely online. Majority of the students have always
completed their education offline and this pandemic forcing the education sector to go
completely online was very challenging. This was a topic with which we could relate the
most and our objective was to understand the challenges people at the managerial positions
faced in this sector during their transition to the online world. This project would also help
us to understand what challenges we might face as we work in virtual teams from different
geographical locations.

Literature Review

Review of the article Virtual Teams by Jennifer L. Gibbs. From the book: The International
Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication.
She defined virtual teams as a team who are at different geographical locations
communicating through CMC (Computer-mediated-communication) and flexible work
arrangements.
The important dimensions of a virtual team were defined to be:
1. Geographic Dispersion
2. Dependence on electronics
3. Diversity in cultures
4. Functional Diversity
Communication and interaction that is constructed socially as a dynamic process is called
teaming. It has different input variables like group size and composition, members’
knowledge, skills and abilities. It is very important that all the members of the team
understand these dimensions and variables and work together cooperating as a team.
Review of an article on virtual team effectiveness available at sciencedirect.
The attempt of the paper was to explain the role of different elements that are vital to
virtual team effectiveness. These elements included trust, information sharing and
communication, in building virtual teams. Different prominent factors like dependability on
each other, dealing with time, concern for collaboration, information penetration, reliability
on technology and tools for communication were identified. A team needs to keep all these
factors in mind to make the virtual team a success.

Review of a research article on Employees perception and experiences during COVID 19

This study involved responses from 50 respondents to work from home. Majority of the
respondents were from the teaching sector. 88% of these respondents were involved in the
work from home setup for the first time. The research used hypothesis testing to determine
the factors affecting the willingness of people working from home. The research can be
summarized by saying that respondents working from home were willing to work only if
they had good and supportive environment to work from home. Home environment
severely affects the productivity of the respondents.

Research Method
We managed to contact 3 persons who are holding managerial positions in their respective
colleges.
1. Dr Krishnapriya Mohanraj (Principal: Bombay College Of Pharmacy)
2. Dr. Sharad Mahiskar (Pro Vice Chancellor: NMIMS)
3. Dr. Anand Shedge (Director: MET)
We managed to get interviews through zoom or normal calls and gain meaningful insights
which helped us to answer the following questions:
1. Working in virtual teams in a work from home context, what kind of challenges do
you, your team and your organisation face? (Explore as many areas of challenges for
discussion and ask them which challenges they consider to be most significant).
a) In these times of uncertainty, how could you assure the students that the
standard of education would not be compromised?
b) How did the transition from offline to online education impact the learning
process?
2. How were you able to cope in this new context of work from home?
a) How difficult it is to maintain work life balance while working from home?

3. What were the initiatives/policies/guidelines adopted by your organisation to

effectively work from home and in virtual teams in this scenario?
a) How challenging it is to comply with the constantly changing regulatory
guidelines issued by the Government?
The respondents were very patient and willing to help. One interview was recorded (link of
the recordings are provided in the Appendix 1) while others were conducted through
normal calls.
Analysis and Findings
Answering our first question regarding the challenges faced by them, their teams and their
organizations, they said that the first step taken by them was conducting the lectures online.
The colleges had the licensed version of Microsoft Teams or Zoom and they started using
them when the lockdown was implemented. There were different types of challenges while
conducting these online lectures.
1. The main challenge was to keep the students engaged in the lecture and maintain
the standards of teaching. The colleges had to ensure that the learning of the
students is not hampered due to the online classes. The students generally tend to
keep their videos and audios off due to bandwidth issues. This makes the job of the
teachers difficult who like to interact with the students while teaching. In order to
overcome this challenge the teachers try to ask relevant questions and at times
come up with polls to keep the class interactive. In order to engage the students in a
meaningful manner they are given regular assignments and quizzes are conducted
frequently in the classes.
2. Some students are from the remote areas where the internet connectivity is not up
to the mark. Two students from one of the classes are from Jammu and Kashmir and
they have 2g connections. In order to resolve this, every lecture is recorded and sent
to the students for their reference. This allows the students to go through the
lectures at their own convenience. According to the persons interviewed, even the
students have tried to get access to better laptops and broadband connections.
There were many students who used their mobiles for attending the lectures in
March. This percentage has gone down now with many of them having a laptop
which helps them to attend these virtual classes. The college has tried to support
each and every student, addressing their issues and trying their best to resolve them.
3. The other challenge was that students were not able to experience the campus life
which is a big part of their college life. In order to overcome this, the whole
organization is coming up with innovative ideas to do conduct different events. One
of the colleges for example had a one and half hour event on the independence day
called ‘Ek Bharat Shrest bharat’ where students had composed poems and patriotic
songs. This not only keeps the students motivated, but also brings joy to the whole
administration.
This is the main challenge that every college is facing where they have to keep the
students and the faculties along with the other administrative staff motivated and
hope that the situation would improve in the near future.
4. Another challenge is to constantly keep adapting to the ever changing government
guidelines. They have no choice but to wait for the government’s decision. Students
seeking admissions had no clarity upon the schedule of the entrance exams and the
passing out batches didn’t know when their final exams would be conducted.
Another major setback was that research students were not allowed to come to the
college. The skill development during practicals is also missing in the online setup.
 Even the principal didn’t have solutions to these challenges. She said that CET exams
might be conducted soon with the new batch starting their course from November.
The exam for the final year students would be conducted in October.
5. One important challenge is to maintain the work life balance while working from
home and also to carry out the administrative activities of the college since all the
administrative staffs cannot be provided a laptop. Sometimes there are meetings at
odd hours.

Recommendations
There were a few challenges that were still unaddressed and it was important to think about
some solutions for these problems.
1. One major problem is to conduct practicals online. It is difficult for the principals
to decide how to maintain the same standards for learning. We feel that the
practicals shouldn’t be conducted online. The heads of the departments of
different sections must plan something with the principal and keep subjects that
doesn’t need practical knowledge for the present semester and keep them for
the next semester if possible with a hope that the students would be able to
attend college physically. Some of the course outlines might be unchangeable,
but they can try and minimize the loss of learning by coming up with a suitable
plan.
2. Another major problem was that the final year students still couldn’t give their
final year exams. There are many options that the college could have taken for
this. They could have given the students some project which could have tested
the knowledge they have gained throughout their curriculum. If the college still
needs the students to give a test and maintain their standards, there are many
software companies like TCS who have come up with softwares like TCS ION that
help us to conduct an online exam with top level proctoring.
3. One of the challenges that went unaddressed was that many teachers are not
very conversant with technology. The colleges can keep a workshop of 2-3 days
in which they can train these teachers so that they can contribute to the learning
of the students.
References:
1. Bhat & Ahuja, S. K. (2017). Virtual Team Effectiveness. Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2017.11.338

2. (PDF) Virtual teams. (2017, March 1). Retrieved from

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314712225_Virtual_Teams
Citation - Gibbs, Kim, & Boyraz. (2017)

3. Shareena & Shahid, Mahammad. (2020). Work from home during COVID-19:
Employees perception and experiences. 9.Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2017.11.338
Citation - Shareena & Shahid, Mahammad. (2020)

Appendix 1:
The link to the google drivehaving our zoom call recording with Dr Krishnapriya Mohanraj:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15pqIa7X-2qpUe5pYFO4dzRQcfY4TOHIQ