CHAPTER 12

The Lonely, Dark Halls of Isolation

Ben was sitting at his desk and reading a disturbing report. A few members of his team had complained that they felt demotivated and disconnected from the team. Ben wasn’t sure who the team members were, but he sure wanted to find out. He tried to keep everyone in the loop. He felt that he had done a good job of managing his team, and he had implemented many new ideas. For example, he set up a team web forum, where everyone could communicate what they were working on, what phase of their project they were in, and other relevant work-related tasks. Ben had frequent calls with his team on both a group and individual level. He had even traveled more in the last year to visit his remote team members than ever before. However, it appeared, based on the report, that it wasn’t enough. He was perplexed. What more could he do to motivate his team?

Managers like Ben face many challenges throughout their career. As mentioned, some challenges can be exacerbated while working virtually. While many struggle with these issues, each leader handles these situations in different ways. Some might allow stress to build up until they explode on a team member. Others are proactive in managing the challenges and face them with the best attitude possible, while some others might simply crumble under the pressure. Ben was falling into the former category. The pressure of his new job, new deliverables, a new team, and the added stresses of virtual and international work were proving to be overwhelming. Ben was reaching a tipping point. However, to help alleviate the stress, Ben decided to work on new solutions that might help. He looked into the place he was most comfortable: his work.

In the world of sales and marketing, it is important to bring value to one’s customer. In order to differentiate itself from competitors, a firm must bring something to the table that will make it more relevant than its competitors to the customer market it serves. Ben began to think about how this could apply to his team-level management. According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, a company can best stay relevant when it continues learning. This helps the organization and its employees remain adaptable and facilitates the ability to react to changes in the marketplace (Wadors 2016). Ben was certainly learning a lot. However, he realized that a big part of his role was to coach his team to success. This was an area where he felt he could really learn more and improve. The problem was that Ben was unwittingly dealing with some of the deeply rooted psychological challenges of team members working remotely.

One of the big problems in virtual work is that doing one’s job remotely can feel isolating. Employees call into their team meetings, sometimes with cameras activated and live video feed, and other times not. Virtual employees can spend a lot of time staring at their screen and looking at names of people in their meeting, or slides from the moderator. Oftentimes, this world feels sterile, uninviting, and lacking any personal touch. This can make people feel isolated, and this isolation can create many challenges for otherwise solid employees. Some simply miss the interaction with others in their team. They can get depressed or lose motivation due to the inability to develop relationships with their team members, and these things can lead to a diminished team spirit (Bailey 2013). As a result of limited face-to-face interactions, people who work virtually can feel insulated and alone, which creates greater difficulty for the remote worker (Kirkman et al. 2002).

Working digitally can also create task interdependence, which is the level to which an employee requires input, data, information, and collaborative support to do their job (Van der Vegt, Van de Vliert, and Oosterhof 2003). Depending on the work, the level of task interdependence can vary. However, workers who are in the virtual spectrum often have to sift through an endless void of e-mails, calls, conferences, and tedious files and paperwork. Their share of time with others can often be limited, at best. This social isolation can have implications for the worker and his or her team. When people feel alone in their work, or are isolated socially, this can impact their satisfaction with what they are doing (Maslach and Jackson 1981). Therefore, a manager’s role in this environment must be not only to motivate employees, but also to utilize the right tools to alleviate some of the isolation for remote team members. For example, in an effort to enhance the social environment in a team, a manager could incorporate more video technology, where possible.

Additionally, the manager could support team members through online social networks, such as through congratulating a job well done in front of the whole team in a social forum (Wool 2017). This idea hit Ben when he had a team meeting one Friday afternoon. Ben had called in with video conferencing, and most of his team connected with audio only. Ben was leading the meeting and staring at his slides while speaking about the topic at hand. He would solicit feedback from his team during this call, and yet only a few would ever speak. He stared at the names and the little images of microphones, waiting for them to light up and indicate that others were going to speak. At one point, Ben made a joke and was met with utter silence on the call. He began to wonder if his people were even present, so he started to call individuals by name. They always responded in this case, but would then disappear back into silence. Ben knew that if he was frustrated by this, then others in his team might also be impacted. Therefore, he decided to implement a new rule. He required that his team call in through video; no excuses. Once he did this, the team became far more engaged in the calls. In turn, Ben felt more like a facilitator than a lecturer in the meetings, and for him, this was a great change.

When Ben began to think of the social networking piece, he realized that there was room for improvement there too. Currently, the organization had a website where anyone could talk about their projects, but it was really meant for business-related topics only, and not everyone used it. Ben began to think that maybe the team forum might be a terrific way to build team comradery and companionship. He thought that they could make the web forum more personal and include special employee life-events, like birthdays, marriages, births, etc. In this way, team members could learn more about each other than what phase of the project each had completed. Perhaps, he thought, this could help sideline some of the dehumanizing aspects of virtual working for his team. Even the added use of emoticons, such as happy faces, can activate emotional response in the same human brain pathways as nonverbal communication (Yuasa, Saito, and Mukawa 2011).

Furthermore, the social aspect of a team can have great importance for many other factors as well. As mentioned earlier, working in a virtual setting can require a great degree of personal motivation, as a manager is not constantly overseeing each detail of an employee’s daily tasks. However, the social network of a virtual team might increase social burden and drive individual team members to increased performance. Research has demonstrated that pressure in a social setting can contribute to increased individual motivation and enhanced commitment toward the team as a whole (Staples and Webster 2007). Along with these challenges, managers can have a difficult time finding ways to truly measure the level of engagement of their team members. A good manager can help facilitate engagement by creating specific agreements for the team, implementing a schedule to highlight team members, instituting clear guidelines for team communication, and educating themselves on the natural developmental stages of team formulation (Evans 2011). Other ways managers can help create greater social bonds would include contacting team members more frequently, providing opportunities for virtual team members to join company events, and even increasing the potential for customer or stakeholder meetings to diminish the feelings of social isolation (Kirkman, Rosen, Gibson, Tesluk and McPherson 2002).

Ben spent many hours thinking about how he could implement his new discoveries to build better emotional and social bonds with his team. Along with setting new guidelines for meetings, he decided to especially reach out to those team members who were disconnected from other members of the project. He would set up weekly calls when possible and take a few more minutes to enhance his discussions to move beyond business topics. Ben thought about how often he had called his team and asked “how are things?” before moving on without acknowledging or even really giving them time to answer. This must change, he thought. Furthermore, he would try to build team cohesiveness through increased team-building exercises when the group was together. He also realized that he rarely contacted some of his team members, simply because they were not managing key components of his current project. He decided to implement changes in this area, too. Ben started to use his own rule of thinking from the customer point of view and adapt it to his team point of view. This helped him visualize the depth of some of the issues many of his team members might be facing. This visualization also motivated him to bring greater relevance as a leader to his team members.

After only a month of implementing some of these basic changes, Ben began to see real results. Meetings were far more productive and engaging, his team seemed more engaged and responsive, and he felt that he was developing better relationships with his team. While happy with the results so far, he knew that it would be very easy to fall into old habits. Therefore, he committed himself to continue with his plan and hopefully become a better leader in the process.