How Working From Home Can Amp Up Your Team's Communication and Creativity
The great work from home experiment has begun. This shift brings small and large frustrations: my friend spent an hour trying to log in to his company’s email server, parents now have a second job keeping their kids entertained, and relationships may be in danger as partners spend much more time together. As you might be experiencing right now, there are downsides to remote work.
But there’s a silver lining. There are some new skills we can learn from this forced remote work situation. Our limitations, like communicating virtually and feeling distant, might even push us to communicate better and come up with better quality creative ideas. Let’s explore how.
References
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[2] Lin, C., Standing, C., & Liu, Y. C. (2008). A model to develop effective virtual teams. Decision Support Systems, 45(4), 1031-1045.
[3] De Jong, B. A., Dirks, K. T., & Gillespie, N. (2016). Trust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134-1150.
[4] Breuer, C., Hüffmeier, J., & Hertel, G. (2016). Does trust matter more in virtual teams? A meta-analysis of trust and team effectiveness considering virtuality and documentation as moderators. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1151-1177.
[5] DeRosa, D. M., Smith, C. L., & Hantula, D. A. (2007). The medium matters: Mining the long-promised merit of group interaction in creative idea generation tasks in a meta-analysis of the electronic group brainstorming literature. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(3), 1549-1581.
[6] Dennis, A. R., & Williams, M. L. (2005). A meta-analysis of group side effects in electronic brainstorming: More heads are better than one. International Journal of e-Collaboration (IJeC), 1(1), 24-42.
[7] Moshavi, D. (2001). “Yes and…”: introducing improvisational theatre techniques to the management classroom. Journal of Management Education, 25(4), 437-449.
[8] Schilpzand, M. C., Herold, D. M., & Shalley, C. E. (2011). Members’ openness to experience and teams’ creative performance. Small Group Research, 42(1), 55-76.
[9] Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165-218.
About the Author
Natasha Ouslis
Natasha is a behavior change consultant, writer, and researcher. She started her own workplace behavioral science consulting firm after working as a consultant at fast-growing behavioral economics companies including BEworks. Natasha is also finishing her PhD in organizational psychology at Western University, specializing in team conflict and collaboration, where she completed her Master of Science in the same field. She has a monthly column on workplace behavioral design in the Habit Weekly newsletter and is a Director and science translator at the nonprofit ScienceForWork.
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