The COVID-19 pandemic has forced enterprises into distributed and remote work situations. There is no question that the team of 2019 is not going to be like the team of 2021. Does that mean that we witnessing an evolution of the definition of how teams perform and what is teamwork in those situations? Join MINDWORKS host, Daniel Serfaty, as he talks to Dr. Nancy Cooke, the Director of Arizona State University’s Center for Human, AI and Robot Teams, and Dr. Stephen Fiore, Director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at University of Central Florida, about the evolution of teams.
Listen to the entire interview in The Magic of Teams 1: The ABCs of Teams with Nancy Cooke and Stephen Fiore
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced enterprises into distributed and remote work situations. There is no question that the team of 2019 is not going to be like the team of 2021. Does that mean that we witnessing an evolution of the definition of how teams perform and what is teamwork in those situations? Join MINDWORKS host, Daniel Serfaty, as he talks to Dr. Nancy Cooke, the Director of Arizona State University’s Center for Human, AI and Robot Teams, and Dr. Stephen Fiore, Director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at University of Central Florida, about the evolution of teams.
Listen to the entire interview in The Magic of Teams 1: The ABCs of Teams with Nancy Cooke and Stephen Fiore
Daniel Serfaty: With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing enterprises, whether they are corporate or academic enterprises, into distributed and remote work situations, are we witnessing an evolution of the definition of how teams perform and what is teamwork in those situations? Nancy, you want to take that on, and then Steve I would love your perspective on that.
Nancy Cooke: On the one hand, because we are distributed and don't have to commute to a meeting place, we can have more of these meetings, almost infinite number of meetings, and that may improve teamwork because there's more communication. On the other hand, there's some things that we know about good collaboration that we're missing. So I think COVID is taxing the teamwork for that reason. And the two things that come to mind are food and serendipity. A lot of good collaboration happens when we share food with one another, when there's like a common break room or you go out for pizza or drinks after work. And that's when a lot of the collaboration happens and people relax and open up their mind a bit.
But the other thing is serendipity. A lot of good collaboration happens because we run into each other in the hallway or on our way to the restroom or at a particular meeting that we didn't expect to both be at. So we're not doing either one of those things. We're not sharing food and we're not being serendipitous. And people try to use breakout rooms, I think, to get at some of that. But I don't think it's sufficient. So I think maybe we're improving the number of meetings we can have and maybe teamwork because there are so many meetings, but also we're taxing the teamwork.
Daniel Serfaty: That's very interesting. I would have thought about the serendipity, but the food is certainly an intriguing variable here. Steve, how about you? How do you think this new world in a sense induced by COVID is affecting the way teams work together?
Stephen Fiore: I'd like to think it's calling attention to the need for better technology to facilitate this kind of collaborative distributed work. So virtual teams has been a sub area of research for a number of years now and there's fairly sophisticated frameworks for looking at them, and part of the problem is the people who study technology are in computer science and there's a field of computer supported collaborative work that overlaps somewhat but not completely with researchers in teams. And because of that disconnect, I think that the people who are building technologies to support distributed work may not be collaborating with the right people, may not be aware of some of the teamwork needs when it comes to this kind of distributed work.
So I think that limitations are becoming much more apparent because we're forced to use some of these technologies. I won't name any particular companies. There's certainly a lot of variability in the effectiveness of these different platforms that we're now using. And some of the bigger names are really bad, surprisingly bad, at developing these collaborative technologies. So my hope is that this is a kind of use inspired science and engineering where because of the tremendous increase in collaborative work, that they're going to be developing better technologies. And it's also up to the users to make more apparent and to inform the designers what we don't like about the technologies. And I see some adapting fairly well to this but others are too rigid in their technology and they're not changing.
Daniel Serfaty: It is fascinating along those lines, or at least I can observe that in my own organization, how people spontaneously have been trying to reconstruct what has been deconstructed or destroyed by the remote work situation, the equivalent of the water coolers, the serendipity, almost then seek to try to induce artificially or promote the conditions for serendipity. And I'm witnessing that not because it's something that's decided from corporate from the top, but rather maybe it's a collective subconscious effort to make up for what the technology, as you say Steve, is not providing us. And I think there is a research that is screaming to be performed here to see what exactly as our shortcuts, those additional channels of collaboration that people have created around those tools. Steve, you wanted to add?
Stephen Fiore: The serendipity, this has been studied for example in the science of team science and the label for that is referred to as productive collisions where you run into somebody in the hallway, "Hey, what are you working on?" And they share what they're working on and you say, "Oh, that sounds similar to something I'm doing. We should get together." Or just the ambient awareness of what people are doing. So if they're working on a whiteboard somewhere, someone may witness that and say, "Oh, that looks interesting." And go and talk to them about whatever is the model or the data, whatever they're graphing on that whiteboard.
Those kinds of informal interactions are really critical to any organizational innovation and I don't know how well we can engage in social engineering to produce that. The only example I can think of is a lot of us that run scholarly organizations where we're running virtual conferences now. And for one that we ran in June, we specifically tried to mimic the chats that happen during coffee breaks. We know that's where the real action happens. It's not necessarily during the talks, it's after the talks in between the sessions. So we set up Zoom rooms where anyone could go to and say, "Hey, if you want to meet up with someone, go check out this Google Sheet and go to this Zoom location and have an informal conversation."
And it turns out, I found out a couple of months later, some company had developed an app for that to try to foster these kinds of informal get togethers at virtual conferences. And as you well know, my favorite part of conferences is hanging out at the bar at the end of the day where you share a drink with friends and you just sit around and talk about what you're doing, what are the interesting things you've learned. We're trying to mimic that. There are these virtual happy hours, but it's really not the same thing. I have no solution to it, but you're right. This is a significant problem that we're going to have to figure out how to overcome.
Daniel Serfaty: I'm glad you added the drink portion of the food hypothesis that Nancy proposed. Nancy, you want to add something?
Nancy Cooke: Yes. I meant to include the drink in the food. The other thing I think that's really difficult and maybe hampers communication is this idea of lack of co-presence. I can't see what's going on around you except directly behind you, or with Steve. And so there may be some distraction that's happening in the background that you can't see that maybe changes what I say. And so a lot of communication happens in context and we're pretty impoverished in the context that we share right now.