My 5 Lessons Learned after a Year of Virtual Collaboration in 2020

After almost everything has been said and done about this surprising, disruptive and challenging year 2020, I'd like to wrap it up by sharing my lessons learned in terms of virtual collaboration. Virtually all areas of life have been shifted to remote collaboration including home schooling for our kids, remote teaching as lecturer and of course uncounted virtual business meetings. Here's what I took away and will remember going forward.

1. Freedom to Experiment: Explore the "New Normal" of Collaboration

It was Friday the 13th in March, the first day in the Home Office, when I realized that I, like many others, had not been prepared for such a scenario despite many years of communication & leadership training courses and frequent virtual meetings. Since there was obviously no best practice or standard procedure available for this situation, I soon felt comfortable to follow one of our organization's cultural belief statements "Freedom to Experiment". Luckily the technical infrastructure was in place and stable, so I could start my first virtual activities: Scheduling a virtual team get-together without a specific agenda to make sure the team can connect, calling a few colleagues to keep business operations going and also texting a team member to stay connected while he was spending vacation time on a remote island...

Once the team agreed that we would benefit from casual virtual get-together sessions beyond our business meetings, we continued this experiment. Since the situation was completely unpredictable, I decided to schedule meetings with 1 or 2 weeks lead time instead of regular meeting series. That made it possible to react to the latest developments and adjust meeting frequency, duration, topics etc. as needed. Soon this became a team tradition with various themes (Joint morning coffee, virtual team lunch, sharing vacation experiences from the past...) and we will continue this habit in January.

2. Lights, Camera, Action: The Technical Setup

Virtual collaboration requires a technical infrastructure and luckily most laptop computers and mobile devices provide the necessary components to get started. The key ingredients for a successful virtual meeting include now a stable and fast internet connection, good audio quality, a camera and proper lighting. Over time, we have seen how all of us have gotten more and more used to the remote setup and constantly learn to optimize our technical setup. This includes the various collaboration software platforms such as Zoom, Teams, Jitsi, Webex and Blackboard, each with its own features and specifics to master. The continuous and accelerated deployment of new software features offered enhanced possibilities but also challenged us to stay up-to-date with the latest versions and knowledge about the added features. In 2020 not only team meetings and business alignments went virtual, also large events, conferences and summits had to be held virtually. The picture below offers a glimpse at the necessary technical setup for our virtual leadership summit connecting 300 participants from all over the world for a very well-received and interactive session. Despite all the technical possibilities, one challenge remains: Running virtual events with participants from all over the world requires to take into account the participants' time zones and plan the schedule accordingly.

3. Learning by doing: Include interactive elements

Feeling tired and exhausted was common for many of us throughout 2020 and is summarized perfectly in the term "Zoom Fatigue". Listening to calls and staring at a screen for many hours each day can be tough without any interaction. To overcome this fatigue and unidirectional communication, I tried to include interactive elements into my virtual sessions such as short online polls to capture some feedback during our team meetings. This became in particular important when teaching my online lectures completely remotely and with very limited possibilities to interact visually (The students could see me via video but I could not see them). So from time to time I used an online quiz via Pingo to ask questions and analyze the students' answers together with them. Another very simple and effective method to sense the mood in a virtual business meeting turned out to ask participants to share the Emoji that describes their current mood which often helped to start the conversation with a smile :-)

4. Give and take: To be hosted by a good host, be a good guest

There are typical expectations for a good meeting host: Be prepared, engaging, inspiring... But it is not only the host alone who determines if a meeting will be successful and satisfying in the end, especially taking into account the challenges of a virtual meeting without being in one room together. We probably all have encountered meetings in which it was hard for the host to run the meeting and engage with the group. Hence, I suggest as a New Year resolution to be aware of the impact of being a good guest in meetings to support the host on the one hand and on the other hand thereby increase the level of satisfaction for all participants.

A few suggested simple house rules to be a good guest:

• Provide your thoughts and feedback especially if it is asked for (verbally, via chat...)
• Turn on your video if the situation allows to enable visual interaction
• Simple but important - both in virtual and physical meetings: Be on time!

5. It's still all about people: Make it personal and have fun!

One more thing: It's still and always about people - doesn't matter if virtual or physical meetings and collaboration.

Ultimately, it lies in the eye of the beholder if a meeting and our collaboration is perceived as personal, engaging and fun. It is definitely possible to create an atmosphere that embraces personal exchange and having fun even in times of crisis and uncertainty. My experience of the past months is that especially in these unprecedented and challenging times, personal elements and humor helped us as a team to collaborate successfully.

For example on this year's BringYourTeddyBearToWorkDay in October, many team members brought their stuffed animals along to our virtual team get-together and shared stories about their cuddly friends. Due to the pandemic also no onsite Christmas parties could be held this year and the students in our team organized a fantastic virtual event with Christmas photos and a Pub Quiz.

So I believe it is possible to add a personal touch to virtual collaboration and this will continue to be an important success factor in the New Normal.

What to expect after 2020...

After this most surprising and unexpected year in my life time, I will be careful to make any concrete predictions but I dare to say that virtual collaboration will remain and become even more relevant in 2021 and going forward. We all truly hope that the pandemic will get under control soon and physical meetings will be possible again. But even then a hybrid setup of physical and virtual collaboration is very likely. To finish on a positive note, the shift to virtual collaboration caused also some very positive effects such as reducing or even eliminating commuting and travel times and associated costs as well as the related effects on the environment e.g. via carbon dioxide emissions. I also found that the virtual setup and working from the Home Office to some extent created a level playing field for many colleagues: Managers, experts, students, contractors could all connect via the same collaboration platforms across locations and time zones and work together as one team.