21st Century Work Life WLP160 - Myths that Get in the Way of Embracing Virtual Teamwork
There are many valid reasons for resisting going remote in your team, but today we cover those reasons based on myths and common misconceptions about personalities suited to remote work and communication. visit www.virtualnotdistant.com
We start with the one piece of often misquoted research, something that really frustrates Pilar in particular:
1) 93% of communication is non-verbal.
The assumption of this is that therefore, virtual teamwork will never work as well as collocated.
However, this statistic, which comes from Mehrabian’s work needs more context.
It relates to emotional content and is more pertinent to situations where there is a disconnect between what is being said and what the listener is perceiving is going on.
This article explains it all:
2) The only way of generating ideas and innovating is by being in a room together shouting out ideas.
Therefore if we can’t do this as a remote team, we will never be able to generate new ideas and be creative.
Well, guess what, brainstorming doesn’t always work anyway!
https://www.inc.com/melissa-schilling/the-science-of-why-brainstorming-in-groups-doesnt-work.html
3) Only introverts are suited to working from home. (We know that virtual teams don’t always have people working from home, but we thought we’d tackle this one as it also gets us going…)
Well, what is an introvert anyway? And some “extroverts” make remote work anyway, they just know they need social interaction and make sure they get it in some sort of way.
We challenge the fact that there is one type of personality that works best from home.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3046450/do-you-have-the-right-personality-to-work-from-home
We like this other article because it looks at personality traits or characterisitcs that might go best with remote work.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289370