Marta Jackowska is a PhD student at the Department of Management. And when she and her colleague Professor Jacob Lauring starting studying online work practices and digital meetings, she had no idea how topical their research would suddenly become.

The questionnaire they developed for the project was sent to five Danish organisations about a year before the Covid-19 pandemic hit Europe and forced workplaces all over the world to implement digital solutions for work and teaching virtually overnight.

Since then, the results of their research have only become more relevant. And even though the study was carried out before everything went online, Marta Jackowska believes that it contains valuable insights on how to get the most out of digital tools.

“Our research shows that if the culture of an organisation isn’t designed to work together online, the digital tools won’t work. I think the Covid-19 situation was a wake-up call for a lot of people, because it made it clear that technology in itself is not a magic bullet. It’s something we all have to learn how to use,” she said.

Online meetings shouldn’t be like just another email

On the practical level, learning how to collaborate online is about everything from all employees learning how to host a meeting on Zoom to more advanced ways of using the tools in the programme – for example, you can actually draw on the screen in the same way as if you had a whiteboard in a conference room. In this way, you can hold virtual meetings that function just as well as in-person meetings.

But online work also makes new demands on managers, who have to learn how to use the digital solutions for the right things.

“When a meeting takes place online, you have to plan it out. There has to be a clear reason for meeting. It’s important that the meeting isn’t something that could have been just another email,” Jackowska said.

Set aside time for small talk

At the same time, it’s important that meetings are about more than who does what, especially in the current Covid-19 situation. They should also be used to replace some of the social interaction that is lost when people no longer meet in person at work.

“Normally, it happens automatically that we engage in small talk before a meeting starts, but you have to schedule time for it in online meetings. There’s no way that 50 people can small talk on Zoom. But you can make break-out rooms with groups of three people,” Jackowska said.

Another way to create social interaction online is to hold an weekly meeting to replace the kinds of meetings that normally take place around the coffee machine, as Jackowska put it.

“It might feel a little artificial to begin with, but it gets better over time,” she said, based on her research – and her own experience.

Just like the whiteboard function in Zoom, it’s something that needs to be learned.

Managers must be understanding

Jackowska also pointed out that managers can create a better online work environment in the current situation by taking a “more human approach” to their employees.

“They need to understand that many employees aren’t as productive as normal, and that this won’t necessarily change for the time being. And they have to be good at communicating this clearly.”

In one company Jackowska studied in a different research project, she noted that one of the managers held regular one-on-one meetings with each employee – online.

“This gave them a sense of how individuals were doing; just a brief chat where it was possible to discuss things you wouldn’t want to bring up at a larger meeting.”

Technology isn’t the problem – it’s the isolation

Just as technology isn’t a solution in itself, Jackowska stressed that technology isn’t the problem with online work. It’s the feeling of isolation.

“It’s the physical distance from your colleagues, but it’s also the emotional distance that comes from the fact that you don’t feel like you belong to a team to the same degree when you’re sitting by yourself and you can’t see your colleagues.”

This is confirmed by her research project, which showed that employees feel there is less knowledge-sharing in their team when the individual members are physically isolated, compared with a situation where two teams in different units meet online.

She expressed hope that future research will help shed light on how the feeling of distance and isolation can be reduced for employees who work remotely..

At the same time, she stressed that there’s a big difference in how well working from home works for people that’s related to whether or not it’s voluntary.