Before the COVID-19 crisis, a survey of office workers by 451 Research showed that 67% of employees worked from home at least some of the time but only 13% worked from home fulltime. When the COVID-19 crisis hit in March 2020, many more employees left their offices to work from home—known as distributed work. A distributed team is a group of coworkers who work remotely, online, with no physical office space. By April 2020, as much as 75% of companies had implemented, or planned to implement, universal work-from-home policies. Interestingly, 38% of those companies expect these changes to be permanent. COVID-19 may change the world of work as we know it. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey emailed employees in May 2020 and informed them that they could work at home—even after the lockdown ended. Only essential employees would be required to come in to work. He said that Twitter had wanted to work in a distributed way before the virus, but the pandemic accelerated the timeline. Twitter human resources director Jennifer Christie stated that the organization would “never probably be the same” in how work is done. “People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way,” Christie said. “Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.” Twitter encouraged its employees to start working from home in early March as the coronavirus began to spread across the United States. Several other tech companies did the same, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Distributed work is here to stay, and leaders will need to adapt to the challenges of virtual teamwork....

Discussion Questions 

1. What leadership skills are needed for distributed work? How are they the same or different from other team leadership skills?

2. Discuss the need for cohesion in virtual teams. How can a virtual team leader develop cohesion?

3. Discuss the pros and cons of distributed work becoming permanent. Do you agree or disagree with the strategy?