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This is a post and podcast I have been thinking about for a long time. I first started thinking about it as the world of office life was being transformed by the COVID pandemic, as offices of colocated workers were being emptied of their occupants and people were all moving to working from home.
From the workplace perspective, the necessitating of working from home this brought about was both a good thing, in that it broke the mental chains that had been preventing many organisations recognising that they could function with their personnel working outside of the office, and in some ways a bad one in that as workplaces change from a physical meeting place to a virtual one, many of the human connections that made them effective have begun to be lost.
How it started
When I first developed an interest in virtual teams and remote work, which was in major engineering projects back between 2008 and 2010, a typical virtual team or workshare arrangement as many companies referred to it, comprised between two and perhaps five offices around the country or the world where groups of engineers and project delivery personnel worked collectively to deliver their projects.
These groups were largely defined by being co located as groups but separated geographically by city or country. The challenges they faced, and continue to face, were of distance, culture, language, time zone and technical roles. They had numerous, complex interfaces, interactions and relationships but, and it is a big BUT… they are, at the location level, largely colocated.
What happened
Already beginning as technologies enabled easier working from outside the traditional office, but heavily accelerated in reaction to the pandemic, these co-located hubs of people were exploded into constellations as personnel suddenly moved from working in one place to working from their individual homes. This was a massive shock to the entire system, breaking long standing traditional work practices of attending an office every day for work, being co-located with your workmates, seeing them every day, being able to chat organically, come together in groups for meetings and experience a sense of common purpose through proximity.
Back in the early 2010’s communications was still rapidly evolving, moving from expensive, cumbersome and complex video conference systems, often built into the fabric of the building, toward the modern situation where practically everyone has a video conference suite in their pocket, on their tablet or on their laptop. This ubiquity of communications has made it far easier for people to join meetings from anywhere and has given the workforce and their employers a feeling of comfort. That comfort can though be misplaced since even the finest tools need the users to truly understand their use to get the best value from them.
How it’s going
So, here in 2026, where are we now.
We have reached a position where the virtual teams of the early years of the century are still there in the minds of many, but reality is far more complex. Modern virtual teams for projects consist of the traditional hubs, each surrounded by constellations of individuals. This extreme form of virtual team brings with it a whole host of additional challenges. Gone are the days of having meetings where only a couple of office locations joined the call, even small team meetings involve numerous different individual callers coming in from kitchens, home offices and cafe’s. Similarly the days of everyone coming together to celebrate key milestones, tackle complex challenges or collaborate on a report in person are largely gone.
Leaders and managers are now often navigating situations where some team members are remote most of a week, some may even be remote all the time, and every day a different subset of a project team will be together in person in the home office. Side discussions are a thing of the past, as is overhearing a conversation about some phase of a project and being able to either contribute or including the outcomes from that conversation in your work.
Communications have moved from the organic and natural to needing to be wholly conscious, planned and often also strategic just simply to keep the local teem engaged and aligned. Once this is elevated and consolidated to the whole of project level, the challenge and the need for quality communications to ensure the project stays on track and the entire team aligned takes communications from a nice to get right to one of the highest risks on any project manager’s risk dashboard.