Pandemic Disruptions and the Imperatives of Virtual Work Channels

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting stay-at-home orders have led to significant changes in the way people work. One of these changes involves increased use of virtual work channels as a means of communicating or holding work meetings. Today’s organizations have to remain alert and adaptive to unforeseen events, such as external crises, which create increased uncertainty among their workforce and pose immediate threats to the organizations’ performance and viability. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, organizations suddenly have to navigate the unprecedented and thereby find new solutions to challenges arising across many areas of their operations. Educational institutions, offices, factories and markets were closed as a result of the lockdown measures imposed by several governments. To ensure that business operations continued, a work from home policy was implemented by most organizations. This enabled everyone do their work while maintaining social distancing. Despite the changes, this pandemic is teaching the organizations as well as their business managers a lot of lessons. The present, extreme cases of requisite physical distancing need not imply equivalent increases in psychological distance, and also offer firms some insight into the unanticipated benefits of a virtual workforce – a type of workforce that, quite possibly, will influence the ‘new normal’ of the post-COVID world. The purpose of this paper to examine the imperatives of virtual work channels as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic disruptions.