Where there was an organisation, now there is a network…

Drawing on my experience of working in networked firms with no physical premises, no salaried employees and made up entirely of virtual project teams, I show that changes in the context that organisations operate in have had a profound effect on how people go about their work. With boundaries around many organisations excessively porous, people have fewer ways to help them contain the anxiety generated by the work. Teamwork and leadership within projects are both subsequently more fraught. And people can find it too risky to connect with others beyond projects at an organisational level reinforcing silos. Nevertheless people find ways to process their experience and to learn through interactions in small groups of people who often have a shared history and/or identity.

The disintegration of the traditional organisation

Organisations have experienced major changes over the last 30–40 years including increasing primacy of the market and growing competition, the breakdown of formal hierarchies and the emergence of new forms of power, specialisation and outsourcing, the increasing number of contract workers as well as advances in communication technologies and artificial intelligence.

These trends have promoted the growth of a network form of organisation, which often have no premises, where work is undertaken by self-employed contractors, often called associates, working primarily online and often scattered widely geographically. Associates work with clients and with each other through email, workplace chat applications and video meetings. These might be complemented by occasional in-person events.

So what impact do all these trends have on the capacity of these firms to work toward their purpose?

Fewer ways to make sense of people’s experiences

The lack of structure often means associates might be ‘lighter on their feet’, where associates can manage tasks in a unique way, write for a variety of audiences, hold events and set up communities of practice within and beyond specific projects without needing multiple approvals.

Conventional organisations with physical premises, offered ways to make sense of, or discharge, thoughts and feelings generated by work through face-to-face conversations with colleagues (which might be formal and informal, professional and social). A hierarchical structure helped to contain anxiety and provide security, whilst a physical space helped create a boundary behind which work could be left behind after one left the workspace.

As a ’virtual’ worker, with a lot of conversation happening over workplace chat applications or email conversations, interactions might provoke ‘desk rage’ but when you pull back from the keyboard, you often find yourself alone without any immediate means to process what just happened.

Traditional organisations often created formal roles and tasks to help meet its purpose effectively. These are often absent from networked organisations. The absence of such roles can mean that key issues (such as financial management and communications) are left unaddressed, left entirely to the founder/director to think about, creating a sense of dependency, or undertaken by multiple associates with little coordination.

Increasing risk of homogeneity

Individuals are often invited to join networked firms by founders and directors. New joiners are therefore dependent on the founder’s own identity and network. This can lead to a homogeneity amongst network members. Levels of trust are higher and the network is easier to sustain. However, innovation and novelty often stems from heterogeneity. Without conscious efforts to diversify the network, there are risks that the network and its work stagnates. But maintaining high enough levels of trust amongst a more diverse network requires more work.

Poor teamwork between associates

Email and especially workplace chat applications promise increased productivity. But while they can help transmit messages, they rarely help to develop shared meaning. Their use can encourage more voluminous communication, but this tends to be of lower quality. You can also end up spending a lot of time reading emails and chat messages rather than doing your work.

Shared meaning can be better achieved through regular synchronous engagement through video meetings. Organising these can be difficult given busy schedules and differing time zones. But they can help to develop a shared identity, and a supportive working environment despite the difficulty of reading people’s emotions online.

But even in the context of video meetings, contesting differences, which is at the core of good team work, can be fraught with difficulty. Good collaboration requires a shared history among people who are willing to take risks and expose their ‘ignorance’ (or not knowing) to one another. This is difficult especially if you’re working with people you’ve never met, as ‘first impressions are often lasting impressions’. And with limitations in what clients are willing to pay, making the time to develop a better understanding of, and develop trust toward, each other is often tricky.

Where you disagree with somebody, interacting virtually makes it harder to truly listen to what they are saying and hold in mind a ‘good’ sense of the other. It is hard to recreate the potentially positive effect of human bodies resonating with one another in the same physical space through video calls. This often results in moving between the extremes of either being overly polite and not saying what’s on your mind on one hand and confrontational behaviour on the other, both of which result in inefficiencies.

All this is exacerbated by asymmetries in power amongst team members, based on differences in the more visible and audible features of individuals’ identity such as whether people are from richer or poorer countries, how they are racialised, their accent, their tone of voice, whether English is a first language (where it is the lingua franca), gender as well as age. Working online is thus more likely to strengthen the processes of inclusion and exclusion which tend to characterise group work.

Having frank conversations is also made tricky due to the competitive environment in which firms operate, encouraging people to cover up any underlying anxieties and preventing them from sharing what’s truly bothering them. At the same time associates often practice reciprocity and exchange which provides them with mutual benefits in the form of learning and funding opportunities but works against them saying anything potentially uncomfortable for fear of losing out on valuable information and business opportunities, especially from the firm’s director.

The lack of a shared history amongst team members along with difficulties in frank communication made virtual teams more susceptible to picking up on the vibrations of the client organisations, which can make life trickier for the consulting team, if those vibrations aren’t helpful! As a team leader, knowing how much of colleagues’ behaviour is them and how much is the client organisation getting into them is hard to distinguish.

While people in a networked firm might find cohering around particular projects challenging, this is more likely to be the case at the level of the firm. Even if associates are invited to attend regular firm level meetings, they may not join frequently due to competing priorities. And when they do attend, they are not necessarily present, often being drawn into multi-tasking with little space for staff to reflect on their experiences working across projects, reinforcing silos across the network.

Challenges in taking up the role of leader

Leading project teams in a networked environment was a challenging prospect. Given the emergence of new forms of power, a leader can find themselves being challenged, having to negotiate decisions on an ongoing basis and accepting feedback from others about how their actions are being interpreted. Suggesting to one’s ‘followers’ what they should do or trying to make people do things using carrots and sticks was likely to be counter productive. Instead a better approach was for leaders to persuade and negotiate with team members, so the latter consciously chooses their next move.

This resonates with Simon Western’s notion of eco-leadership, which is shaped by an understanding of one’s purpose, an emphasis on engaging staff, distributing leadership and shifting from top down control to influencing eco-systems and networks. But this can leave leaders feeling vulnerable and affect their capacity to demonstrate presence and resilience in providing space for others to process their experience. This is also contrary to conventional approaches in a context where leaders and their ‘followers’ might be pre-disposed to setting up relations of dependency.

Given what I’ve shared above, not surprisingly then, research undertaken before Covid suggested that the more virtual the team was, the poorer the quality of team interactions and performance.

Making sense of things in pairs and small groups

A lack of togetherness can make it hard for staff to find ways to protect themselves from excessive levels of anxiety that the work often generates. This can in turn reduce the mental space that staff have to create and innovate and make doing so a very risky proposition. Associates may not identify with the whole firm. But they are more likely to meet with other individuals in pairs or threes, spaces which are felt to be ‘safer’.

These groupings are likely to be based on common identity characteristics such as nationality, language, gender, race or a shared history of having worked in the same institution previously or studied at the same university. While these pairs or small groups might work against the purpose of the whole firm, as wrong or negative perceptions (i.e. gossip) might get ‘trapped’ in these groups, they can also help people to work through and process the pressures they are under. They can also help provide the basis of a community of practice where learning and innovation take place even if it might be somewhat fragmented. It may not be perfect, but it may well be ‘good enough’.