Dr Maren Deepwell is the CEO of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), having joined the Association in 2008, she has led the organisation since 2012 including a strategic transition to becoming a virtual team in 2018. Since 2018, she has led the organisation as a fully distributed, virtual team and is currently writing an Open Access coaching book on leading virtual teams – here she shares an extract ahead of its release in spring 2022.

IN 2020 many countries around the world moved learning online in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, most schools, colleges and university campuses closed from March 2020 until the end of the summer term. The ‘great pivot online’ enabled students to continue their learning during months of lockdown and the only gradual return to in person teaching.

At the same time as learning moved online, so did the workplace for an increasing proportion of the population. In the UK, the average percentage of adults working from home increased from 27 per cent to 37 per cent, and estimates suggest that globally up to 88 per cent of organisations “encouraged or required employees to work from home”, from March 2020.

A year on, the UK Business Insights and Conditions Survey (April 2021) showed that in education 48 per cent of employees continue to work from home, the fourth largest percentage behind Real Estate Activities (57 per cent), Professional Scientific and Technical Activities (71 per cent) and Information and Communication (81 per cent). According to the Office for National Statistics, 24 per cent of businesses overall intend to use increased homeworking as a permanent business model going forward, and in education this rises to 37.6 per cent.

Reporting from the survey, the ONS further states: “Both businesses and individuals preferred a ‘hybrid’ working approach (a mixture of both office and homeworking) in the future. However, while nearly two-fifths (38 per cent) of businesses expected 75 per cent or more of their workforce to be at their normal place of work, a large proportion (36 per cent) of those currently homeworking thought they would spend the majority or all their time homeworking in the future.”

This aligns with predictions made by a survey conducted by Gartner, which shows that in the U.S. “82 per cent of respondents intend to permit remote working some of the time as -employees return to the workplace”, and a further forecast that “by the end of 2021, 51 per cent of all knowledge workers worldwide are expected to be working remotely, up from 27 per cent of knowledge workers in 2019”.

Hybrid is here to stay

Although these surveys also show that there is still a significant amount of uncertainty in all industries, a greater adoption of hybrid and homeworking looks to be a certainty. What started as a response to a global crisis is now becoming part of the status quo for an increasing number of people.

When learning moved online and homes across the world suddenly turned into virtual classrooms, many students’ first experience of learning online at scale was a response to a crisis. It is remarkable to consider what was achieved with little or no notice by Learning Technologists all across the world, supporting staff and students. Learning Technology made learning, teaching and assessment during the pandemic possible and provided some continuity in the face of what is commonly referred to as unprecedented circumstances. But we also know that what many experienced was crisis provision, an emergency response version of online learning which was borne of necessity using whatever tools and platforms were readily available. It wasn’t a carefully designed offering full of creativity, engagement and flexibility as we know the best online and blended learning can be. There was no time to learn from the rich body of research and practice that would usually inform the design of new courses and modules, there was only time to respond to crisis after crisis as months of lockdown dragged on.

Similarly, many employees who suddenly found themselves at their kitchen table with their laptop had a first taste of working remotely in a time of crisis. Just like schools and colleges had little notice before they moved online, employers often had to send staff to work from home from one day to the next with little or no support and preparation. The result, for many, was the equivalent of learning during a crisis, a kind of emergency homeworking.

Shift the narrative

Homeschooling and homeworking kept many people safe during the dark days of 2020, but in both cases our emergency response has to evolve from crisis provision to a brighter vision of what virtual learning and virtual working should look like. As universities, colleges and schools invest in expertise and infrastructure to take their blended offering to a new level, so do employers who are looking to adopt a hybrid or home-based working model.

In learning and teaching we might think of the digital learning environment or learning management system as fundamental to learning online at scale, and for the workplace there is comparable infrastructure to be put in place. Once you have your foundation of technology, policy and capability however, where do you go?

In education, online learning is often described as inferior to in-person learning and teaching. The common perception is that if you translate what you are used to doing in person and on campus, such as a lecture for example, and put its equivalent, such as a lecture recording, online, you lose something in the process, it’s a “lecture-deficit” model, if you like.

Which is why it is so important that we shift “the narrative about online education from a deficit one… We need to find ways to ensure that we see some advantages to this different mode of education and garner the benefits of its particular world of possibilities. … It won’t be easy; it won’t be cheap; but our online education won’t be a paltry imitation of old and tired genres like the lecture.”

Equitable and engaging

Creating a richer vision for the future of the virtual classroom highlights what we need to imagine for the future of the virtual workplace, too, and this is the primary purpose of this book.

In this book I want to look at what’s beyond translating office-based working practices online and not focus on what home-workers lose in the process, in a kind of “office-deficit” model. Instead I will share how a distributed organisation can be a welcoming and warm place to work and how you can empower staff in making virtual working an equitable and engaging reality that benefits the organisation and the individual alike.

In 2017 I embarked on a journey of organisational transformation as the CEO of an independent charity, as we took our organisation from a traditional, office-based model of operations to a fully virtual, distributed team. In comparison to many businesses who were forced to adopt home-working in response to the global pandemic, we made the transition for strategic reasons over the period of a year. Instead of sending staff home with a laptop one day and starting home-working the next, we went through formal consultation periods and implemented the transition gradually, providing support and training at every stage. As a result we made a very successful transition and started to focus on how to evolve our approach to working as a virtual team beyond practical considerations from the outset.

People and business needs

When I set out to create a new vision for what working for our virtual organisation would be like, I came across a lot of practical advice about infrastructure and business processes (like article this from Scientific American) and I also read a lot of management books (such as Dr Gleb Tsipursky’s Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage) that seemed intent on helping leaders and managers to translate traditional power structures from the office to the virtual workplace with a strong emphasis on productivity, cost-savings and employee surveillance. None of what I came across helped to answer my questions.

What I was looking for was authentic insight into what it’s like to manage people remotely and to lead an organisation from home, and to do it well. And by “doing it well”, I mean not only meeting budget targets and KPIs but to balance business needs with employee happiness and wellbeing. I was looking to find creative and fun ways to work with people you may never meet in person and to build meaningful working relationships. I was looking for ethical ways to work online that respect employee privacy and build trust between the organisation and its staff. In short, I was looking for the opposite of the ‘office-deficit’ model.

This is why I am writing this book. It’s the book I wish I had found when I was setting out on my journey to lead a virtual team. I hope it will provide a source of inspiration and a prompt for reflection to my readers and will be of practical help with managing hybrid, blended and fully distributed teams and organisations.

Although for many people around the world remote working has been a pandemic necessity, it is by no means a new practice. Working from home has a long history. Here in the UK the industrial age saw a rise in home workers, usually women who worked from home for an outside employer, were described as the ‘hidden workforce’ or the ‘sweated trades’ (Bythell, 1978). This type of work stood in contrast to independent, skilled craftspeople who practiced their trade from home prior to industrialisation. Inequalities affected these (often unskilled) homeworkers and poor working conditions and pay were particularly widespread between 1850 and 1914 across a broad range of industries, including the tailoring industry, shoe, glove and boot making and also straw plaiting and sack making (Pennington & Westover, 1989).

A hundred years later, at the beginning of another era of widespread homeworking and we are now faced with renewed questions about how this will increase inequality and for which parts of the population. Supported by digital technologies we may now have more flexibility working from home, but the pressures of for example caring for children and other family members whilst earning an income remain.

A horizon scanning report published by UK Parliament in April 2021 highlights how little is known about current practice and the long-term impact of an increase in flexible employment. It concludes:

“The impact on health and well-being of the increase of technologies in the workplace and long-term working from home is not yet known and could have potential effects on healthcare systems. Positive benefits from increased flexible working will not be equally distributed throughout the population and could increase economic and social inequalities.”

This book sets out to examine the many factors that impact on the homeworking employee and the employer, and how those change in the long term. Featuring examples of organisational transformation collected over a number of years, each chapter poses questions through which you can examine your own policies and approaches and explore practical solutions to common issues encountered by virtual teams. It presents an opportunity to rethink how we work, to reimagine home as a workplace for this new era of distributed working and to consider what is most important to us and how we can shape our working lives for the better.

From Virtual Learning to Virtual Working: Open Leadership in practice by Dr Maren Deepwell will be published in 2022 as an Open Access publication by the Association for Learning Technology.