According to the IDC, more than 56% of employees in Asia.

Pacific region want flexible work, with options to work both in the office and remotely. Furthermore, the data shows that more than 70% of the employees surveyed said their productivity was higher or at least at the same level compared to pre-pandemic.

What this means is that a huge number of people will be working in organisations having never met their colleagues in real life and been onboarded into teams remotely. This creates a whole host of complications for HR and driving employee engagement.

What can employers do to minimise the negative side effects of this unusual situation? One clear solution is to hire natural team players who will probably take better to working with a bunch of people they may have never met.

The new rules of teamwork in the physical world

Let’s pretend for a moment that the isolation aspect of this equation doesn’t exist – and that instead, we’re just dealing with a standard case of trying to bring new people together to form an effective team. To do this, it’s helpful to look through a lens that HR influencer Amy Edmondson calls “teaming”.

Amy is professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and was voted HR’s most influential thinker in 2019. In that same year, she delivered an incredible Ted Talk on the topic of “teaming”, during which she described the concept as “teamwork on the fly”. Or in other words, teamwork without the pre-established relationships that you find within well-established teams.

To highlight what Amy means when she says “teaming”, a great example from her keynote, is that of hospital staff. She says that the average patient in a hospital will be attended by 60 different members of staff during their stay – many of whom won’t even know each other’s name, let alone their temperament or style. Yet they still must find a way to work together in order to cure that patient. And sometimes, life is literally at stake.

The 3 key ingredients for effective team work

Before you can build strong new teams across a remote landscape, it’s important to first understand the characteristics which form good teams in the physical world.

Amy Edmondson says there are three specific traits found in most successful “teamers”:

• Humility
• Curiosity
• An appetite for learning by risk-taking

In her talk, Amy explains that in situations where teaming really works, you can be absolutely sure that leaders at all levels are humble – they admit they do not have the answers. She calls this “situational humility”.
Regarding curiosity, she says that it’s vital team members drop the “you or me” mindset. Instead of seeing colleagues as opponents, you want people to be actively curious about what each other can bring to the table.

And it’s important for members of ad-hoc teams to have the psychological safety of being able to take risks without ridicule.

And this leads onto one of the most baffling HR challenges of this whole pandemic: How do you build effective teams, with qualities such as these, when you are hiring remotely, working remotely, and when you are potentially asking a team of colleagues to join together with people they may never meet?

How to build a virtual high performing team

Finding good team players is difficult at the best of times. But when it comes to assessing a person’s skills in a totally remote landscape, it’s even harder to fully understand their personality, their intentions, their sense of humour, and their work ethic. And this is going to be the same for any colleagues they eventually work with, who will know them best as a little square on their computer screen.

So, what can be done?

While Amy Edmondson admitted that it was an interesting challenge with no definitive answer, she did have some sound advice for anybody trying to identify team players remotely.

“Start by asking them about their previous team experiences,” Amy said. “Look for evidence of humility and credit-giving – that’s a good place to start.”

You might not be able to visually assess a person’s team-working abilities in a remote situation, but you can certainly look for cues in the way they tell their stories. Is a person talking about the contributions and achievements of others they worked with? Or are they constantly making themselves the heroes of the story?

Working better together, remotely

Of course, there’s more to this challenge than simply hiring good team players. And if you’re working with remote teams who you’ve hired during the lockdown, then you might find yourself struggling with a range of other challenges, including communication and company culture.