Communication in the Age of COVID-19

Project Management in the Information Age Course work
Communication in the Age of COVID-19 Assignment
Project success relies heavily on effective communication. While there has been a greater shift towards employing virtual teams in recent years, most organizations continue to rely on having a significant portion of their staff work regularly onsite in office locations. In the communications management lesson, the advantages of face-to-face communication in promoting effective collaboration are emphasized repeatedly.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a severe shock to how many people work in addition to putting their health at risk. A study published in May stated that half of people working before the pandemic were now performing their jobs remotely. A large portion of that group is made up of knowledge-workers. Some academics and business leaders expect this to be a permanent shift. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has said he expects 50% of his employees to be doing their work outside of an office location within five years.
There have been other times in the past when experts have forecast a growing movement towards telecommuting. Some organizations have pushed back against that trend in the past. Ironically, there are two notable technology organizations who have done so in the past decade. The now-defunct Yahoo decided under CEO Marissa Mayer to put a halt to telecommuting back in 2013. IBM instituted a similar policy in 2017.
As we’ll discuss in class, communication technology can promote better communication among virtual team members. However, it is interesting to note that before the pandemic hit, 95% of the 2000 employees working at Slack, the company behind a leading cloud-based team collaboration tool, worked out of a company office.
Imagine it is 2025 and the predictions about a major shift towards telecommuting have come true, with half or more of knowledge workers being able to telecommute at least three days each work week. Onsite project team meetings have been effectively eliminated. Each student will write a two page paper using the standard assignment template which addresses the following questions in that scenario:
1. Would you expect that on average, the effectiveness of communication within project teams and between team members and stakeholders not on the project team would improve? Stay the same? Get worse?
2. What conditions would need to exist or what steps would need to be taken in order to promote effective communication as described in the first bullet? Please also describe how you think those conditions or steps would help.
3. Would you prefer to permanently telecommute in the world of 2025 described above? Why or why not?
This assignment is inspired by a June 2020 article by Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine titled “What If Working from Home Goes On … Forever?”. A link to it is included in the session folder for our October 28 class session. It is a long article and students are not required to read it, or at least all of it. However, it might offer some useful perspectives on the assignment questions. Of course, students are welcome to conduct their own research. It is acceptable to draw on other sources from newspapers, journals, reputable websites, and other online sources. You may also interview fellow students, co-workers or even family members for their thoughts on the subject.
https://www(dot)nytimes(dot)com/interactive/2020/06/09/magazine/remote-work-covid.html?searchResultPosition=1
Your paper will be evaluated on the basis of how clearly and openly you answer each question, including the validity and number of conditions and steps you discuss in your response to question 2. The strength of your reasoning and openness displayed in how you address question 3 will also be carefully evaluated.
NEED TO SUMBIT ON THE Turnitin. Will check similarity.
Make sure you did your own work, use your own language to answer all the questions.
Submission will be sent to Turnitin to be electronically reviewed for plagiarism.