Managing teamwork in the face of pandemic

I was reading lately about teamwork, especially under the new circumstances Coronavirus enforced on us. It is a hot topic and rightfully so since everyone seems to believe that previous face to face relations helped us to maintain a coordinated performance through the pandemic. Now how do we manage teamwork for new people that never meet each other in person?
Coincidently or not I had a call with April where she fantastically explained to me some of the principles I had to know to better understand the effect of Laser Fault Injections on the silicon in order to keep a presentation. She went far and beyond and delivered much more than I was expecting. My feedback to her got us discussing about the education system and its liabilities.

You might wonder what has one to do with the other and how I got from teamwork to school topics.

Well… do you remember what was the worst grade we could take in school? 1. And for what? For copying. Or in other words, for collaboration.

Maybe you haven’t thought about this until now under this perspective, but it is the reality. The worst thing you can do in school is to try to work with somebody else.

You might say that there are places where working on group projects is encouraged. But that never happened to me. Always had to be individual grades for individual work.
In short, if we didn’t know anything on our own, we took a 3 or a 4 maybe. If you didn’t know anything but tried to reach a result with someone else, you took a 1. If we knew the subject and tried to help the other colleague we still got a 1. If a colleague had less knowledge on the subject and turned to inspire from our paper, again we both took a 1.
Does not matter the direction of the attempt, the punishment was always there.

Now we are in our adult life and the companies we work for spend thousands and hundreds of millions of dollars each year on personal development and teamwork classes, trying to fix in 3 days of training what was embedded in our minds for a minimum of 12 years of school, 18 if you count university to it. If you were born and raised in a communistic country? Good luck adding that to the portfolio…

We lived it thousands of times in our lives until now. It shaped our minds and the way we see the world around us.
Teamwork has always been a challenging subject. However, cooperation is a human characteristic that always occurred naturally. To stimulate it, we just have to reprogram ourselves and build together an environment that overwrites years of vehement punishments into praised behavior.

Sounds doable, isn’t it? But will it be a real change if we still receive individual grades?

Just one of many life hassles.

Stay safe; stay well.