How a Lack of Unstructured Interaction Is Ruining Team Collaboration in Your Company

Team interactions. They’re essential, both for the success of your company and the overall satisfaction levels of your teammates. The two go hand-in-hand. But in the age of cam-to-cam, Zoom meetings, team interactions are kept at a minimum. 

For 90% of people, Zoom meetings are too burdensome, time-consuming, and ineffective. But is that necessarily a bad thing? In traditional offices, most interactions are nothing more than distractions from “real work,” right? 

On a surface level, perhaps. But when you go a bit deeper, the situation is more complicated. A lack of unstructured interactions we had in physical offices is sorely missing. 

A lack of casual social interactions negatively affects overall team collaboration and prevents distributed teams from being engaged and productive.

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The Social Dilemma 

Distributed teams often lack the social dynamic that creates lively, productive teams in the physical office. Needing to schedule a call for every little thing becomes exhausting. 

The hurdle of scheduling a meeting creates enough friction that many teams simply stop taking the time to work through problems together, bounce ideas off one another, and keep communication lines open and flowing throughout the day. 

This sharp decline in social interaction inevitably leads to several significant problems, including lack of alignment, inefficient communication, and low team member engagement and morale. These problems may start small, and you may overlook their impact right away since work is still getting done. 

But, left unchecked, these problems can escalate, significantly reducing team member productivity and satisfaction.  Here’s why:

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Lack of Alignment 

Without frequent, unstructured interactions outside of planned meetings, it’s easy for teams to get out of sync with project priorities, goals, and tasks. 

Of course, structured meetings are still important for team collaboration. They allow teams to stay on track and align their objectives. However, they don’t replace the casual check-ins and conversations that keep projects moving in the right direction.

For example, teams that lack alignment are more likely to duplicate efforts, make avoidable errors, or unintentionally let important details slip through the cracks. All of these mistakes can quickly derail an entire project.

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Inefficient Communication

Problems that could once be easily solved by hopping over to someone’s desk and working through it in person now stretch unresolved for days, diluted by back-and-forth emails and never-ending video calls. 

Sure, work is getting done, but it’s inefficient, and the process becomes frustrating and draining to even the most long-suffering individuals.

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Low Engagement and Morale 

When team members work primarily in isolation, it is straightforward to become disengaged and dissatisfied with their role – and the company. In the office, many leaders seek to make work “fun,” and there’s a reason for that. 

A culture of enjoying the work you do and building awesome, dynamic teams has become a critical differentiator for leaders looking to attract and keep talented team members. 

In a distributed workforce, it’s hard for many team members to remain engaged when the team doesn’t feel like a team anymore. Tools for team collaboration like Zoom can easily take all the fun, social parts of a job out of the equation. 

While many leaders have tried to solve this with Zoom happy hours, these often fell flat because they felt like just another meeting. 

Scheduling another video call doesn’t recreate the person-to-person interactions and bonding organically at in-person events. As a result, many people simply don’t go, and leaders, disheartened, stop scheduling them.

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The Solution: A Virtual Office 

Virtual office platforms, like Kosy, have rapidly evolved to meet the growing need for frictionless interactions no matter where your teams are located. These virtual work platforms complement any existing team collaboration app you may be using at the moment. 

But they are specifically designed to recreate the interactions of the physical office and keep communication flowing without the barriers of scheduling yet another meeting.

Ready to Reconnect Your Remote Team? 

Your virtual office should enable team collaboration, no matter where your team members are. 

Sure, this is something you want, but you’re unsure where to start, right? Kosy is here to help. Our virtual office platform makes it easy to create custom virtual offices built to meet your company’s unique needs, host engaging meetings, and connect your team.

Try Kosy for free to see how easy it is to bring your teams together remotely.