Covid-19 has taken a dramatic toll on human life, but less clear is how it has affected the performance of design teams in technology forced to work together in endless Zoom meetings.
For sure, some engineers have felt a small benefit from working more regularly at home, somewhat isolated from the workplace. Yet, there are many moms who have bounced toddlers in their laps, still expected to work online and produce outcomes, meet targets and keep households running as dads also try to cope.
There could be some insights for Covid-era work teams from research into space exploration, specifically on how astronauts might cope with a long journey to Mars in coming years.
Soviet cosmonaut Valery Ryumin penned something prescient in his diary in 1980: “All the conditions for murder are met if you shut two [people] in a cabin measuring 18 feet by 20 and leave them together two months.”
It’s obvious there are multiple tech challenges with getting to Mars over a year-long trip, including the impact of radiation on the human body. Living in a tight space aboard a ship and then also on Mars will also create psychological tensions over isolation and confinement.
Behavioral science researchers are studying team performance in anticipation of Mars missions, including how to first build a team that can work together and how to repair the team if the members aren’t working well together. It sounds somewhat like what corporate managers and directors of research institutes have faced when dealing with Earthbound crises, including a pandemic.
An interesting insight researchers have gathered from interviewing former astronauts and studying space mission analogs on Earth over many years is something dubbed the “third-quarter phenomenon.” This is a point in a mission after its midpoint when creative thinking and decision making decline and when motivation is down and tensions are up. It is when the excitement of starting a new project or mission has waned but the end is not quite in sight. With astronauts, specifically ,it is when they have been eating the same foods, talking with the same people and looking at the same dark views day after day. (That experience might sound like working at home during Covid during a long, dark winter and frequently ordering the same take-out food.)
Noshir Contractor and Leslie DeChurch, both professors and researchers into teams and behaviors at Northwestern University, used their work on astronauts to develop ideas on how to maximize teams in a virtual world. Their tips include:
Re-pair your team: If your team or family is not working/playing well together, change who is working closely together and give members of the team tasks they want to do.
Promote positive small group living : Create rituals that bring people together.
Manage the third quarter: Know that mood and motivation can drop just after the midpoint of a mission and prepare for it.
Create structure and meaningful routines: Develop a daily or weekly schedule.
Remember humor: It is a coping style and can bring joy.
Call their tips commonsense if you will, but the main message seems to be that it is important to focus on the people element in a complex technological challenge, whether it is building a better chip or server or rocket ship.
“Teams really do need care along the way to ensure they continue performing at high levels,” DeChurch said in a recent Northwestern magazine article by Emily Ayshford.
DeChurch and Contractor are creating a model for NASA to potentially use in Artemis missions to the Moon, prior to missions to Mars. Their model could predict with 80% accuracy how teams will work together and how to re-pair teams during a mission.
“We want to not just predict what will happen within teams,” Contractor told Ayshford. “We want to be able to change it and optimize it.”