Managing Project Teams in Digital World

In 2020 the world was unexpectedly hit by COVID-19 and a huge number of teams including the project ones had to begin to work remotely. While debates over productiveness of distant work remain, it is difficult to deny that the effect on project teams during the pandemic is long term. During the quarantine, completely new project teams have been formed and they cannot exist within traditional teamwork style. There are examples of teams composed of international members or companies that are satisfied with the benefits of remote work and plan to introduce hybrid workstyle in post-Covid times. Since many project companies have never employed an online workstyle of such massive scale before, they have faced new ethical questions. Should webcam be always on during online meetings? Is there any new dress code for online meetings? Is smoking allowed during online meetings? Questions like these commonly arise within companies. To research the impact of obligatory “online” workstyle (also referred to as “remote work”, “distant work” or “work from home”) on the ethical conjuncture of the project teams operations, the methods of surveying and interviewing were employed. The questionnaire contained statements about ethical risks and respondents were asked to express to what extend they agree or disagree to them. Also, there were several questions to discover project personnel’s opinion on new ethical risks specific to remote work only. In the interview, project managers from different industries were asked about their experience with the significant risks discovered in the survey and best-practice ideas they had. As a result, a list of ethical issues was compiled for project managers to be included in their team codes of conduct and recommendations on how to solve these issues were deduced. The issue addressed in this study is of utmost significance from both scientific and practical viewpoints. Enterprises, when considering hybrid or fully distant workstyle for their project teams, can use the results of this research to draw drafts for project teams code of conduct or include recommendations from this study into their corporate code of conduct if applicable. For scholars investigating project management ethics, this study can serve as an overview of the most common ethical issues remote project teams face, which can be used for further research.