Challenges encountered and strategies adopted by virtual team member in virtual team meetings

Virtual teamwork has been growing rapidly and successfully in the last two decades and has become an essential work form worldwide due to the outbreak of Covid-19. Since then, this work form has become a ‘must’ rather than an alternative in organisations. Drawing from 12 semi-structured interviews and group discussion data collected in a Brazilian multinational IT company located in Manila, this presentation will focus on the challenges faced by virtual team members in the context of virtual team meetings (VTM). VTMsact as a melting pot in which challenges about meeting deficiencies, virtual teamwork, language as well as team diversity all come together and create a particularly challenging environment for virtual team members. While much of the literature on effective virtual teamwork tends to cast the responsibility onto the team managers, interview data reveals that virtual team members also take on pro-active roles and come up with strategies to tackle the challenges they face in virtual work teams.