Team coordinators are prepared to manage multiple situations such as misunderstanding, conflicts, different levels of engagement and they are usually willing to take risks while accepting a leading position. Yet, not all of them are prepared for crisis such as COVID-19 pandemic. The way they communicate with their teams in this type of periods is essential to ensure continuity and establish organizational trust (Guzzo et al, 2021). In this context, many corporations had to face a new challenge: working mostly or even entirely from home. Employees as well as managers switched to virtual meetings, the concept of a team has suffered modifications and virtual meetings replaced all face-to-face interactions. Leaders had to adapt and learn how to improve their skills to engage with their teams and to ensure performance. The purpose of our study is to see what specific activities were implemented within teams while working from home, what is the perception leaders have about team performance and to find out if this context has diminished their level of control. Data for this paper are gathered using in-depth interviews with team leaders/coordinators/managers from different corporations installed in Bucharest, Romania. The results show that the performance has increased, the teams and coordinators showed a great adaptability, and their level of trust has improved. Recommendations are put forward for teams to consider creating a better balance between their personal and professional lives and to find new ways of socializing at work from time to time on other topics that the business-related ones.
1 July 2020 in Proceedings of the International Conference on Business Excellence
We are living in an extremely globalized and digitalized world where social media represent the core of our existence whether for personal or professional reasons. Social media impact on business in general caught the attention of researchers (Grizane & Jurgelane, 2017) during the last years, especially to measure the impact of their use in business growth, increasing sales and/or customer loyalty. There are more and more studies that focus on the harmful effect of fake news on specific markets, news that may appear easily and are difficult to control. Fake news can affect both the customers and/ or the business depending on the context. The purpose of this study is to identify how are the fake news appearing in a world where access to information is so simple and everybody can check the truthfulness of information and what kind of barriers are used to protect the business from being affected and the customers from being misinformed. Data for this paper are gathered using in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from real estate businesses. The results show that the level of increasing fake news is affecting the trust building process. Recommendations are put forward for organizations to analyze more user behavior and use it for the decision-making process in order to limit the negative effects of fake news. Also, customers need to learn to identify quality brand communication, pay attention to details and be very precautions while taking decisions based on news that may be fake.