RAPID: Teaming in the Time of Covid-19: Understanding how technology affordances can enable collaboration during sudden workplace disruption

The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has already been highly disruptive to workplaces. With little notice and marked urgency, organizations have been shifting their workers out of their typical workplaces and into their homes. Widespread fear, as well as practices such as social distancing or closing offices in favor of remote collaboration, may influence how employees communicate and collaborate, even if none of the employees catch the disease themselves. We will investigate what implications these disruptions have on communication, interpersonal relationships, and employees in organizations. This work aims to examine both the impact of COVID-19 on these work processes in organizations, and how processes impacted by the outbreak recover, or fail to recover, over time. We posit that, beyond its immediate impact on the organization, COVID-19 will alter social relationships in the organizations in ways that endure even after the pandemic itself. In short, the goal of this research is to identify the impacts of COVID-19 on employees and collaboration within organizations, as well as whether organizations recover naturally from these changes or whether a deliberate intervention will be necessary for recovery.