Abstract
Crisis management by work teams usually requires increased communication. However, unexpected and crisis situations may also include restrictions on common communication channels and patterns.
This was also the case during the covid-19 pandemic, when work teams had to partially or completely transfer their communication to the online environment. Therefore, we were interested in how much the subjectively perceived volume of communication during a pandemic will change compared to the normal situation.
As a form of support, we offered work teams the opportunity to monitor communication using the sociomapping method right at the beginning of the quarantine. 73 work teams (803 people) signed up for the program, ranging from 4 to 30 people. Members evaluated each other on the frequency of current and optimal communication on a five-point scale.
We compared the results with the standards for different sizes of teams collected in the pre-quarantine period on a total of 1184 Czech teams (9545 people). The volume of current communication remained comparable during the quarantine with the situation outside the quarantine for all team sizes.
The evaluation of the optimal volume of communication did not change only for small teams up to 7 people (p = 0.295; d = 0.147), for medium teams (7 to 15 members) the need to communicate with others decreased significantly (p = 0.027; d = 0.414) and there was even a more significant reduction in teams over 16 (p = 0.0014; d = 0.882). The transfer of communication to the online environment during quarantine had an impact especially on medium and large teams, in which the need to communicate with other team members decreased.