Inclusion from a distance - Virtual work and work group inclusion

Sammanfattning: Diversity has during the last decades been established as a valued business goal for companies worldwide. During this development, inclusion has emerged as the main mediating factor to achieve the benefits of diversity, a mediating factor companies struggle to measure. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic fuelled a switch to remote work, posing a multitude of questions regarding how to best communicate virtually. As both companies and their employees indicate a desire to keep these new work methods, virtual work becomes a research area of high interest. This thesis combines theories on work group inclusion, media richness and gender in organizations to investigate the research question "How does the perceived level of work group inclusion of employees relate to the level of media richness in virtual and face-to-face teams?" with the additional question of "How does this relationship differ depending on the gender of the employees?". The questions are answered by conducting a quantitative study, using a multivariate regression analysis of a self-served survey answered by 1100 office workers across 4 different male-dominated industries. The analysis finds an interesting gender difference indicating that men demonstrate higher levels of work group inclusion related to using lean media such as text communication while the opposite is true for women and other genders, where instead higher media richness such as video conferencing is related to higher levels of inclusion. This difference reveals how the choice of communication method relates to the perceived work group inclusion and may favour certain genders in the virtual workplace, posing questions regarding how communication practices should be adjusted to virtual work settings.