Developing the Effectiveness and Cooperation of Virtual Meetings : Case: International Deus Project

Abstract

A need for this thesis became after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the Deus project and the people around Europe to work remotely. This meant that instead of normal meetings, most of the meetings changed to be done virtually. This created a need for the project also to think about how to develop a learning and training approach virtually and how virtual meetings could be improved.

Many employees and students had already experienced virtual meetings before Covid-19, but since nowadays in most European countries, virtual meetings are essential we need to research the experiences of employees about the effectiveness and cooperation during virtual meetings. This research studies the experiences of employees by a combination of interviews and online inquiries.

Employees who participated in the research were from five countries in the Deus project. The participants gave useful information on how to develop virtual meetings to be more cooperative and effective. The results were analyzed and reflected comparing the results to the theoretical framework of this thesis.

The theoretical framework of this thesis consists of cooperative learning and cooperative leadership, which according to the research presented in this thesis are some of the best pedagogic models to motivate a team to work and succeed. The final expected outcome of the thesis is a new virtual meeting concept, which could be used to build better virtual meetings. If a new cooperative concept were built, it should be implemented to study its benefits by any researcher or an organization.