What is virtual intelligence and why do all workers need it?

In this hyper-connected, post-COVID-19 world, gone are the days when everyone works together in the same place at the same time. Instead, the majority of white-collar workers regularly interact with telecommuting colleagues, counterparts in distributed offices, remote workers and freelancers.

Even as some companies, like Amazon and Goldman Sachs, implement return-to-office policies, 67.8% of tech industry employees globally were fully or mostly remote in 2023. The consulting and finance industries are similar, with 50.6% and 48.7% of employees working primarily remotely.

Job candidates today are expected to collaborate, communicate and seek feedback and mentorship, in addition to possessing the knowledge required to perform their specific roles. All of these skills are essential to the success of individuals and teams, yet there has been little effort to examine how these competencies translate to a distributed or hybrid work environment compared to in-office, in-person and entirely synchronous equivalents. Assessing 'remote-readiness' as the working world goes hybrid is, therefore, essential.

In the past, employers may have factored in employees’ intelligence quotient (IQ), emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) and their technical skills. These days, it’s also about a team’s ‘remote-readiness’ quotient.

This remote-readiness quotient or 'virtual intelligence' can make the difference between someone getting hired or let go. Take, for example, a white shoe law firm that recently laid off two associates who possessed excellent legal minds yet didn’t know the unwritten etiquette for how to project professionalism in remote meetings with new clients. Or the sales development representative who regularly appeared on video calls with new prospects with religious paraphernalia visible behind him. Or the individual who doesn’t grasp time zone implications when scheduling calls and deadlines with remote colleagues. These anecdotes are common and preclude talent from finding, keeping or succeeding in their jobs.

Demonstrating virtual intelligence or remote readiness at scale could also have larger geopolitical implications. A growing strategy in countries with high youth unemployment — particularly in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — is to prepare rising talent to work remotely in digital jobs. Governments, universities and youth organizations have invested heavily in training young people to become coders, marketers, sales people, customer support agents, financial analysts and prompt engineers for companies abroad. The belief is that by investing in their skills within specific in-demand roles, fresh talent can be prepared to enter a global workforce.

The market trend lines have favoured this analysis even in the age of AI, with the World Economic Forum forecasting an increase of 26% overall in global digital jobs between 2023-2043. This is especially true in emerging markets, where growth is projected to be 71% in sub-Saharan Africa, 33% in the Middle East and 19% in South Asia.

But hard skills alone will not allay HR leaders’ concerns about finding the right candidates — especially when hiring people in new places that they are not familiar with. HR leaders want to know that their employees have good judgment — including when it comes to working with global, diverse teams. As remote work expert and LinkedIn 'Top Voice', Cali Yost, stated, “In today’s flexible work reality, employers need to know if employees have the skills to hit the ground running and perform at a high-level working across places, spaces and time zones.”

If the skills to collaborate, communicate, seek feedback and mentorship remotely are critical to the new work environment, how do employers assess talent for these skills? As the head of HR at a global cybersecurity company with over 10,000 employees in distributed offices recently asked, “How do I know that this talent is ‘remote-ready'?"

There are a range of ways to do this: via interviews focused on virtual intelligence, for example, or via work simulations. Prompted by this question, the social enterprise that I lead, Localized, recently partnered with ETS, the largest assessment organization in the world and creators of the TOEFL and GRE exams, to launch ETS Anywherepro, a remote-ready assessment for digital workers. Co-developed by the experts at ETS and Localized’s behavioural scientist-in-residence and based on conversations with hundreds of employers over the last year, this assessment is one method to help badge those with the virtual intelligence to work with hybrid and distributed teams. Our aim is to ensure that it’s easy to validate talent with the skills. For those who don’t pass the assessment, there are many questions that offer opportunities for further learning and reflection.

Regardless of which method employers or talent adopt, it is beneficial for governments, universities, employers and job seekers alike to recognize that we are in a new moment where virtual impressions matter. In addressing her recent publication, A Review of Virtual Impression Management Behaviors and Outcomes,” professor of management at Kogod School of Business at American University, Hayley Blunden, emphasized that: “One big takeaway from this work is that virtual interaction is really quite rich in driving others’ impressions of us.”