Network interaction in student organizations before and after COVID-19 pandemic start

The COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 provoked the shift to remote functioning in a range of organizations, causing the change of formal and informal interaction networks in the organizations. The paper outlines the research results of the outcomes of such shift from offline to remote functioning in three student organizations at NaUKMA: “Ta Mohylianka” (TM), “Kyiv Mohyla Moot Court Society” (KMMCS) and “Buddy NaUKMA” (Buddy). The survey data on the network interaction in ТМ and KMMCS were collected in March 2020 before the shift to the remote mode, and after a year another wave was conducted in March 2021 to collect the data from these two organizations and another third organization, Buddy. This enables us to trace the change in informal networks due to the remote mode of communication a year after the pandemic started. As a result, we reveal that the informal interaction and friendship in organizations increased after the shift to remote mode when we focus on the actors who were in the organizations both before and after the pandemic started. Thus, they sustained and strengthened their informal ties that they formed in offline format prior to COVID-19 (this is observed both for TM and KMMCS). However, with new actors joining the organizations in 2021, the average ties strength for friendship networks declined for KMMCS. Moreover, the attribute of faculty that defines the work processes in Buddy caused higher average tie strength for friendship network within a faculty, but much lower between faculties. In contrast, TM as an organization also joins students from all the faculties, but its work processes are not overlapping with the boundaries of one faculty, so the friendship ties formed actively in groups that are heterogeneous by faculty attribute. In addition, we found that the level of integration of actors into the organization informal networks is partly interrelated with how the staff assess the efficiency of communication in the organization. The last outcome requires further checking with alternative tools and a more detailed scale to assess the efficiency of communication in the organization. For practical reasons, this also sheds light on the improvement of organizations functioning when the remote or mixed modes of work are planned to be applied in 2022–2023 academic year due to the wartime in Ukraine.