In recent years, the use of virtual work has increased due to digitalization and the effects of theCovid-19 pandemic. A growing number of companies have shifted to a hybrid model or anentirely virtual model of work. This trend toward virtual work has created a need for leaders tohave skills applicable to the complexities of communication and connection that can occur ina virtual environment. Since for many leaders and companies this environment may be new,they are presented with the challenge of developing leadership skills that can help them tonavigate their roles. Leadership development is an area that has been studied extensively butnot necessarily within the virtual context. Therefore, in order to face the challenges of virtualleadership, leadership development that considers the complexity of a virtual and globallydistributed context is needed. As such, this thesis aims to investigate whether virtual leadershipprograms can develop leaders, given this complex context, and if so, in what ways. This thesisis a qualitative case study, and the data has been collected with questionnaires from a companythat has completed virtual leadership program. Data were later analyzed in connection with atypology of development to determine how leaders in a virtual and globally distributed contextcan be developed. The findings show that the virtual leadership development program’sefficiency depends on how well different kinds of developments have been included in it.

The participatory design previously proved to be a useful approach to design a system together with customers. Also, research has shown guidelines on managing distributed teams, which is now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, more relevant than ever. The gap that remains to be explored is the lack of guidelines on how to design a remote workshop in such a way that it enables people to share their work practice and picture their work contexts. In this work, we aim to gain knowledge about participants' abilities to collaborate online as well as accessing their different work processes by conducting a series of workshops involving a wide range of users. The results show that participants' hands-on performance was rather limited, and they tend to use more traditional ways of cooperation. Applying our methods, we were able to access details about the underlying processes of participants' work and their way of thinking that can be used to make the design of the workshop more suitable for participants.

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