Prior to the Covid pandemic, remote working was a relatively rare occurrence, and while contingent workers were growing in number, the proportion of the workforce operating remotely was relatively low. The pandemic obviously changed that, and in many industries large proportions of the workforce were now working remotely.
Research from Columbia Business School suggests that shared culture is vital if remote work is to be successful for employers and employees alike. The study focused on the various forms of misbehavior employees can engage in when working remotely, such as deviating from their task or not taking responsibility. They find that when the organization’s values are well communicated, this misbehavior is far less likely to occur.
“Employers looking for ways to keep their remote workers on task can increase communication efforts to employees around the company’s social responsibility values and employee ethics,” the researchers say. “If the company simultaneously ups the monitoring of the workers and they know they’re being watched, though, the benefits tied to communication of values are negated.”
Common values
The researchers recruited around 4,000 volunteers from the Mechanical Turk platform to understand how online gig workers operated. Each recruit was asked to enter information into the contact pages of various websites, with bonuses offered if they reached the website owners by phone.
The researchers also randomly decided whether to implement certain values around how they communicated with the gig workers. For instance, some received communication around things like the organization’s social responsibility values or the ethical code that employees follow. Some of the volunteers also received a note in their assignment description saying that their work was being monitored, while others did not.
Regardless of whether how they worked was being monitored, all of the workers were tracked in terms of task completion, which allowed the researchers to identify those who not only shirked but also did things like claiming bonus payments falsely. The aim was to see if any link existed between the values and the behavior of the workers.
The results suggest that there was indeed a decline in misconduct among those workers who received communication around the values of the organization. Interestingly, however, this boost was removed when the workers were monitored.
“Remote work is here to stay, and the gig economy only continues to explode in growth. In these settings, employers have traditionally been less likely to communicate company values, because the work is often seen as transactional. This is a major oversight,” the researchers conclude. “As these types of work become increasingly prevalent, employers are going to have to learn how to communicate their values even to physically distant employees if they want to be most effective at building trust, cultivating buy-in, and ultimately, helping workers to stay on track.”
