As remote work has become commonplace during the Covid pandemic, it has provided a fascinating insight into how productive people can be when remote work is adopted at scale.  For instance, in a previous article, research found that productivity either grew or remained stable during the pandemic, often as a result of people obtaining greater control over their work time.

Research from BerkeleyHaas argues that while this has been the case for solo work, it hasn’t been as beneficial for collaborative work as workers have tended to become more siloed in who and how they communicate with colleagues.  This has been typified by a reduction in real-time conversations, with scheduled Zoom calls the de-facto means of communication across the workforce.

Collaborative work

The study involved over 61,000 employees from across Microsoft, with data collected both before and after the company issued a company-wide work-from-home mandate as a result of the pandemic.  The results suggest that having a workforce operating remotely full-time may make it harder for sharing new information and generating new innovation.

“Measuring the causal effects of remote work has historically been difficult, because only certain types of workers were allowed to work away from the office. That changed during the pandemic, when almost everyone who could work from home was required to do so,” the researchers say. “The work-from-home mandate created a unique opportunity to identify the effects of company-wide remote work on how information workers communicate and collaborate.”

The findings emerged after data was collected on the behavior of employees using things such as their instant messages, phone calls, emails, meeting diaries, and even their working hours.  The authors highlight that while there is clearly a desire to better reflect the desires of employees, there is also a need to understand some of the implications of remote work for employee behavior.

Changing habits

Microsoft is already a relatively unique example as 18% of employees were working from home even before Covid changed everything so significantly.  This also allowed researchers to compare the impact of the pandemic quite closely, however.  The authors aimed to remove the various other impacts the pandemic had on employee behavior by using various statistical techniques to compare the employees who worked from home pre-Covid with those who had to do so as a result of the pandemic.

The move to remote working resulted in a 25% fall in time spent collaborating with colleagues compared to pre-pandemic levels.  What’s more, when people did collaborate, they tended to do so more slowly than before.

Instead, newly remote workers appeared to communicate more intently with those they were already close to, thus building deeper connections with their inner network.  This communication typically took place via asynchronous forms of communication, such as messaging platforms or email, than they did via synchronous forms, such as the telephone or a Zoom (or perhaps teams in this instance!) call.

“The fact that your colleagues’ remote work status affects your own work habits has major implications for companies that are considering hybrid or mixed-mode work policies,” the researchers conclude. “It’s important to be thoughtful about how these policies are implemented.”