The Covid pandemic saw remote working adopted en masse for the first time, and therefore provided us with unheralded insight into what worked and what didn’t. While the general consensus among workers is that remote work is something they want to retain, managers are often keener for people to return to the office on a regular basis.
An often voiced concern by managers is that remote working prevents younger employees from learning effectively from their peers. It’s a question assessed in detail by a recent study from the Kellogg School of Management.
Working together
The researchers analyzed a whopping 17 million or so previous studies conducted over the last 45 years to understand how physical proximity affects the likelihood that collaborators would gain new knowledge from their peers.
The study found that the subtle non-verbal means of communicating when face-to-face are often vital for the more tacit forms of knowledge exchange that form the basis of how we learn. Indeed, the researchers argue that we often do far more of this kind of learning than we imagine.
The researchers analyzed data from the Microsoft Academic Graph, covering academic papers from 1975 to 2018. They aimed to spot scholars who picked up new knowledge through teaming up with colleagues they’d worked with before.
To figure this out, they looked for instances where someone switched from their usual academic field to a completely different one. For example, starting in materials science, teaming up with chemists, and eventually publishing a solo paper in chemistry. Even though one-person papers aren’t common, they still found 1.7 million authors who fit this pattern.
Mapping connections
Then, they mapped out where these 1.7 million authors and their collaborators were located, down to the specific building. If two authors were less than a 10-minute walk (about 700 meters) apart, they counted it as a local collaboration.
The researchers also checked the authors’ career stage, how highly ranked their institution was, and how many people joined in on their group projects. This way, they pieced together a detailed picture of how knowledge moves around when scholars team up.
They also calculated the so-called learning rate, which was defined by academics who first began to work with peers in a new field before subsequently publishing a paper in that field, and then calculated whether those collaborations were local or not.
Location matters
The results show that instances of local collaboration had declined over the 40-year study period, such that just 60% of collaborations were local in 2015, with technology enabling teams to operate over thousands of kilometers.
While remote collaborations increased, however, they also coincided with a decline in the learning rate. This was true across every discipline, with local collaborations seeing greater learning undertaken than long-distance collaborations. This was especially so in fields such as science and engineering.
What’s more, the learning premium was equally pronounced for those early in their careers and among those at lower-ranked institutions, both of which necessitate learning to help one’s career progression.
A changing world
With the last paper included in the study published in 2018, there has obviously been a lot of change since then, not least of which in our propensity to work remotely. Indeed, the use of tools like Zoom is now commonplace even when working with local collaborators.
The researchers worry that those of us working remotely may be missing out on valuable learning opportunities, which could, in turn, affect our career progression.
“It could result in a knowledge disparity and segregation,” the researchers explain. “Especially if you’re early in your career. You may miss collaborative learning opportunities that could ultimately benefit your career.”
Indeed, this could also have consequences for innovation more broadly, as the bedrock of innovation is the exchange of knowledge and ideas, which if hampered by remote collaboration could have longer-lasting consequences.
Striking a balance
The authors suggest that companies should strike a balance between letting employees work from home, where they can get stuff done, and having them come to the office, where they can collaborate and generate new ideas.
This is especially crucial for companies aiming to be innovative. If a company wants to grow its knowledge in a specific area, like tech in Silicon Valley or government affairs in Washington, DC, they should think about setting up offices in those places to tap into the local know-how.
“Bring people together so they can exchange ideas in person,” the authors conclude. “We are incredibly good at learning from each other, especially in these murky ways that can lead to innovation.”
