Does remote working impact collaboration?

With so many of us working from home, maybe for the first time or even continuing a trend, this research is important when considering the need to create environments to encourage collaboration. Yang and colleagues report that “The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information workers. Viewing this shift as a natural experiment in which some workers were already working remotely before the pandemic enables us to separate the effects of firm-wide remote work from other pandemic-related confounding factors. Here, we use rich data on the emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020 to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide remote work on collaboration and communication.

Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication.

Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.”

Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, Neha Shah, Kevin Sherman, Brent Hecht, and Jaime Teevan.  2021.  “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers.”  Nature Human Behaviour, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4#change-history