The Benefits of Offices with People
September 29, 2021
One result of the pandemic is likely to be with us for a while. Many workers find they prefer working remotely for a number of reasons, and a hefty percentage insist they be allowed to continue doing so. That may not be best for employers, though, at least in the IT field. The journal Nature Human Behavior shares a study on “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers.” A team of researchers from Microsoft, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley, examined the internal communications of Microsoft employees during the first half of 2020. They analyzed patterns in emails, calendars, instant messages, video and audio calls, and work hours. The conclusion—remote work has a detrimental effect on collaboration and information sharing. The paper states:
“Our results suggest that shifting to firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network to become more heavily siloed—with fewer ties that cut across formal business units or bridge structural holes in Microsoft’s informal collaboration network—and that those silos became more densely connected. Furthermore, the network became more static, with fewer ties added and deleted per month. Previous research suggests that these changes in collaboration patterns may impede the transfer of knowledge and reduce the quality of workers’ output. Our results also indicate that the shift to firm-wide remote work caused synchronous communication to decrease and asynchronous communication to increase. Not only were the communication media that workers used less synchronous, but they were also less ‘rich’ (for example, email and IM). These changes in communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information. We expect that the effects we observe on workers’ collaboration and communication patterns will impact productivity and, in the long-term, innovation.”
It does make sense that communicating face to face would be more effective than any other method. That is primarily how humans have been doing it for thousands of years, after all. We note, though, the study focuses on a period early in the pandemic—perhaps some of these inefficiencies have improved since then. The researchers acknowledge their scope is limited to that time period at that corporation and suggest further study is needed once the pandemic is (finally!) over. The paper suggests large organizations that can collect communications data consider performing their own analysis and sharing those results with the rest of us. See the paper for the many details of the study’s methods, results, conclusions, recommendations, and references.
Cynthia Murrell, September 29, 2021
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