Study used “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.”
Here’s what they came up with:
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 knowledge10,12,13 and reduce the quality of workers’ output11,23. 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 information26,27,28.
We expect that the effects we observe on workers’ collaboration and communication patterns will impact productivity and, in the long-term, innovation. Yet, across many sectors, firms are making decisions to adopt permanent remote work policies based only on short-term data52.
There are multiple high-profile cases of firms such as IBM and Yahoo! enacting, but ultimately rescinding, flexible remote work policies before COVID-19, presumably due to the impacts of these policies on communication and collaboration61,62. On the basis of these examples, one might conclude that the current enthusiasm for remote work may not ultimately translate into a long-lasting shift to remote work for the majority of firms.
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