Happy to work hybrid? Staying home comes with a cost to you and your boss, new study finds
Information sharing and collaboration suffer when you work from home — or when your colleague works from home
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Employees working from home are more siloed, communicate less frequently and are less collaborative than they were in the office, a newly published study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour has found.
The study, which analyzed communication patterns among Microsoft Corp.’s more than 61,000 employees before and after the company implemented a work-from-home mandate in response to the pandemic, suggested fully remote workforces may have more difficulty sharing and acquiring new information.
The findings could have implications for knowledge workers’ future productivity and innovation at companies that embrace remote work post-pandemic, co-author David Holtz, a University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business assistant professor, said in a news release.
Workers spent about 25 per cent less of their time on collaboration with colleagues across different segments of the business than pre-pandemic, and added new collaborators to projects more slowly, the study found. Their collaboration networks also became “less interconnected and more siloed.”
While employees communicated more frequently and built more connections with colleagues in their immediate team, their formal and informal communication with colleagues on other teams dropped while they worked remotely.
The fact that your colleagues’ remote work status affects your own work habits has major implications for companies that are considering hybrid
David Holtz
The number of hours employees spent in meetings decreased by about five per cent due to remote work. The study said the increase in meetings many people experienced during the pandemic could be due to pandemic-related factors, rather than remote work itself.
Holtz, who conducted the research while an MIT Sloan doctoral intern at Microsoft and co-wrote the paper with 10 Microsoft colleagues, said the researchers were also able to determine that workers’ collaboration patterns are affected not just by whether they’re working remotely, but whether their colleagues are.
“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,” Holtz said, adding that having teams and collaborators in the office at the same time improves communication and the flow of information.
“It’s important to be thoughtful about how these policies are implemented,” he said.
According to a late August survey from ADP Canada and Maru Public Opinion, a majority of employers are rolling out hybrid work models. One-third, or 33 per cent, of Canadians surveyed said they are being given the option to come in for only two or three days per week, and 21 per cent said they have no set days mandated. Forty per cent of workers said they’re expected to be in the office five days a week.
The pandemic created a “unique opportunity” to study the impact of company-wide remote work policies, Holtz said, but researchers had to determine how much behaviour changes were caused by remote working specifically, rather than by the impacts of the pandemic.
Nearly one in five (18 per cent) Microsoft employees had been working remotely pre-pandemic, giving researchers the opportunity to compare pre-pandemic remote workers against those who had to quickly move to remote work due to stay-at-home orders.
The researchers used anonymized data on Microsoft employees’ roles, business group, managerial status, length of time spent at the company and what share of their co-workers were remote before the onset of the pandemic. They also accessed aggregated weekly data on the amount of time employees spent in both scheduled and unscheduled meetings and calls, how many emails and instant messages workers sent, the length of their workweeks, and monthly summaries on workers’ collaboration networks.
• Email: krolfe@postmedia.com | Twitter: kelseyarolfe
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