Remote work, again...

I came across a news headline earlier this week announcing that the U.S. set an all-time high record for the number of COVID-19 cases reported (1.35 million cases) on Monday, January 10, 2022, shattering the previous global record of 1.03 million cases.  The highly contagious Omicron variant shows no signs of slowing down, and even though it is potentially less severe, the aforementioned record for new cases came on the same day that the U.S. had the highest number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients.  It doesn't appear likely that organizations will walk back from the shift that they made earlier in the pandemic to remote work.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, only about 5% of all Americans in the labor force worked from home more than 3 days per week.  By April, 2020 (just about a month or so into the pandemic), over one-third of the labor force was working remotely full-time.  A number of companies, particularly those in the technology sector, have developed plans, procedures, and policies that will enable at least a portion of their employees to work remotely, even after the pandemic is over.  I have discussed some of the effects, both positive and negative, of remote working on various metrics in a previous post (see "The WFH question").  I mentioned at the time that the data on the impact of remote working on productivity and engagement were far from conclusive.  I suspect we will continue to see studies on this particular question, as we continue to learn from this large-scale natural experiment.

With all of this in mind, I recently came across a study published in the journal, Nature Human Behaviour, called "The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers".  This particular study reported on the experience of the Microsoft Corporation after they switched, fairly abruptly, to remote work early in the pandemic.  The study investigators leveraged unprecedented access to emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls, and work hours for 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020.  

What was really interesting about this study, and why it was different from prior studies, is that the investigators used this treasure trove of data to conduct analyze the network topology at Microsoft before and then after the shift to remote work.  Incidentally, if you want to learn more about the science of networks, I would highly recommend the book Linked by Albert-laszlo Barabasi and Jennifer Frangos.

For those of you who are either not familiar or not well-versed in network science, it helps to think about your own personal situation at work.  Who are the individuals that you spend the most time with at work?  What does your organization's formal org chart look like?  What about your organization's informal org chart?  How does information flow through the organization, both formally and informally?  Who are the individuals that seem to be well-connected throughout the organization and have all the answers?  How strong are personal ties between individuals?  

Certain network configurations and topologies favor knowledge transfer, creativity, and hence productivity.  Just as important, the kinds of ties between individuals can impact issues such as cooperation, collaboration, and trust (favored by strong ties between individuals) or access to new information (favored by weak ties between individuals).  

Here were the main results from the Microsoft study:

1. Individual business groups became less interconnected (there were less bridging ties between different groups).

2. Individual employees spent more time with their stronger ties (which tend to favor information transfer) and less time with their weaker ties (which tend to favor transfer of new knowledge).

3. Individuals and groups were less likely to form new bridging ties.

4. Individuals spent less time with newly added ties.

One other major finding came out of this study.  Following the shift to remote work, Microsoft employees spent more time communicating asynchronously (e.g., communication via email) and less time synchronously (communication that happens in real time, such as in-person, by telephone, or in a video conference call).  The investigators suggested that this shift to asynchronous communication at the expense of synchronous communication contributed to the results above.

The investigators concluded that the change in network topology following the shift to remote work created a more static, siloed work environment.  Whether these changes will affect the long-term creativity and productivity at Microsoft is another question that was left unanswered by the current study.  However, I suspect that similar studies will follow, especially as we near the two-year anniversary of this pandemic.  What is clear is that the shift to remote work has changed how we approach management in our organizations, and as leaders we will have to adjust our management methods to these new work models.