Journal Article: “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers”

The following article was recently published by Nature Human Behavior.

Title

The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers

Authors

Longqi Yang
Microsoft

David Holtz
Haas School of Business, University of California, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

Sonia Jaffe
Microsoft

Siddharth Suri
Microsoft

Shilpi Sinha
Microsoft

Jeffrey Weston
Microsoft

Connor Joyce
Microsoft

Neha Shah
Microsoft

Kevin Sherman
Microsoft

Brent Hecht
Microsoft

Jaime Teevan
Microsoft

Source

Nature Human Behavior (2021)
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4

Abstract

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.

Direct to Full Text Article

Filed under: Data Files, News