Too much home office harms communication
A study by Microsoft shows: Pure remote work favors silo formation between individuals and teams.
Too much home office deteriorates communication and collaboration and encourages silo formation. That's according to a Study by Microsoft and the Haas School of Business at the University of California., Berkeley. This is based on an analysis of U.S. data from before and after Microsoft imposed company-wide homeworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a deteriorated information flow could become a problem in the long run, according to the study authors.
Pandemic creates clarity
At Microsoft, just under a fifth of employees were working outside the office even before the pandemic. But it remained unclear how well that was working out. "Measuring the causal effects of remote work has historically been difficult because only certain types of employees were allowed to work outside the office," explains David Holtz, a professor at Haas Business School. But because of the pandemic, suddenly everyone at Microsoft was working from home. An analysis of anonymized data on communications from emails to IMs to meetings and the working hours of 61,000 U.S. employees was therefore able to show the impact of remote working in general.
It now seems clear that company-wide remote work favors silo formation. This is because cross-group collaboration was 25 percent less common than before the pandemic. In addition, additional employees were slower to become involved in collaboration. Communication was more likely to occur with close contacts and asynchronously, such as via email. Direct conversations, whether in person, by phone or via video conference, were less frequent. In addition, the amount of time employees spent in meetings was five percent less during the pandemic. Overall, therefore, the flow of information was impaired, which could affect productivity and innovation in the long term.
Mutual influences
The analysis also found that employees respond not only to whether they work from home themselves, but also to whether colleagues do. "The fact that colleagues' remote work status affects their own work habits has significant implications for companies considering hybrid or blended work policies," Holtz says. For example, he says, having team colleagues and remote workers in the office at the same time improves communication and information flow for both in-office and out-of-office workers.
