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The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

nature.com

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Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#71

Post by ryanSrich »

AndreiCalazans wrote: post #9

Unintentional by accident remote work shouldn’t be considered the baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled “effects of remote work at Microsoft” to not induce the sense of generalist research. For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling. Nevert…

It’s a ridiculous study.

They should instead look at companies that are:

1.) set up to do remote work because they actually created a plan for it and executed on it. Not companies reluctantly forced into it by a pandemic.

2.) look at companies that have been doing it longer than 6 months. Focusing on the first 6 months of 2020 as the baseline for how remote work is “going”. Is beyond unscientific.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#72

Post by walshemj »

jstx1 wrote: post #44
animanoir wrote: post #39

Companies will invoke even God to make employees return to offices. I don't trust Microsoft neither this study.

That argument works both ways - some people who like remote will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to defend WFH when presented with evidence that it isn't ideal.

Just like when OOP was the new hotness any one suggesting that maybe OOP wasn't suitable for 100% of projects - used to get shouted down on slash dot.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#74

Post by ryanSrich »

walshemj wrote: post #70
mmaunder wrote: post #29

“ 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.” So less interruptions and m…

You didn't see "static and siloed" that's just asking for a disruptor to come in and eat your lunch

A disrupter that’s likely also working remotely.

A businesses absolute shit remote working process != remote working is bad.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#75

Post by missedthecue »

rybosworld wrote: post #53
missedthecue wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, it's just hard to build and maintain relationships from afar. Any kind, be it business, platonic, or romantic. Humans are social creatures, meant for in-person interaction.

This is more or less the same train of thought that people first had about online dating. "It won't work", "it's not the same", "it's weird to meet someone online" etc. I couldn't disagree more that remote relationships are more difficult. On the contrary, technology continues to make it easier to stay in touch with 500 friends, coworkers from your last 3 jobs etc.

People don't date online. They meet online and go date in person.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#76

Post by stefan_ »

kiklion wrote: post #68
earthscienceman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We used to pay for entire buildings to house our employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost on to them!"

It kind of depends on the details. My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment. The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices. There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.

Because you are saving pennies but losing dollars of productivity?

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#77

Post by technofiend »

kongin wrote: post #58
phillipcarter wrote: post #14

The key thing is here: > over the first six months of 2020 Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience working remotely, so many folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't have good practices set up for remote w…

They should do a follow up study on how many people will die from Covid by working in the office. I rather wonder how preventable deaths impact innovation in teams. From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until everyone susceptible dies. The office doesn't sound so good when it's…

Anecdotally I've seen reports of people getting Covid more than once. So even the assumption that if Delta runs rampant through the unvaccinated population at least we'll gain full herd immunity that way is perhaps not true. Plus you always have people too young to be vaccinated or immunocompromised that will be a reservoir. I'm not an epidemiologist and claim no expertise but it certainly appears we may always have the threat of this virus in the background. Bleh.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#78

Post by huetius »

civilized wrote: post #64
huetius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sympathize with this, given that truly high-functioning, collaborative work environments are anything but ubiquitous, but I think that these kinds of environments are still the ideal, however rare and difficult to achieve they are. I’ve only worked for two orgs that really got it right, and they were far and away the best work experiences I’ve had. I can’t imagine those orgs being able to thrive in a completely…

I get that some people love their offices and think they are amazing work environments, but when I probe, it always seems to boil down to emotional attachment. A lifestyle choice. Offices usually don't actually improve productivity, IMO.

That’s probably true in many, or even most cases. Even so, what do you think about the example of the formerly successful company that now can’t retain engineers? Even if the benefits were entirely intangible, this still ultimately has had an effect on productivity, right? Intangible benefits are… benefits!

I think the benefits were quite tangible in this case; I can elaborate as much as I can while maintaining my anonymity if you think it’s relevant.

EDIT: more formatting. Can’t type today.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#79

Post by PragmaticPulp »

phillipcarter wrote: post #14

The key thing is here: > over the first six months of 2020 Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience working remotely, so many folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't have good practices set up for remote w…

> The key thing is here:

> > over the first six months of 2020

This also implies that most of the employees already knew each other and worked together before being forced into remote work.

One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is that people carry over the in-person relationships they were already comfortable with.

It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship building and a comfortable network of people within the company, it can be hard to break in.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#80

Post by joe_the_user »

spanktheuser wrote: post #35

Interesting study. The data collection & classification methods seem strong as does the underlying data set. However I’m unconvinced their analysis necessarily follows from the established facts. - Knowledge workers are treated as a homogeneous population. But it seems unlikely a software engineer, a VP of software engineering, and a business development associate obtain the same benefit from frequent in person meeti…

Another aspect of the study is it's primarily measuring proxies to reach conclusions - for example: because email is used rather than zoom, they assume (following various theories) that nuance is lost. Maybe, maybe not.
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