The effects of remote work on Collaboration among information workers

In Economics, there is a research methodology called Difference in Differences (DiD).  DiD is typically used to estimate the effect of a specific intervention or treatment (such as a passage of the law, enactment of policy, or large-scale program implementation) by comparing the changes in outcomes over time between a population that is enrolled in a program (the intervention group) and a population that is not (the control group).  The famous Card and Kreuger study of 1994 leveraged this model to prove that the increase in minimum wages (in this case, a comparison between the US states of NJ and Pennsylvania) did not decrease the FTE jobs in fast-food restaurants. 

 In September – 2021, Nature Human behavior published a significant study using a similar DiD technique using Microsoft information workers (tech workers) data.  Yang, L., Holtz, D., Jaffe, S. et al. The effects of remote work on Collaboration among information workers. Nat Hum Behav (2021).

 Crunching the numbers revealed that while hours worked went up slightly when employees shifted to working from home, communication, particularly real-time conversations, fell significantly. One of the statements caught my attention.  The study states that firm-wide remote work ossified workers’ ego networks, made the network more fragmented, and made each fragment more clustered. (Ossification here refers to people who usually worked in an office instead of remote before the pandemic).  This result means an ego network (network of people with similar interests) is formed, and people operate in this well-fragmented network.

 This report is a good study, but I raise the following two questions for this study: 

• The datasets used in this study is from Dec-2019 to June 2020 – a time frame when we were still figuring out the pandemic
• Who can definitively state that such stratification and clustering did not exist when we all went to an office and worked.  At least in the digital way of working through platforms like Slack, you improve connections to the worker across categories.  At least now, we are in the journey of knowing if there could be a Ph.D. at the bagging counter/front line of a company that may be able to solve your complex mathematical problems.  The odds of better Collaboration is higher in the digital way of working

Perhaps, we need to look at what Marc Benioff stated in Dreamforce 2021 keynote.  Benioff stated that the World faces Health, Workforce, Sustainability, Inequitability, and trust crisis. We have to develop a set of competencies to address all aspects of what Benioff has highlighted