Microsoft researchers analyzed data from more than 61,000 workers at this company in the US since the pandemic began, from December 2019 before the shutdown, until June 2020 , when many companies saw the opportunity to test the modality. teleworking in order to reduce coronavirus infections.
According to the study, working from home made employees ‘more isolated in the way they communicated’, made it difficult for employees in all departments to share information, which could have implications for the ‘productivity and innovation’ of a company. company.
Working from home meant that employees spent fewer hours in meetings, often criticized for being too long and a waste of time. Interestingly, remote work also increased the volume of emails and instant messages sent, as well as the average number of hours worked in a week, suggesting that telecommuting has made employees work much more.
The new research, led by David Holtz, assistant professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley has concluded that Microsoft has decided that from 2022 it will promote a ‘hybrid’ model of work where employees can choose what’s best for them, according to their CEO, Satya Nadella.
“Historically, measuring the causal effects of telecommuting has been difficult, because only certain types of workers were allowed to work outside the office,” said Professor Holtz. “That changed during the pandemic, when almost everyone who could work from home had to. “The obligation to work from home created a unique opportunity to identify the effects of remote working across the company on how information workers communicate and collaborate.”
Before the pandemic, 18% of Microsoft employees already worked remotely.
Overall, the authors found that teleworking caused a shift from real-time communication, such as phone calls and meetings, to less immediate communication, such as emails and instant messages. Looking at it on the bright side, remote work led workers to communicate more frequently with people on their internal network and to build more connections within it.
Referencia: Yang, L., Holtz, D., Jaffe, S. et al. The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4
