One Crucial Impact of Remote Work on Your Team’s Relationships

Can 61,000 people all be wrong?

That’s the number of Microsoft employees who were the subjects of a recent paper in Nature studying ‘The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers’.  The authors studied the effects of the first six months of the pandemic on this group through their emails, calendars, instant messages, and video/audio calls as the company shifted to remote work. 

If you don’t want to read the whole paper, Derek Thompson in the Atlantic summarises one of it’s key conclusions.

In short, at work we have in-group connections with those we work most frequently, in a formal team, under a manager.  Then we have out-group connections, our more informal relationships and friendships across an organisation.  As Thompson puts it:

‘Remote work took a battering ram to all out-group ties.’

The paper shows that as we moved remote, we worked more tightly with our existing teams and close colleagues (hence flat or rising productivity) but our connections with those beyond that circle dropped off dramatically. 

Why is this a problem? 

Well, at the organisational level, companies are concerned that this will stifle innovation.  Breakthroughs are often made when information from previously disparate domains is unexpectedly combined.  This happens more often through out-group connections, which facilitate flows of unfamiliar ideas between departments.  So there’s work to be done here to maintain those flows in a remote world.

But the aspect that Thompson doesn’t cover is the impact on individuals’ careers.

Employees’ often thrive when they gain exposure to different parts of their organisation.  They learn more about how it works so they can offer more meaningful contributions, they meet new people to mentor and guide them beyond their manager and peers, and they discover new opportunities.  

Again, this is all cultivated through out-group ties.  Exactly the ones which the researchers say have been reduced so dramatically.  

The good news is we as managers can take deliberate action to help.  The clue is in this tweet:

Consider getting started before your employees have to ask.