How workers go back to offices might matter if the objective is to reap the benefits of physical interactions at work, including the unplanned interactions that are touted as a benefit of office work.
Many firms now talk about hybrid work arrangements, partly in the office, partly at home. How that is accomplished could make all the difference. Right now, almost everyone is working from home. What happens when reopening happens?
If hybrid work environments create two tiers of employees (those who are in the office and those who are not, or those who have the ability to informally interact with senior leaders and those who do not), virtual employees risk becoming a “lower class.” And that will create incentives for people to prefer in-office working, rather than staying at home.
Nor is it clear how much benefit might accrue from the unplanned interactions that can happen at a workplace.
Even in-person interactions might suffer if “mask wearing” in the office and social distancing are required. Extended wearing of masks likely means conversations and meetings will be shorter.
That and social distancing will inhibit informal face-to-face communication, which is the main reason for sending employees back to the office.
About 70 percent or more workers consistently say they would rather continue to work from home than go into reconfigured offices and be required to wear masks, the authors say.
That noted, widespread work from home policies arguably have not lead to a drop in productivity many would logically have expected.
A survey of 600 U.S. white collar employees, 40 percent of whom say they are “in management,” suggests the enforced work-from-home experience has been unexpectedly more successful, in terms of perceived productivity, than expected. The authors believe the “everybody has to do it” context made a big difference, as some early work-from-home studies suggested a drop in productivity could be expected.
That has many speculating about whether many or most such employees might “never” return to the older office-based patterns. The authors of the study say there are some issues that will likely have to be addressed for that to happen on a widespread scale.
Unplanned interactions that lead to important outcomes are one advantage of physical settings. “Physical offices cause people who don’t normally work with each other to connect accidentally — bumping into each other in the hallway or the cafeteria — and that interaction sparks new ideas,” they say.
“In our analysis of the amount of digital interaction at a different technology company, we found that, after the lockdown, employees increased their communication with close collaborators by 40 percent but at a cost of 10 percent less communication with other colleagues,” the authors day.
“There also tends to be less schmoozing and small talk among virtual workers, which Michael Morris of Stanford and Columbia and Janice Nadler, Terri Kurtzberg, and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern have shown leads to lower levels of trust,” they note. “The decline in such spontaneous communications and trust can have a big negative impact on innovation and collaboration.”
Virtual work could undermine three other activities that are critical to long-term organizational health:
Onboarding new employees
“Weak” relationships
“Strong” relationships
Onboarding new employees in terms of inculcating culture seems fairly easy to do in a virtual context. It seems harder to assess and develop peoples’ unique strengths.
Virtual work also means it is harder to develop “weak ties,” shallow or peripheral relationships among members of an organization who don’t work closely with each other but have nonetheless connected over time.
Weak ties have been shown to play an important role in organizational performance, including innovation, raising or maintaining product and service quality, and attaining project milestones, they argue. That is difficult to create, on a virtual basis.
Strong ties also are harder to develop. “People are still getting the work done, but the long-term relationships that once sprang from such shared experiences are undoubtedly at risk,” they note.
Beyond that, the way that workers come back to work might matter. Hybrid work environments--a combination of virtual and office-based work--sounds like the best of both worlds.
It might also become the worst of both worlds. Many of the benefits of having everyone work virtually may be lost if companies send just some employees back to the office.
Some research has found that teams with isolated members (one person per location) or an equivalent number of members in each location (two in one office and two in another) reported better scores on coordination and identification within the team.
“But if some team members were collocated and others were not (as would likely be true in hybrid environments), team dynamics suffered, which presumably hurt performance,” the authors note.
