> The study, which was just published in Nature Human Behavior, analyzed data on the communications of approximately 61,000 Microsoft employees in the U.S. gathered between December 2019 and June 2020. 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.
> Switching from a corridor chat to an exchange of emails isn't a one-to-one substitution, and the researchers worry about the knock-on effects of changes to the way office workers collaborate.
> "Without intervention, the effects we discovered have the potential to impact workers' ability to acquire and share new information across groups, and as a result, affect productivity and innovation," they write. "Based on previous research, we believe that the shift to less 'rich' communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, the study itself does not show any link between remote work and innovation. It merely shows that communication has become more asynchronous, and then applies the assumption that asynchronous communication is worse.
> Switching from a corridor chat to an exchange of emails isn't a one-to-one substitution, and the researchers worry about the knock-on effects of changes to the way office workers collaborate.
> "Without intervention, the effects we discovered have the potential to impact workers' ability to acquire and share new information across groups, and as a result, affect productivity and innovation," they write. "Based on previous research, we believe that the shift to less 'rich' communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, the study itself does not show any link between remote work and innovation. It merely shows that communication has become more asynchronous, and then applies the assumption that asynchronous communication is worse.
What a joke.