The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

The research on this is very mixed, and in many cases has found that remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. Anecdotally, I've found some organizations work great fully remotely, while others require in-person presence at least some of the time. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/time-savin.... https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/1/165/2337... https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+ employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the whole: “Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

Your anecdata doesn’t back up large scale data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 A lot depends on culture and process. Usually companies which had remote on day 1 do better because they get to fine tune and evolve the process over time.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 > Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network. Discussed on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920 It's not a perfect study but we don't really have that much actual research and evidence either way.