When Covid forced everyone to start working from home in 2020, I was very curious what the research said about remote work and what I could do as a leader to help my team function in a fully distributed environment.
- Remote workers are more effective at individual tasks. When doing projects that don’t require interaction, studies show 4-14% improved productivity for remote workers. This is partially attributed to longer working hours people tend to put in when not required to commute and partially to a better ability to concentrate without interruption.
- Remote workers have a higher retention rate, less stress, and higher job satisfaction. They’re also willing to take an 8% but in pay to not come in. The pay bit may be entirely rational in that the cost of commuting (in both time and money) can be significant.
- Remote workers are less effective at innovation and group tasks.
1) An MIT study using recording devices found that “those who had the most face-to-face interactions cleared about $100,000 more in revenue per month compared to their less interactive counterparts. This was attributed to the fact that problem solving, a frequent occurrence in IT situations, is easier when one is able to speak to an expert in person rather than emailing or instant messaging complex questions. This suggests that telecommuting, which reduces face-to-face interactions may have a negative impact on collaboration and innovation.”
2) A separate study “of 56 engineering teams used a survey design to examine the relationship between numerous characteristics of the team, including geographic dispersion and electronic dependence, which have potential relevance to a telecommuting arrangement. The authors found that increased geographical diversity and dependence on electronics for communication related to less innovation.”
3) This is why IBM and Yahoo famously abandoned their work anywhere policies in recent years. “In one case, we looked at software teams where some people were working in the office and some people were working from home and from other locations, and we looked at how likely those people were to communicate about those dependencies if they were in the same place or if they were remote.
“Technologically, nothing stops you from communicating with people who have these dependencies. But when you were remote, you were about 8 percent less likely to have those conversations. Importantly, when you don’t communicate with someone who has a dependency on your code, the probability of a bug popping up is about 12 times higher — so there’s a really huge effect. And in general, having these gaps means that it takes you about 32 percent longer to complete code. When you’re talking about a company like Yahoo, you’re looking at, conservatively, hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity.”
4) Back in the 70s Tom Allen did an in-depth study on what makes engineering teams successful. One of his key discoveries is that when people sit farther apart there’s a strong negative correlation with how much they communicate, dubbed the Allen Curve. Teams that sit closer together are more communicative and more successful. The results have been replicated many times since the original study and the advent of email and video calls did nothing to change the results. The closer you sit with your team the more successful the team is.
5) Two recent-ish research papers that found that when flights between cities become cheaper or airlines add non-stop routes, where previously one needed a layover, there’s a significant increase in collaboration, and the results of collaboration are higher quality and more novel. Paraphrasing, when barriers to communication are reduced the quality and impact of the work increases. - 3 days/week in the office is a sweet spot. Research shows that as long as people are in the office that often, they have the same sense of community, are able to build social capital, and don’t feel excluded.
- Remote workers that also have childcare duties don’t do well. Studies show the workers are less effective and have significantly higher levels of stress as the work/family-time boundaries are blurred. If possible, remote employees should arrange for childcare during work hours.
One last block quote I found particularly intriguing:
“It’s interesting — [Yahoo CEO] Marissa Mayer comes from Google, and I know a lot of the guys at Google. Google’s HR division is called “People Analytics,” and they do great stuff. If you think about how Google deals with this, they’re building these gigantic campuses all over the world so that they can have thousands of employees who can be together at the same time. When you think about it, if there’s one company that should be able to have people telecommute all the time, it’s Google—this is what they do. And yet they still spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating these incredibly centralized campuses so that they can have everybody together. Because they understand that, first of all, the coordination on just executing projects is extremely important. But then you think about all the other things: How do you create new ideas? If you bump into someone in the hallway who’s working on a completely different project, those interactions are extremely valuable, because when you talk to a guy who’s doing something that’s completely unrelated to you, that’s when you get that new idea. But those are unplanned interactions. Electronic communication is pretty good at planned interactions—you can set up a time to talk on the phone or over Skype or whatever—but once I’m remote, I don’t even know who I should be talking to, beyond my formal requirements. That’s the issue that a lot of these successful companies understand.”
Amazon recently reached a similar conclusion. During Covid they gave individual managers license to set WFH policies and they collected data on how teams performed. They reached the same conclusion: everyone will be required to come in at least 3 days/week. I’ve heard the argument that this was just their way to do a layoff without having to pay severance, but I’m willing to bet there’s at least a glimmer of truth to the assertions. If they really wanted to reduce the workforce they could have mandated 5 days in the office.
The Upshot
Any significant engineering effort is a group activity. I think the evidence is pretty clear that remote teams will get out-performed by in-person teams, unless there’s an absolutely massive difference in the quality of engineers you can hire remotely due to other constraints (e.g., budget).
Sources:
https://hbr.org/2019/08/is-it-time-to-let-employees-work-from-anywhere
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/10/cover-remote-work
Nate Clark's Writing 
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