The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

Abstract: COVID-19 caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information work- ers. Viewing this shift as a natural experiment, where some workers were already working remotely prior to the pandemic, allows us to separate the effects of firm-wide remote work from other pandemic-related confounders. We use rich data on the emails, calendars, in- stant messages, video/audio calls, and workweek hours of nearly 62,000 U.S. Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020 to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide re- mote work on collaboration and communication. Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused workers’ collaboration network to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous com- munication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.