Preamble
This blog is about work. How and where we work, and why the discussion generated by these questions is relevant to the future of work. The world of work is evolving. This blog will provide some history and context, highlight the push and pull between employees and employers, and sample some Return To Office (RTO) policy considerations. It’s important enough to repeat: The world of work is evolving. Correspondingly, this blog will try to keep pace.
Confirming and Refuting, Part 2
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on how, and where, many people work. Prior to the pandemic, the vast majority of workers spent 5 days in the office every week. The shutdowns in response to the pandemic forced employees to work from home, or not at all, for an extended period of time. Companies have shared various reasons for instituting their RTO policies and mandating that their employees work from an office location at least part of the time, as we shared in our September 2024 article titled “Why RTO”. In part 1 of the Confirming and Refuting series of articles, we looked at a couple of the justifications. In this article, we’ll look at a few more.
Collaboration, Innovation, and Mentoring
The next set of justifications are closely related, and all appear to be logical justifications for RTO.
Definitions
Innovation is a creative process that makes changes in an established product, method or idea.
Mentoring is the process of training or advising someone, typically a younger or less experienced colleague, with the intention of transferring knowledge to that individual.
Collaboration is the act of working together with someone to produce or create something.
Knowledge spillover is the research term for flow of knowledge from one person or team to another person or team. The flow of information is bidirectionally informative for collaboration, unidirectionally informative for mentoring, and inspirational for innovation.
You’ll note that the definitions of these processes all include the concept of working together, therefore none of them cannot happen in isolation. But do the people have to be geographically and physically co-located in order to collaborate, innovate, or mentor?
In the 1990s and earlier, research showed that knowledge spillover decayed over geographic distance, in general. In essence, geographical and physical co-location was directly responsible for a high degree of working together. Further research from the early 2000s and 2010s confirmed the original finding, with one additional insight. The strength of the interpersonal network between individuals and teams can overcome, at least partially, geographically-introduced decay in knowledge spillover. In short, a strong working relationship between individuals and teams could still lead to a high degree of collaboration and innovation, even if the individuals and teams were geographically distributed.
Academic research can give us insights, but a shared experience is more relatable. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to identify this experience. Everyone was forced to work remotely, including many who worked as part of geographically co-located teams. One observation from the lockdowns is that collaboration decreased for teams who were previously geographically co-located. Digging further into the data for knowledge workers, we see that the strength of interpersonal networks became more important - strong networks got stronger, and weak networks got weaker. Essentially, the “keep the business running” collaboration within a single team, or between teams that worked together out of necessity, remained high. But the “innovative” collaboration between individuals and teams that weren’t required to work together decreased. The most likely reasons for this further weakening of weak relationships are:
The increased energy and decreased perceived utility to maintain these relationships - when my day is already filled with virtual calls, it’s tough to schedule a virtual “catch-up” call with a person I don’t need to work with on a day-to-day basis.
The lack of face-to-face opportunities to renew those relationships - it’s impossible to catch up with a person from a different team if we’re not in the same physical location.
The value of mentorship is also non-trivial. Proteges are more likely to get promoted, get a raise, and feel more confident about their work. But does mentorship serve as a valid reason for forcing employees into the office?
Collaboration, innovation, and mentorship all decreased during the pandemic. Many companies used these three justifications for mandating a hybrid or fully in-office RTO policy. Being back in the office certainly increases knowledge spillover, with caveats (see below). But there are other ways to realize the increases without being physically co-located. Companies can foster greater collaboration through a corporate focus on technology and tools in the form of collaboration platforms like Slack and Office365. These platforms can empower teams to build and maintain weaker interpersonal networks. They can also help mentors build deeper relationships with their proteges.
Two caveats
First, teams that were at least partially remote prior to the pandemic did not suffer the same reduction in collaboration and innovation. By being remote voluntarily, they had already identified and implemented ways to boost collaboration using the collaboration tools and platforms described above.
Second, increased collaboration / innovation / mentorship for a team mandated to be fully in-office only happens if the in-office team is co-located. There’s no net increase in collaboration within a geographically distributed team of individuals over those individuals working from a non-office location. “Individuals in random office locations” does not result in better collaboration than “individuals remote”. On the contrary, forcing all workers to incur the time cost of their respective commutes results in a net loss in productivity, without the benefit of face-to-face collaborative time.
The Bottom Line
Collaboration, innovation, and mentoring seem like logical reasons for mandating employees back to the office. Research and case studies that have shown ways for companies to increase collaboration, innovation, and mentoring even in a fully remote work environment.
Up Next
December 2024: Confirming and refuting, part 3
Citations
Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 1992
Networks, Geography, and Knowledge Flows: Evidence from Citation Patterns in Mathematics, European Trade Study Group, July 2014
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers, Nature Human Behavior, September 2021
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