Interviews with 760 finance employees tie remote work to slower help between colleagues

The only line in this account with money attached runs in the company's favor. Starting in the pandemic, the firm reduced its office space to save money, so there was not enough room for everyone on designated office days, and told supervisors to focus on individual deliverables ^[8]. The cost is harder to see. When employees said the work was getting done, they meant their own assignments and KPIs. Tasks like helping a colleague or teaching a new hire how things worked were easier to let slide, because those tasks had depended on personal relationships ^[6].

The paper calls the asset in question "relational capital": the knowledge of whom to turn to for help, the comfort to ask, and a colleague who will answer ^[5]. At this firm it ran on familiarity. Employees who called colleagues they knew got help quickly, and otherwise help was more likely to be delayed ^[2]. The authors describe a loop in which a slow answer makes people less willing to reach out again, and the relationship erodes further ^[4]. More meetings did not fix it. In larger virtual meetings people kept cameras off and did other work, sometimes forcing a follow-up meeting to cover what they had missed ^[14].

Thirty-eight group interviews with roughly 760 employees comes to about 20 people a session ^[15]. The authors say the interviews alone cannot prove that working from home caused the problems, though they believe it contributed, and cannot establish how widespread the problems are ^[10].

That leaves the authors' explanation, remote work, competing with two others. One is the hybrid as this company ran it: shared desks made it harder to sit near the same colleagues, and attendance rules were enforced inconsistently ^[9]. A commuter could make the trip and find colleagues absent ^[9]. The other is a self-care norm from the pandemic, when the company encouraged employees to put their own well-being first; the authors say it may also have played a role ^[11].

I think those two, plus the order to manage individual deliverables, explain at least as much of the erosion as distance does. Each is a decision the company made and could reverse, so each is cheaper to test than a return-to-office order. The counter-case deserves weight. The authors conducted the 38 sessions themselves and still concluded remote work played a part ^[7][10].

If that view holds, the company bought a smaller property bill and paid for part of it in slower help. It did not keep desks for everyone on office days, and it pointed supervisors at individual output ^[8]. Coordinated office days, the authors' main recommendation, need desk capacity on exactly the days this company had too little of it ^[12][8].

The view would be wrong if a firm with coordinated team days, enough desks and supervisors who credit help still found newcomers waiting months for answers.

Remote work had defenders in the sessions too. Some respondents considered reduced face-to-face contact an advantage for women, minorities and introverts, and for anyone with a private space, home can be an easier place to concentrate ^[13].