The impact of remote work on collaboration within the enterprise

As a countermeasure against COVID-19 infection, many companies are introducing remote work. In the midst of this, Microsoft released a research report that analyzed the behavior of more than 60,000 employees and summarized the impact of remote work on corporate communications.

Microsoft analyzed the impact of remote work on employee communication by collecting communication data from 61,182 people, excluding those who deal with sensitive data. Reduced communication that creates new relationships: Share of time with cross-group ties, Share of time with bridging ties, and Share of time with added ties. and the individual clustering coefficient representing the existing relationship increases.

In addition, as a result of analyzing the communication content, the time spent on scheduled meetings (Scheduled meeting hours), total meeting time (Meeting + call hours) decreased, time spent on unexpected calls (Unscheduled call hours), and sending instant messages It was found that the number of times (IMs sent) and the number of emails sent (Emails sent) increased.

In addition, as a result of conducting a similar analysis by job position, it is investigated that the number of instant messages sent by managers and engineers has significantly increased outwardly compared to general employees and non-engineers. The Microsoft analytics team found that these findings suggest that enterprise-wide remoteworking will make it harder for employees to discover and share new information, as enterprise-wide remoteworking reduces interconnections between Microsoft business groups and reduces the amount of time employees spend collaborating with peers that become bridges between them. It was concluded that the possibility was presented.

The analysis team said that the results of this analysis could be an indicator to determine whether other companies should continue remote work. He pointed out that there is a possibility that many companies will continue to work remotely for a long time due to these factors. Related information can be found here.