The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4#MOESM1

by saadatq • 5 years ago

105 40 5 years ago

nature.com

wcunning• 5 years ago

Dupe, previous discussion available at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.

This is because deliberate knowledge sharing is so ad-hoc and inconsistent. How often do new hires have to turn to someone to figure out how to get the project to build locally as the instructions suck? Quite often.

imbnwa3• 5 years ago

Said this somewhere else recently, but I've never seen a Confluence that wasn't a disaster, magnified by the modern rate of turnover.

Ostensibly Google/Amazon put a lot of thought and work into formalizing institutional practice and knowledge, and it likely helps that most competent engineers are gunning for a long-term role at those kinds of firms, but I've yet to see anything resembling such where I've worked.

VectorLock3• 5 years ago

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to unsuck Confluence but haven't come on anything really great. It doesn't help the WYSIWYG in-browser editor isn't great, and its document model/API doesn't exactly lend itself to getting documents in/out of it from other systems like Markdown, etc.

hinkley3• 5 years ago

There are too many degrees of separation in Amazon and I suspect Google's situation as well.

Onboarding docs need to be iterative. They need 'user studies' with some of the new employees. If I go through the onboarding docs with a new employee, and they get stuck, either I'm the one who knows how to fix it or I know the person who does, so we can get it fixed. Once that becomes opaque the docs are more of a sick joke than anything.

vikingerik• 5 years ago

Confluence is documentation theater. For most Confluence usage I've ever seen, the author's real purpose is mostly to signal that documentation has been written, and the experience of whoever might be using it later is a distant second.

Confluence docs tend to be written as the result of timed events, for each project or sprint or meeting or whatever, rather than organized by topic. And most are write-only and never looked at again.

What a Confluence (or any documentation) repository really needs is continuous refactoring, to be organized by functionality rather than time implemented. Just like code, if you never do that, what you get is documentation debt and a big ball of documud.

nineplay• 5 years ago

I like confluence as a _temporary_ discussion space. Put up some mockups, put up some sequence diagrams, suggest external components and get feedback. It doesn't entirely eliminate design meetings, but it can serve as a overview so people have already thought about the design before a zoom meeting on it. A virtual whiteboard maybe.

The other think I like it for is lists of 'learning' links Our team has a nice page with suggested books or lectures or tutorials that they think others will find useful.

Everything else is stale within a week or so. If I need to document something it goes into a Readme which can also go stale but is still a bit more in your face.

I've also seen what someone points out below - the engineers who think Confluence documentation counts as task completion.

"Did you figure out how to do X?"
"Yes, here is a confluence page."
"Did you install it? Did you run it? Did you validate the results?"
"... here is a confluence page"

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

So… just call the colleague who knows on the phone? How is this any different than walking over to their desk and asking?

It’s very weird how adverse people are to spontaneous phone calls. Especially the younger generation. Everything has to be scheduled and confirmed back and forth.

I understand that an unexpected phone call can disturb someone, but so can an unexpected tap on the shoulder.

VectorLock3• 5 years ago

Lots of people seem to have found a lot of utility in asynchronous communication and mitigating time vampires.

guenthert• 5 years ago

When you walk over, you at least have the opportunity to observe whether the person you're about to bug is deep in the flow, cleaning up his desk or chatting with co-workers.

I'd rather use e-mail or some chat system when remote and working on something else until I get an answer, unless of course, something is on fire.

commandlinefan2• 5 years ago

Voice calls combine the worst of real-time interactions (no chance to review what you're about to say for possible misinterpretation) with the worst of long-distance interactions (can't read body language). I literally can't for the life of me think of a worse way to interact with a human being than over the phone.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

What I've seen some people do is create a Clubhouse like audio chat room. If they are in it, it means you can feel free to interrupt.

iso1631• 5 years ago

Presumably just once, as the new hire updates the instructions

tppiotrowski• 5 years ago

Yup. It's a living document and the new hire can update it in a way that makes sense to them and in turn to future new hires. All manager should encourage this from day 1. Be the change you seek.

mabbo• 5 years ago

This URL links to an anchor at the bottom of the page. Recommend modifying the URL, except the original URL has already been discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920

commandlinefan2• 5 years ago

Since the industrial revolution, all knowledge work has required remote collaboration. If your company has multiple physical offices, or if you have a supplier or a customer that's not colocated within walking distance, you've been collaborating remotely, whether by mail, telegram, telephone or computer. Maybe that's slightly "inefficient" - or maybe it's a good thing with full-remote working that we get to refine it so well?

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 5 years ago

The positive effect a 2-week in-person visit to a remote office had on the collaboration over the next year or so astonished me.

Turns out humans are social animals, people with social bonds work together more effectively, and you don't build those via Zoom and Slack. And I'm not talking about "partying together every night, living at the office", just "being around each other and talking outside of the rigid confines of scheduled meetings".

No, scheduled socials aren't the same.

reidjs• 5 years ago

What you are describing sounds like scheduled socials to me, just in the office instead of over zoom. But I would not be surprised if mostly wfh with a few in-person days turns out to be the optimal setup for most offices.

m4rtink• 5 years ago

I don't think its comparable - most factories still had huge main complexes in one place or at least a city where one could visit everything during a single day if needed.

Sure, there was internal communication with smaller factories and with customers, but with much migher latency and information content than whats possible now.

specialist2• 5 years ago

Your point highlights that calling it "remote work" is inadequate.

Communications separated by time and space is a familiar problem. We adapted, more or less.

With the apocalypse came the forever meetings (zoom calls), which are same time and same virtual space.

Houston808• 5 years ago

Seems to me this study doesn't warrant a lot of attention. Its basic methodology is flawed, and the author's identify this towards the end. Couple things I noticed: 1) They only look at one company. 2) There is no control group. 3) There is no comparison to companies that were full remote prior. 4) IM is listed as asynchronous communication. In my experience it can be async or sync with my split being ~50% of the time. It is an easy replacement for Phone/Video when only a small amount of back and forth are needed. 5) Microsoft has not just remote employees but also cross collaboration across remote campuses prior to pandemic. This could have also been a good control.

Surprised Nature picked this up with such big holes.

gdubs• 5 years ago

Only skimmed, but do they address the fact that last year was more “working at home during a pandemic” than “remote work”? How much of the communications issues were due to the fact that people were juggling homeschooling, housekeeping, caregiving, while trying to stay productive?

maerF0x0• 5 years ago

Also it's worth considering that remote vs in-office work may be different skills and it takes time to build up skills.

For me, I'd rather work on building the skill with a higher sum value ver time (integration of value rate), even if their is a learning/adaption curve.

Taking someone who has worked in an office for 10 years and expecting them to be more productive in the first 6 months of work from home is failing to treat it as a skill that develops over time.

lostcolony• 5 years ago

It's worse than that; the skills and learnings -run directly counter to each other- in some cases.

For instance, in the office, what is the single best way to collaborate on something? Why, you get people together and chat, likely informally, in a free ranging discussion.

Remote, what's the single best way to collaborate? Why, you write up a document with your initial thoughts and send it out for everyone else to weigh in on; you have a fully asynchronous, documented communication.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but, tellingly, the people who are best with one of them are likely not the people who are best with the other. And trying to impose one in the other's context will lead to poorer results; written docs in the office when a conversation will do feel heavyhanded and process heavy, but zoom meetings, especially if the hours don't all line up, in a remote workplace feel unnecessary, and reduces participation.

A LOT of companies have treated the pandemic as "figure out how to carry in person practices to remote", rather than a new beast worthy of learning new ways of working.

civilized• 5 years ago

They use the people who were already working at home before the pandemic as a control group. They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else, except they were already working from home. So theoretically, taking the difference between the newly WFH group and the already WFH group "cancels out" pandemic-related effects and isolates the impact of moving to WFH.

In simplistic terms, Group A experienced "pandemic + effect from changing to WFH" while Group B experienced only "pandemic". Therefore, B-A = "effect from changing to WFH" alone.

It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it's entirely convincing. It seems like you'd have to assume a couple things: (1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect; (2) new WFHers are interchangeable with veteran WFHers.

As a veteran WFHer, Assumption 2 seems especially suspect to me. People who self-selected into WFH and have been doing it for a while are going to be a very different group than the general population forced into it by a pandemic.

That said, I am a fan of econometrists and the crazy stunts they do with data to obtain so-called "natural experiments". So I'm open to changing my mind here. These kinds of papers are rarely convincing but never boring. Perhaps they managed to prove the somewhat uninteresting proposition that people thrust into WFH by a pandemic aren't very good at it.

Natsu• 5 years ago

Yeah, not all businesses were well-prepared for a sudden WFH transition like this. At my employer, we were already doing limited WFH (one day a week) and productivity & satisfaction increased broadly for full WFH, but I know that doesn't generalize and some particular people had individual issues (e.g. it's hard to work on stuff that requires focus while small children want your attention).

Bilal_io• 5 years ago

They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else

It takes a while to adjust to the changes.

null_shift• 5 years ago

“(1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect“

i think this is a significantly flawed assumption. in my experience, the people that had been working from home previously are much better equipped to deal with the pandemic (e.g. likely have a home office set up vs. working from makeshift workspace like a kitchen table).

furyofantares• 5 years ago

On the flip side, something that I haven't seen discussed really, the experience I had was that over time, I found there were ways in which working from home got harder rather than easier. At the start of the pandemic, I already had a ton of work to do, and when I finished it I already had a good idea of the next work to do, and so on. That became less and less true over time

And then, unrelated to that, I eventually switched teams, and had a much more difficult time finding my place on the new team

tick_tock_tick• 5 years ago

I'm willing to be the "office" will be a competitive advantage in the future.

The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

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