From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington met as Ph.D. students, when they were randomly assigned desks a few feet away from each other in a basement office at Harvard University. They started chatting and soon learned they shared an interest in improving work — both for workers and companies. The collaboration that ensued continued at Princeton University, where they both completed postdocs.
Their latest joint project is a book on the benefits of working together — face to face, in real time. In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, which will be published later this month, describes the benefits of in-person collaboration and the drawbacks of remote work...
Many workers, including in higher ed, say they prefer to work remotely at least part time. Why do you think there’s such a gap between what people say they want and what might be good for them?
I think that the costs of remote work are very subtle, often. From a productivity perspective, the quality of work is harder to see than the quantity. At a more personal level, the costs can also be subtle. You don’t recognize that you’re not having these face-to-face interactions with colleagues, and so you’re not developing stronger relationships with them. It’s kind of hard to see that counterfactual, whereas it’s relatively easy to see the counterfactual of “I would have to be commuting and now I’m not and I really don’t like commuting.” ...The things that you’re potentially losing by not going into the office are these much mushier concepts — maybe you would have come up with a better idea if you were in person and you had a serendipitous collision with your colleague. But you don’t know that that would have happened.
Colleges and universities differ from other types of workplaces in many ways. Are there lessons from your research that would apply specifically to an academic setting?
It’s been interesting to see how resonant some of our findings have been with other academics. One of our papers looks at how much feedback software engineers get on their code, and we find that people who are distant from their colleagues, even by just a short walk, end up getting 20 percent fewer comments on their work. That hits young people harder, and also hits women harder because it looks like they’re less comfortable asking for advice when they have to do that digitally. A lot of young female academics, particularly, have come up to us and talked about the connection they see between that study and their own experience. I think the transition to being a professor from being a grad student is a tough one in the best of circumstances. In those contexts where it’s no one’s job to mentor you, it’s extra important to have this in-person reinforcement...
How can employers in higher ed persuade employees of the benefits of working in person?
Aspects of the data could be compelling. There is a study where they basically have teams of people or pairs of people try to come up with new ideas for products for a company, and the experiment randomizes them so that half of them are in Zoom meetings and half of them are in-person meetings. The people in in-person meetings come up with 14 percent more ideas. Their ideas are also rated as more creative. One hypothesis is that when people are on Zoom meetings, they’re always looking at the camera to kind of signal that engagement. But then you don’t get the eyes wandering, and that means you don’t get your mind wandering as much. There’s also a lot of other things that are happening in person that don’t translate totally to Zoom, like at a neurological level — your brains kind of light up in sync with the people you’re working with in person in a way that is not fully replicated online.
Faculty members enjoy the autonomy to work how and when they like. Does your research offer insights into whether there is a minimum number of hours to create these benefits of working in-person?
The office is not about having butts in seats, and everyone in their own office or cubicle or whatever the arrangement is. That could really imply some notion of core hours, where if most meetings with students, meetings with other faculty, happen between say 10 and 2, those could be the hours that faculty are implicitly expected to come in for... The emphasis should be on this idea of getting brains in sync.
Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-case-against-remote-work.
