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The COVID-19 pandemic shifted how nearly everyone works and interacts – in particular, many workers began working primarily from home. The remote and hybrid work trend – beginning prior but propelled by the pandemic – appears to be here to stay. The New York Times reported in March 2024 that roughly 14,000,000 U.S. workers between 18 and 64 work a hybrid schedule and about 15,000,000 work fully remote.
Since the pandemic, extensive research has been conducted to assess how virtual work impacts employees’ productivity and quality of life.
Artis Rozentals, Forbes Councils member and CEO of DeskTime, a productivity and time-tracking app, compiled productivity and effectiveness data from 2,288 users and found that, on average, remote workers put in nearly an hour more than in-office and hybrid workers. The study also showed that hybrid workers were the most productive, followed by remote workers, then office workers. Typically, remote workers were more effective than hybrid and in-office workers.
A USA Today survey sought to better understand the benefits and drawback of remote work and found that in April 2024, 59 percent of 667 remote worker respondents voted that “better work-life balance” was the top benefit of remote working, followed by “saving time on a commuting” (55 percent) and “having a more comfortable workspace” (54 percent).
In the same survey, 34 percent of respondents voted the biggest drawback of remote work is “feeling isolated from your team at work,” followed by “fewer opportunities to learn from others at work” (25 percent). Further down the list, 14 percent of respondents said the top drawback of remote work is “decreased collaboration with your team,” and 13 percent said “feeling less connected to your organization’s culture.”
However Kris Byron, professor of management at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business who specializes in organizational behavior and perception (and misperception) in the workplace, has research that challenges the notion that remote work is always harmful to relationships at work. Byron and her research team specifically examined the unique ways remote workers can learn about their colleagues’ personal lives through virtual interactions.
“According to long-established findings, relationships form through intentional self-disclosures,” Byron said, “which tend to be reciprocal. If I disclose something about myself, you disclose something, and over time our relationship develops because we disclosed increasingly personal information.”
Byron asserts that remote workers have different means of learning about their coworkers because self-disclosures during video meetings are different. For example, remote workers can learn about colleagues when pets show up in the camera’s view, or their kids stop by to say hello during a meeting. Even books and home décor provide a sneak peek into colleagues’ interests and tastes.
Byron said, “We intended to look at how this kind of learning about your coworkers is different and what effect it has.”
Byron’s research suggests the seemingly unintentional nature of the reveal is essential to helping coworkers build bonds. Byron and her team also claim that learning about colleagues through remote work is more vivid because coworkers are experiencing and seeing aspects of their fellow employees’ lives, not just hearing what they say about themselves. Finally, remote interactions can offer glimpses into someone’s personal, non-work life because they are often at home in their private environment. This is especially true when remote workers don’t blur or use fake backgrounds while on video meetings.
“We found that these three things are important,” Byron said. “Vividness, perceived unintentionality, and more non-work related. Those personal perceptions help people see their coworkers as more human, more authentic, and more trustworthy. And, crucially, these perceptions increased employees motivation and actual investment in their coworker relationships.”
In 2021, the Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report echoed that remote work can help cultivate coworker relationships, saying, “These interactions with coworkers may help foster a workplace where people feel more comfortable to be themselves.” Their study found that during the pandemic, “work became more human” because workers interacted with their colleagues’ pets or families virtually and learned more about their personal lives.
Understanding how to maximize employee relationships through remote communication is essential because remote and hybrid work appear to be the new status quo for many. The authors of the Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report stated, “We’re all learning as we go, but we know two things for sure: flexible work is here to stay, and the talent landscape has fundamentally shifted.”
Byron said that if managers are concerned about relational development, there are strategies that can help facilitate trust among remote workers. Companies may, for example, request that workers not use blurred or fake backgrounds, or begin meetings by asking employees to share how they feel about a specific topic or tell something they feel grateful for or annoyed by.
“One of the cited disadvantages of remote work is that it stifles relationship development, making it harder to form relationships when we work remotely,” Byron said. “Our findings suggest that’s not necessarily true.”