Remote work pros & cons

Managing remote work requires emotional intelligence and mutual trust from both the company and employees. Riedl and colleagues (2021, MIT Sloan Management Review) collected the data from more than 5,000 respondents from over 1,300 teams and found that groups working remotely are able to be as efficient as teams working face-to-face. Precisely, they evaluated the collective intelligence of teams — their capability to collaborate efficiently to solve various challenges — and found that face-to-face and remote teams did practically equally well by looking at the overall work these teams completed.

Another study (Sull et al., 2020, MIT Sloan Management Review) shows that maintaining regular, transparent, and consistent communication should be a priority. This can limit the feeling of disconnectedness that about half of the research participants cited. Most people appreciated when their company provided support for physical and mental health, especially, for instance, on how they could deal with social isolation. Coaching is one of the several tools that can help to tackle this issue.

Overall, remote work can improve efficiency, especially regarding stand-alone tasks that where minimal coordination is required with others. This does not apply for contexts where intense team-work is necessary – achieving the same level of productivity proved to be more challenging in this case. Certain tasks are easier to complete remotely, while others are more challenging. The list of pros and cons continues: on the one hand, people can save time on traveling to work. On the other hand, working from home makes several people feeling like they must be available all the time. Research shows that people who work from home spend more hours with work compared to those in the office; also, making allowances proved to be a popular tool for employees to adjust their plans to accommodate personal commitments, such as childcare responsibilities. Building in some flexibility worked better for companies compared to following a strict top-down approach with attention to greater details on planned time-allocations. Please find more related to this in the blog-post on to stop micro-managing your colleagues.