Learning on the Job: Do We Learn and Develop Faster with In-Person Collaboration?

Source:  https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk

Do we learn more from in-person collaborators than remote teammates?  That question has been top of mind for many people over the past few years.   Much of the dialogue about this question has not been evidence-based though.  It's been highly anecdotal.   Recently, however, I read about some fascinating research on the topic. 

Frank van der Wouden and Hyejin Youn analyzed more than 17 million academic publications over decades to address the question of whether local collaboration generates more learning than remote collaboration.  The scholars wanted to identify each researcher who collaborated with someone outside their discipline and later published a sole-authored paper in that new domain.  That later publication would indicate that the researcher had learned a great deal from this collaborator outside his or her original field of expertise.  Youn and van der Wouden compared the learning rate for those who collaborated locally vs. at a distance.   They found that the learning rate of local collaborators exceeded that of distant collaborators, with a particularly substantial impact in areas such as chemistry and engineering.  

Moreover, Youn explained why the impact of local collaboration was greater for people early in their careers: “That’s understandable, because early in your career, you still need to acquire knowledge, and you have to be present to do that when knowledge isn’t yet codified. It’s like riding a bicycle. You can’t learn how to ride a bicycle by reading a paper.”

The study covered the period from 1975-2018. Therefore, some will argue that we have much better tools for virtual collaboration today, and we have become more adept at remote interaction.  As a result, they will conclude that we cannot draw far-reaching conclusions from this study.  That may be true, but it still warrants consideration and certainly indicates that we need further study of the topic for the more recent period of time.  The finding about young people is of particular interest to me.  What do these findings mean for how we bring new workers into the fold early in their career? What should onboarding and apprenticeship look like in those early years?  How will they learn and develop most effectively?  We've been thinking a great deal about what type of work can be done best remotely vs. in-person.  We should also be thinking carefully about the stage of each person's career and how that impacts our decisions about in-person vs. remote collaboration.  

Your Brain on Zoom: Not Good?

Fortune's Orianna Rosa Royle reported this week on a new study by Nan Zhao, Xian Zhang, J. Adam Noah, Mark Tiede, and Joy Hirsch, published in Imaging Neuroscience.  The research examined the brain activity of people engaged in Zoom meetings vs. in-person meetings.  The scholars discovered that face-to-face interactions led to enhanced brain activity.    They wrote that,  "the exchange of social cues is greater for the in-person condition."  Specifically, the scholars reported:

Findings from this investigation suggest that differences occur at the visual sensing level (mean and standard variation of eye contact duration); the behavioral level (coherence and diameters of pupils); the electrocortical level (theta oscillations); the neuroimaging level (contrast between in-person and on-line faces); and the dyadic neural coupling level (coherence between neural signals in the dorsal parietal regions).   

Co-author Joy Hirsch told Fortune, “Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions. Overall, the dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during Zoom encounters.”  She concluded, "“Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same ‘privileged access’ to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing."

What does it mean for those of us who do engage in hybrid work?  We have to think carefully about the type of work being done virtually vs. in-person, and we have to focus on the intensity of the collaboration required during meetings.  Some types of collaboration may be more suited to in-person interaction.  Moreover, we must consider how virtual engagement with others may affect our ability to read social cues and ultimately how the ability to read those cues impacts our ability to build effective working relationships.     

Is Office Chitchat an Unproductive Activity?

Source: NBC

Several weeks ago, Rachel Feintzeig wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal addressing the issue of productivity and distractions at home versus in the office. I found the end of the article quite interesting. One interviewee notes that she "remembers walking into her office complex every day at 9 a.m. to face the long warm-up: colleagues exchanging hellos, putting away their lunches, filling up coffee cups. 'Nothing really got done that first hour,' she said. 'That was our work-life balance, right there.'” The interviewee continued her commentary by talking about the value of just getting right to work:

Same thing at the end of the day, as people wound down, she said. If she wrapped her work early, she felt unable to leave even though the job was done. Starting a remote job last year, she found the idea of working, and breaking, on her own time thrilling. “You don’t have to go up to everyone and go, ‘How was your weekend?’ ” she said. “You can just get to work.”

Whatever we think about the remote work debate, this story suggests that some people are misunderstanding the value of informal non-work-related talk at the office. Catching up about others' lives, children, or weekend activities over a quick cup of coffee is not "unproductive" chatter. It's an important part of how we build relationships with others, and those relationships can be crucial foundations for getting real work done.

Recent research examined the impact of "office chitchat." Scholars Jessica R. Methot, Emily H. Rosado-Solomon, Patrick E. Downes, and Allison S. Gabriel have found that office chitchat can certainly be distracting. However, they also found that, "Small talk enhanced employees’ daily positive social emotions at work, which heightened organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and enhanced well-being at the end of the workday." For more on this topic, see Lindsay Mannering's article for the New York Times titled, "The Awkward But Essential Art of Office Chitchat."

Should Internships Be Fully Remote?

Is remote work diminishing the efficacy of the summer internship experience for thousands of young college students?  Emmy Lucas has written an article on summer internships for Forbes this week.  In that article, she examines how challenging it is this summer for many students to land internships, given the layoffs at many firms, particularly in the tech sector.  She also raises a question about how remote work has affected the ability of interns to learn, grow, and develop successfully.   Here's an excerpt from her article.  She begins with a comment by Jane Ashen Turkewitz, who administers internship placement for the University of Texas at Austin: 

Remote work has also put a damper on the intern experience. “I remember joining the workforce in my twenties and it being super fun,” Ashen Turkewitz says. “You would do your work, but there was camaraderie, there was brainstorming. There was an energy that I believe students and early career folks are missing out on, big time.”

On Glassdoor, negative mentions of remote work in reviews by interns grew by 548% between 2019 and 2021. “Clearly a lot of companies' internship programs are struggling to adapt to the new normal,” Glassdoor’s Terrazas says. “Big companies have been leading the charge in getting folks back into the office, so I'm really going to be curious to see if it has a measurable effect in terms of experience this summer.”

Salesforce’s head of global futureforce programs, Alex Murray, says its interns are back fully in person. “We’ve experimented with remote and hybrid programs over the past few years,” she said in an email. “But our interns told us they want to be in an office environment.”

Kate Feeney, who is interning a second summer at Raytheon Technologies, spent last summer fully remote, but is going to the office one or two days a week this summer. “It’s a lot more isolating [working] online,” she says of her experience last year. Now, “I get to ask more questions about [my co-workers’] job rather than it being so focused sitting on a Zoom listening to them talk.”

This article raises very important questions.  In my view, business leaders need to invest the time and effort to meet with their interns in person throughout a summer experience.  Apprenticeship, learning, and development will often (not always, but often) not take place as effectively in a fully remote manner.  One challenge is that many managers want the flexibility of working remotely often during the summer months.  However, if you hire an intern, you have a responsibility to make that experience meaningful and productive.  Managers should be paying it forward, offering the mentorship and guidance they once received at a young age.   

Why the Decline in Labor Productivity?

Jane Thier reported last week for Fortune on the decline in labor productivity in the American economy.  She notes that the United States has experienced productivity declines for the past five quarters.  That hasn't happened since World War II.  Thier examines George Mason economist Tyler Cowen's commentary regarding the potential causes of this significant decline.   She notes that Cowen attributes much of the problem to "a serious crisis of morale" in the workplace.   I think there's no question that many employees are disengaged, and even disgruntled.  Organizations have been grappling with low engagement for years, but it does seem that the problem has become worse since the pandemic began.

Thier also writes that some experts have begun to question whether remote and hybrid work might be driving declines in labor productivity.   Cowen argues that more data are needed to draw definitive conclusions about the impact of remote work.   Fellow economist Gregory Daco of EY Parthenon argues that comments from various clients suggests that remote work might be causing a decline in productivity.  

Many companies reported high productivity of their employees during those early months of the pandemic.  I wonder, though, whether unique circumstances contributed to that efficiency boost, and if productivity might be falling as those conditions no longer hold.  Many employees and organizations rallied in those early days of the pandemic, working extremely hard to ensure that their firms would survive amidst a preciptious economic downturn.   Moreover, we all were stuck in our homes.  We had very little else to do, and so perhaps many were quite productive in those circumstances.  

Things have changed though.   Now, perhaps, we are seeing some of the limitations of remote work, and it may be having a deleterious impact.  It's not the popular thing to say these days.  People who try to argue for return to office often get pummeled by the press, and they potentially scare off talented employees who insist on working remotely.  Yet, the national productivity data should trouble us greatly.  We have to dig deeper into these data, and more rigorous empirical work must be done to understand the complete ramifications of remote/hybrid work.  

How Business Travel Spurs Innovation

Source: muratart/shutterstock

Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Do Yoon Kim and Wesley W. Koo have written a new working paper titled, "Innovation on Wings: Nonstop Flights and Firm Innovation in the Global Context."  The scholars collected data from over 5,000 airports around the world over a ten-year period (2005-2015).  They married flight data with other datasets that provided information about company patents.  The scholars found that, "a 10 percent increase in nonstop flights between two locations led to a 1.4 percent increase in new patents between firms in those places."   Choudhury explains the finding in a comment for a HBS Working Knowledge feature about the research: 

"We’re showing that business travel matters for innovation, but it only matters if two firms’ locations are either culturally or temporally far away from each other,” he says—that is, if the two firms possess different cultural norms or don’t have overlapping business hours, defined as 1.5 hours or less.

For instance, colleagues who speak different languages and possess unique cultural norms around meeting styles would benefit from in-person meetings, whereas people who speak the same language and operate meetings similarly won’t realize the same benefit.

Choudhury hopes business leaders consider the research when refining post-pandemic work policies. Because of the vast sample size of flights used in this paper, he believes the findings are generalizable for all business leaders.

The paper appears to be a strong endorsement for face-to-face interaction as a catalyst for innovation under certain circumstances.   One caveat - the study focused on data from the pre-pandemic period.  Companies clearly have adopted a range of improved communication technologies since 2020, and managers have become more adept at using these technologies.   Does face-to-face interaction matter as much today as it did during the 2005-2015 period?  Future research will help us answer that question.  For now, the study at least requires us to question whether we can achieve desired innovation results simply by relying on remote communication and collaboration. 

How Important Are Face-to-Face Interactions for Innovation?

Source: www.lifesize.com

Much has been written about the impact of remote work on collaboration and innovation in the workplace. Yet, few rigorous studies have attempted to document the actual impact on innovation. Now comes a fascinating new paper from David Atkin, M. Keith Chen & Anton Popov.  They used an enormous amount of smartphone geolocation data to track face-to-face interactions.   Their research sample includes over 51,000 employees in Silicon Valley in 2016 and 2017 (pre-pandemic).   Here's an excerpt from their paper:

Our rich data on interactions allow us to open the black box of knowledge spillovers and isolate a particular channel: face-to-face meetings. To do so, we first link worker interactions—measured by the probability that a worker from one establishment “meets” a worker of another establishment by being in the same place at the same time with patent citations between their employers, an observable proxy for knowledge flows. 

To calculate these meeting probabilities, we combine smartphone geolocation data with maps of building rooftops for all patenting firms in Silicon Valley, assigning workers to establishments based on where they spend a large fraction of their waking hours. To assign firm-level citations to establishments, we scrape citation data from recent patent applications and use the inventors’ hometowns coupled with the housing locations of workers to probabilistically assign citations across multi-establishment firms. The resulting dataset of establishment-to-establishment worker meetings and citations reveals a strong positive relationship between face-to-face interactions and knowledge flows, even after conditioning on rich controls for the physical distance between establishments.

Note the final sentence.  Face-to-face interactions enhanced knowledge flows. They documented a strong positive effect of face-to-face interactions on patent citations.  Here's more from the authors:

Implementing this approach, we find that face-to-face meetings significantly increase citations between establishments, with the strength of the effect twice the impact of physical distance on citations. Eliminating a quarter of face-to-face meetings in Silicon Valley would reduce the number of citations by approximately 8 percent..." 

Naturally, some will argue that we have learned how to collaborate remotely during the pandemic, and have we have mastered a batch of technologies that promote virtual collaboration.   Certainly, we have  become much more effective at communicating and collaborating with others spread across remote geographic locations.  Yet, remember that this study documents many informal, serendipitous face-to-face interactions among employees.   Those interactions are much harder to replicate virtually.   While many leaders are concerned about losing employees if they try to mandate a return to the office, they do have to consider this study's implications regarding remote work and innovation.  Hopefully, more researech will follow, enabling us to gain a deeper understanding of the value of face-to-face interaction in the new product and new process development process. 

Does Remote Work Harm Creativity & Innovation?

Source: Enterpreneur.com

Melanie S. Brucks & Jonathan Levav have published a new paper in Nature titled, "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation."    The scholars conducted a laboratory experiment as well as a field experiment with 1,490 engineers from five nations around the world.  The researchers found that remote collaboration hampers idea generation.  However, they found that remote collaboration has no impact on the ability of groups to select the best ideas to be implemented.   Here's an excerpt:

Here we show that, even if video interaction could communicate the same information, there remains an inherent and overlooked physical difference in communicating through video that is not psychologically benign: in-person teams operate in a fully shared physical space, whereas virtual teams inhabit a virtual space that is bounded by the screen in front of each member. Our data suggest that this physical difference in shared space compels virtual communicators to narrow their visual field by concentrating on the screen and filtering out peripheral visual stimuli that are not visible or relevant to their partner. According to previous research that empirically and neurologically links visual and cognitive attention as virtual communicators narrow their visual scope to the shared environment of a screen, their cognitive focus narrows in turn. This narrowed focus constrains the associative process underlying idea generation, whereby thoughts ‘branch out’ and activate disparate information that is then combined to form new ideas. Yet the narrowed cognitive focus induced by the use of screens in virtual interaction does not hinder all collaborative activities. Specifically, idea generation is typically followed by selecting which idea to pursue, which requires cognitive focus and analytical reasoning. Here we show that virtual interaction uniquely hinders idea generation—we find that videoconferencing groups generate fewer creative ideas than in-person groups due to narrowed visual focus, but we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective when it comes to idea selection.

Naturally, more research will be need to be conducted to see if others can replicate these findings in other contexts.   Perhaps the ability for remote work groups to collaborate creatively will be stronger in other circumstances or with the right type of leadership/facilitation.  However, this study highlights a very important phenomenon: the narrowing of cognitive focus.  Teams will need to be acutely aware of the negative effects of this "tunnel vision" as they work in remote and/or hybrid environments.  

Microsoft's Study on Remote Work and Collaboration

Source: geeksforgeeks.org

Stanford Professor Bob Sutton recently posted a link to a fascinating piece of research by Microsoft regarding the shift to remote work. The article is titled, "The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers," and it is authored by Longqi Yang, David Holtz, and a team of other researchers. This study examined emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and hours worked for more than 60,000 employees from December 2019 to June 2020 (covering both pre-pandemic work and several months after the shift to remote work). Here is what Microsoft discovered:

Overall, we found that the shift to remote work caused the formal business groups and informal communities within Microsoft to become less interconnected and more siloed. Remote work caused the share of collaboration time employees spent with cross-group connections to drop by about 25% of the pre-pandemic level. Furthermore, firm-wide remote work caused separate groups to become more intraconnected by adding more connections within themselves. The shift to remote work also caused the organizational structure at Microsoft to become less dynamic; Microsoft employees added fewer new collaborators and shed fewer existing ones.

The researchers do point out that the entire study took place with US workers at one company, Microsoft. That's clearly a limitation of the study. Moreover, they only studied the first few months of the pandemic. Companies clearly invested heavily in technology to support remote work and virtual collaboration as the pandemic persisted. Employees may have become more adept at working remotely and collaborating remotely as well. On the other hand, the scholars point out that these workers could "leverage existing network connections, many of which were built in person. This may not be possible if firm-wide remote work were implemented long-term." More work clearly needs to be done, but this research shines a spotlight on the potential downsides of remote work for large numbers of employees in a complex organization.

Stimulating Creativity & Innovation While Working From Home

Source: Pixabay

S. Mitra Kalita wrote an interesting article for Fortune this week about unlocking creativity amidst the pandemic, with so many people working from home.   Kalita writes:

CEOs are nervous as they ponder how working from home affects output, innovation, and productivity in the long term, according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor. “Creativity is the biggest single issue,” he told the Financial Times. “New ideas and new customers and new segments and new business models [are] all the CEOs are concerned about.”

Kalita went to explain, "A Leesman survey of 145,000 workers globally found 28% of those working from home said they were unable to collaborate on creative work."  These numbers surely are troubling.  Yes, vaccination rollouts have picked up speed, and many of us have high hopes of a return to normalcy.  However, we surely will have many people working from home in the future, even when the pandemic hopefully subsides.  We have to conquer the challenge of creativity and innovation in a remote work environment.  Kalita interviewed Blythe Towal, a senior manager of engineering for Shield AI, for the article.  She offered the writer some good principles for how they keep employees innovative at Shield AI in these trying circumstances.  I've summarized and added some commentary below.  

Good ideas come from everywhere: Use virtual collaboration as a means of democratizing participation in meetings and projects.  That type of democratization may come in many forms virtually... chat, break-outs, polling, as well as normal conversation during meetings.  

Overcommunicate:  Encourage instant messaging and frequent check-ins, to make up for the fact that informal conversations don't just naturally happen while people pass one another in the hallway.  You might think certain messaging is being redundant, but put aside that fear.  You can't connect too much when working remotely.  As I've written elsewhere, you have to engineer serendipity to spark innovation in a remote work environment.  

Connect: Use "all-hands" type meetings not only to communicate, but to encourage the formation of bonds across units and teams.  Seek to build relationships and expand people's social networks.  Use these opportunities to also help new employees integrate and connect. 

Values matter: An emphasis on shared values helps people remain poised amidst the tendency to be fighting fires constantly during turbulent times.  It also helps insure alignment while people are dispersed geographically. 

Project positive energy: Watch out for negative energy.  Be realistic, but relentessly optimistic.  Don't get bogged down by small failures or hiccups. Focus on the big picture, and celebrate any and all triumphs together.  Small wins are crucial.  Don't just focus on the large projects and goals.  You need to build momentum and use small wins to persuade those who might be skeptical about innovative ideas and initiatives.

A few tips for leading virtual teams

Why We Might Want to Meet Face-to-Face

Laura Vanderkam has written a good article for Fast Company about the value of face-to-face communication.  She examines the science behind why in-person communication may be more beneficial than virtual meetings at times. 
 

Vanderkam points to one particularly interesting study by Juliana Schroeder, Jane Risen, Francesca Gino, and Michael Norton. They found that, "Handshakes are particularly consequential nonverbal gestures in negotiations because people feel comfortable initiating negotiations with them and believe they signal cooperation." The scholars discovered that handshakes lead to more cooperation in a negotiation. That collaboration helps people grow the pie, i.e. achieve potential win-win outcomes. Moreover, the handshake led to more honest behavior. People were less likely to lie about their interests after exchanging a handshake with another party. 

Vanderkam points out several other benefits of face-to-face communication.  You can read nonverbal cues more easily, and frankly, you are more attentive as it becomes much more socially awkward/inappropriate to multitask in person.  In other words, you are simply less likely to look at your laptop, tablet, or phone if you are in a face-to-face meeting than in a virtual setting.