![]() ![]() While some people find working from home energizing, many employees probably won’t be able to be as effective as they would be under normal conditions. Expect wide differences in productivity across employees, for now.Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Managers need to know what their employees are juggling to provide the right professional support. Empathize with workers’ unique circumstances.She offers three pieces of advice to leaders of remote workforces: The pandemic workforce has created a significant challenge for managers, Sadun says. “It's very unnatural to be constantly looking attentive for hours.” How managers can be mindful You have to show a concentrated face the whole time,” she says. “The issue with Zoom is that you’re always on there. Gathering in person doesn’t seem as draining as staring at a screen. It doesn’t take a detailed time log to know that videoconferencing fatigue has long set in for many employees, a likely factor in shrinking meeting times. If you have to combine your bedroom with your office, it’s not as good.” “If you have a large house, life is good. “This is one of those things where it’s hard to make one statement for everybody,” Sadun says. So far, the preliminary conclusions have been highly varied and personal. To tackle some of these questions, Sadun has been studying how 300 knowledge workers have been spending their time during the pandemic and how those activities affect their moods and perceived effectiveness. The study also didn’t include the time spent on collaboration tools, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, which have become increasingly popular. The anonymized nature of the data made it difficult to discern the quality of the meetings and email communication, and the impact on employees’ well-being. The research team detailed their findings in the working paper Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July. “Unless you really are able to create distinct boundaries between your life and your work, it's almost inevitable that we see these blurring lines,” she says. About 8.3 percent more emails were sent after business hours.Emails had 2.9 percent more recipients.Employees sent 5.2 percent more emails a day. ![]() The team compared the frequency and timing of emails sent within and outside organizations eight weeks before the start of pandemic-related lockdowns and eight weeks after. ![]() “For us, the question was, ‘What happens when you cannot have that physical space anymore?’ How do people adjust their work patterns?” Longer days and more check-ins “The role of an office is to congregate and help people work together,” Sadun says. “There is a general sense that we never stop being in front of Zoom or interacting. Polzer, the UPS Foundation Professor of Human Resource Management HBS doctoral candidate Evan DeFilippis New York University doctoral student Stephen Michael Impink and former HBS research associate Madison Singell-studied aggregated, anonymous emails and meeting invitations of employees at 21,500 companies in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. ![]() In the first large-scale analysis of digital communication early in the crisis, the team-Sadun Jeffrey T. Shifting to remote work at the start of the pandemic stripped away whatever was left of the elusive 9-to-5 business day and replaced it with videoconferencing and “asynchronous work.” With at least 16 percent of Americans planning to keep working from home part of the time after COVID-19 abates, researchers are probing how virtual interaction might reshape organizations. “There is a general sense that we never stop being in front of Zoom or interacting,” says Raffaella Sadun, professor of business administration in the HBS Strategy Unit. Employees also participated in more meetings, though for less time than they did before COVID-19 sent many workers home. Work-from-home employees whose days seem longer, with more meetings and emails than ever before, may find a new Harvard Business School study validating.Īn analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent-or 48.5 minutes-during the pandemic’s early weeks. ![]()
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