How we work Study shows that remote working led to less interconnection. Over the first six months of 2020 a group of social scientists sifted the data captured by the emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours, of 61,182 US Microsoft employees. They sought to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide remote work on collaboration and communication. "Our results show that the shift to firm-wide remote work caused business groups within Microsoft to become less interconnected. It also reduced the number of ties bridging structural holes in the company’s informal collaboration network, and caused individuals to spend less time collaborating with the bridging ties that remained. Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information." Ouch. Research Paper: The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers