As the majority of the desk-based workers lurched to working from home during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, communication between teams fell and working hours increased.
In a peer-reviewed study published in Nature Human Behaviour today, researchers from Microsoft showed how colleagues at the Redmond-based software biz changed their communication and collaboration patterns during the first months of isolation.
Using data gathered from circa 61,000 Microsoft employees in the US between December 2019 to June 2020, the study shows that company-wide remote work caused the collaboration network to become more static and siloed: people were less likely to communicate with those outside their immediate business teams compared with when they spent time in the office.
At the same time, there was a decrease in so-called synchronous communication – phone calls, video meetings or face-to-face meetings – and an increase in asynchronous communication such as email, SMS or corporate chat, the data…