Increasingly, employers are rolling back the remote work arrangements instituted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Companies such as Starbucks, Walmart, Google, JP Morgan Chase, and Amazon have called employees back into the office — some even mandating a five-day-a-week return-to-office (RTO) schedule.

When announcing this change, leaders often say they are doing so to enable collaboration that can only happen in person. When Starbucks’ former CEO Howard Schultz called for his employees to return to their offices for at least three days of the week, he said the decision was motivated by work that demanded “the kind of thinking, daring collaboration, [and] courageous conversations that cannot be done on Teams calls, or in just pre-scheduled meetings.”

Behind statements like Schultz’s is a strong body of research in communications and social psychology that provides evidence supporting the notion that remote communication is less rich than in-office communication. And some management research suggests that employees who primarily work remotely tend to have less trusting and less close relationships with their coworkers.

Yet the decision to bring employees back into the office is not a simple one. Other research shows — and many employees came to realize during the pandemic — that productivity and performance do not suffer when working remotely. Further, employees are actually happier and less likely to leave their jobs when they have remote or hybrid work arrangements.

As management researchers, we were perplexed by the RTO mandates. If leaders believe that in-person collaboration is essential to strong work relationships and thus organizational success, how do we make sense of findings that remote work does not decrease productivity and may also offer additional value to organizations? To investigate this, we questioned the widely-held assumption that interacting remotely hurts coworker relationships.

Our research, recently published in the Academy of Management Journal, draws upon archival, field, and experimental studies to examine how the glimpses of coworkers’ nonwork lives seen through video calls affect relationships. We found that these virtual interactions can make employees see each other as more authentic, human, and trustworthy — all qualities that lead to stronger personal and professional bonds. Our work provides a more balanced view into the influence of remote work on how employees relate with each other. We draw upon our findings to offer research-backed suggestions to managers grappling with the potential benefits — and costs — of RTO mandates.

How working from home provides a window into coworkers’ worlds

While much of the research on remote work and coworker relationships assumes that remote work makes coworkers feel more distance from each other, we examined another possibility: We tested whether remote work makes coworkers feel closer by allowing them to learn nonwork information about each other in a new way.

Drawing on previous research, including our own, that explores how and why learning nonwork information about coworkers benefits relationships, we theorized that working from home makes it more likely that coworkers will learn about each other in three important ways:

  1. They will learn more nonwork information about each other.
  2. They will learn information about each other that is seen as being shared in less intentional ways.
  3. Because they are working in video meetings, they will learn this nonwork, unintentional information about each other in a more vivid, dynamic way — visually, auditorily, etc. — than if they were to tell each other this information when in an office.

Imagine for example that a colleague’s toddler bounds into view during a video meeting, vividly bringing attention to that colleague’s role as a parent. We hypothesized that learning about a coworker’s nonwork life in this unintentional and vivid way would lead employees to see their coworkers as more authentic, trustworthy, and human, thus motivating them to invest in that coworker both personally (i.e., friendship) and professionally.

In our first study, we sought to examine employees’ real-life experiences regarding what they learn about their colleagues when working from home. We asked 286 full-time, U.S.-based employees to describe a time when they were working from home and learned something new about their coworkers. What did they learn? How did they learn it? How did it make them feel about their colleague?

We also systematically analyzed online comments related to remote work and interpersonal relationships, including 8,150 on Reddit, 5,772 on Twitter, 14,625 on LinkedIn, and 40,551 comments across 10 news stories related to interpersonal learning. We found that employees learned a variety of nonwork- and work-related information, including how their coworkers parent, what their coworkers do in their free time, and what their coworkers’ religion or political values are.

Building on this qualitative study, we designed experiments to test our hypotheses. We asked 1,244 full-time, U.S.-based employees in one study and 413 in another study to watch a simulated video meeting alongside a new virtual “coworker” and to collaborate with this coworker on a task during that meeting. Over the course of the call, participants learned various work and nonwork information about their new colleague in different ways. For example, some participants learned that their coworker had a dog or child because the dog or child ran into the room during the meeting. Others learned that their coworker had a dog or child because they were told so by the coworker.

When we analyzed our data, we found that when employees learned information about the coworker that was more vivid (visual or auditory), perceived as unintentional, and nonwork-related — all ways of learning that are more likely when working from home — they were more likely to invest in their personal (i.e., pursue friendship) and professional (i.e., pursue future work collaborations) relationships with that coworker. We found that effect was largely driven by seeing that coworker as more trustworthy, authentic, and human.

Considerations for Managers

Based on our research, we offer suggestions to help managers think through the when’s, why’s, and if’s about bringing employees together in-person:

Change your mindset about how remote work affects coworker relationships

It’s easy to assume that working from home does not benefit employees’ relationships with each other because it’s been the prevailing narrative since the inception of remote work. Our research shows that this mindset isn’t necessarily true. Taken together with accounts of employees leaving their companies when being forced to return-to-office, this mindset may actually harm your employees’ loyalty to your organization. Thus, the first step in thinking about when and why employees should be together in-person is to push back against this prevailing mindset and instead, think through how working remotely may benefit your employees’ relationships in ways that being in the office cannot.

Lean into the relational potential in your remote business practices

Once you have changed your mindset, you can start to see remote work as a generator of employee relationships rather than as an impediment. Our research shows that over video meetings, coworkers can learn new nonwork information about each other in ways that benefit their relationships more than the traditional ways employees learn about one another in the office (e.g., by telling each other about themselves or even connecting on social media).

Based on our research, we suggest two ways you can easily start tapping into the relational potential of your remote business practices:

  1. Role model ways that show (rather than just tell) nonwork related information. For example, you might unblur your own video meeting background. This is an easy way to make your employees see that doing so is not only accepted but encouraged. Through this modeling, you are encouraging employees to unblur their backgrounds and let coworkers get a glimpse into their real life in a less filtered way. For example, an employee who rock climbs might just leave their rock-climbing gear hanging behind them, rather than scurrying to put it away and tidy the camera view.
  2. Create spaces for your employees to vividly share nonwork related details with each other. This might mean carving out some time during team meetings to introduce team members to each other in a different way. Provide a prompt — what is a favorite song, band, food, experience — and allow the conversation to flow between your employees, encourage them to show beloved books or souvenirs. You can increase the vividness of this sharing by creating a team playlist of favorite songs or a space to share photos of experiences outside of work.While our research shows that a curated experience like this may be less impactful than learning nonwork information in an unintentional way, members of our author team have published other research that shows that learning any nonwork information can be a good thing for both your personal and professional relationships.

Focus RTO strategies on tasks and the types of relationships you want to build

Now that you have seen the relational potential in your virtual business practices, you can rethink your RTO plans. We suggest that there are two questions to ask yourself:

  1. Does the work need in-person interaction? Given that our research shows that working remotely can benefit coworker relationships, the narrative that bringing people back to the office to benefit relationships does not tell the full story. Instead of focusing your RTO strategy on the people side of bringing people back together in person, focus your strategy on the work itself. What would interactions between employees look like to best support the work that needs to be done? If it is a brainstorming session that requires liveliness that you think can only be captured in-person, then perhaps you want to bring people together in-person to create that spark. If it is a working session that requires everyone to be on their laptops, that task may be better done remotely. The last thing you want is employees commuting into the office to spend their day logging into video meetings with colleagues just down the hall. It is important to recognize that not all tasks require in-person collaboration, and that working-from-home can provide benefits that being in the office simply cannot provide, for both coworker relationships and beyond. Our main point is that your return-to-work strategy should center on how your employees relate to each other in terms of what is best for the work itself.
  2. What type of relationships do you want your employees to build? While our research showed that individual coworker relationships can benefit from interacting virtually when working from home, we recognize that managers might also want to build relationships between groups of people or between people who may not interact via video meetings; for example, employees who do not work with each other regularly. If you are thinking about a strategy for the latter, merely being in the office every day is unlikely to build the strong relationships that are desired. When people are in the office, they tend to interact only with those who are situated physically close to them. Indeed, one of our experiments showed that sharing can be vivid and perceived as less intentional when learning in-person as well. Think about a very intentional and strategic return-to-office strategy where you focus your in-office time on “moments that matter” that elicit the type of learning about coworkers – learning that is vivid, seen as unintentionally shared, and about nonwork information.

• • •

Our research shows that the decision to RTO can’t solely be about building better and stronger relationships because working from home can benefit coworker relationships in ways that working in the office cannot. Thus, while there is a certain magic to being in-person that we haven’t yet figured out how to fully replicate virtually, there is also a magic to working-from-home —perhaps being able to switch the laundry while you learn new information about your coworkers. This is a magic that many employees have felt and are not happy about losing, suggesting that managers may want to be strategic in their RTO policies and capitalize on the upsides of working remotely.

 

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