Employees working from home full-time become more isolated from their co-workers, a new study suggests.
Researchers from the University of California - Berkeley Haas School of Business looked at tens of thousands of Microsoft staff members who were fully remote.
They found that the employees spent less time collaborating, had fewer real-time conversations and decreased the number of hours spent in meetings.
The team says that the findings suggest having all employees work from home full-time makes it harder to share new information, which could lead to loss of productivity.
A new study looked at 61,000 Microsoft employees who were sent home to work remotely full-time due to the COVID-19 pandemic (file image)
Remote workers spent 25% less time collaborating with colleagues across all networks in comparison with the time spent pre-pandemic (above)
'Measuring the causal effects of remote work has historically been difficult, because only certain types of workers were allowed to work away from the office,' said co-author Dr David Holtz, a faculty affiliate at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, in a statement.
'That changed during the pandemic, when almost everyone who could work from home was required to do so.
'The work-from-home mandate created a unique opportunity to identify the effects of company-wide remote work on how information workers communicate and collaborate.'
When the COVID-19 pandemic first struck the U.S. in March 2020, hundreds of thousands of companies sent their employees home to work remotely full-time.
Many employers have been delaying returning workers to the office five days a week due to the spread of the Delta variant.
In fact, Microsoft announced on Thursday that
