How to Make Hybrid Work a Success, According to Science
Researchers explore how to maximize creativity and connection in hybrid and remote painting environments
By David Adam and Nature Magazine
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to lasting changes in work habits.
Blaise Hayward/Getty Images
Some facets of clinical life do not lend themselves to running away from home. Archaeologist Adrià Breu, who studies Neolithic pottery at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, can’t dig for items in his kitchen, and Claudia Sala’s experiments in molecular microbiology in Tuscany’s Foundation for Life Sciences in Siena, Italy, require him to spend most of his time in his lab. But those two researchers also work from home, for example when writing papers or analyzing data.
It’s a family story. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift toward hybrid paints in science, as in many other professions, and many universities and colleges officially allow you to split your time between running in the workplace or lab and running from home. Millions of people replaced their paints behaved almost overnight and the adjustments remained the same.
But the effect of this radical change is less clear. Remote workers say they are happier and more productive. But some studies suggest that groups that work closely together, adding educational study groups, produce more innovative and higher-quality results.
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As hybrid work becomes more prevalent, researchers are racing to understand all the implications, for science and everything in between. Drawing on economics, psychology, and communication theory, they examine many facets of hybrid work, from how other people respond to emails and videos. calls, to how remote groups collaborate and transfer knowledge.
They also explore what science can offer to bridge the gap between in-office and remote teams and make hybrid paints a success.
Remote work was an option for some people before the COVID-19 pandemic, but not for many. In 2016, in the U. S. , only 4% of fully paid days were painted from home. This proportion reached 60% in May 2020 and has increased. It has since stabilized at around 25%. It’s a similar story in other countries. According to UK government figures for 2022-2023, almost a portion of staff said they spent time running away from home.
Researchers from all clinical fields have been ahead of the curve when it comes to working in geographically remote groups. As generation and policy have fostered the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and materials, and expertise has become more specialized, the geographic distribution of participating study groups has increased. A 2011 study looked at the addresses of some 39 million study authors and found that the average distance of collaboration had increased more or less linearly, from 334 kilometers in 1980 to 1,553 km in 2009. This indicates that remote collaboration was well established through this point and that groups were becoming more international.
Members of these remote study groups sometimes didn’t work from home, but the demanding conditions of remote collaboration and its reliance on communication rather than in-person communication have a lot to do with how organizations and corporations across industries seek to achieve success. hybrid structures, says Ágnes Horvát, a communications and IT specialist. The research scientist who reads the effect of remote work practices at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
When it comes to the way scientists work, Horvát says that “the disorders we face are general. “This means researchers can take a look at studies of remote or hybrid work at insurance companies and other workplaces and apply the lessons to science, he adds.
There were many studies to build on even before the pandemic. Companies, researchers, and specialists have been tracking and predicting the consequences of remote paintings for decades.
In the 1980s, the American banking company American Express ran a successful pilot project called Project Homebound, which tested a select home-based workplace formula for people with disabilities. The project was hailed as a success and the company boasted cost savings and increased productivity. But union leaders were concerned about exploitation and called for a ban on “electronic home workstations. “
More recently, a number of small studies on express teams, such as mid-call staff and IT professionals, have shown that fully remote staff tend to be less productive, around 10-20%. Take fewer calls, enter less data, and take longer to complete the same tasks. This flies in the face of claims from the early days of the pandemic that other people running away from home were getting more work done than those running around the office.
In theory, hybrid work balances artists’ preference for flexibility with bosses’ concerns about production. And a 2022 survey of 1,612 global enterprise marketing and finance engineers and artists Trip. com confirms this. The company has assigned other people to the job. in the workplace full-time or two days a week. Employees who worked in a hybrid style were happier and less likely to leave the company than those who worked in the workplace full-time. The results, published as a working paper and not yet peer-reviewed, recommend that even though team members assigned to the hybrid organization painted different schedules and schedules than those running in the workplace, the teams’ overall productivity was the same. Workers with longer commutes were probably more likely to report the benefits of telerunning.
While those post-pandemic analyses provide useful data, the researchers say, they require longer-term studies to fully assess the advantages of remote work.
“The pandemic has shown us the effects of running away from home in the very short term, but we need more evidence of what will happen if we continue to work remotely for years,” says Marina Schröder, an innovation economist at Leibniz University. He studies the effects of distance painting on creativity and has shown, for example, that communication through chat software leads to less innovation compared to a face-to-face conversation.
Late last year, one such long-term project led by Carl Frey, an economist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, produced the most powerful evidence yet that remote paintings can replace the nature and quality of what researchers produce together.
The team found that those who rely on the same thing make more groundbreaking discoveries. While remote staff derive advantages from greater collective knowledge, those groups are less likely to be artistic and more prepared to make incremental progress.
“We’ve shown in this paper that remote groups are more likely to collaborate on technical tasks,” Frey says, “whereas on-site groups are much more likely to collaborate on conceptualizing new ideas. “
The researchers analyzed 20 million study papers published between 1960 and 2020 and four million patent programs filed between 1976 and 2020 worldwide. The studies looked at contributors’ affiliations and geographic distribution, and used citation studies to assess the extent to which publications were “disruptive. “”.
When the collaboration distance increased from 0 kilometers to more than six hundred kilometers, the probability of disruption decreased by about 20%. “Remote groups are less likely to create groundbreaking discoveries,” Frey says.
Horvát says the study is a valuable warning amid the rush for remote work. “That’s not how we want science to evolve. So I think we want to take this very seriously. “
What could be contributing to this trend?” In any case, the ideation procedure is more complicated when it is mediated by technology. I think it’s the closest thing to a mechanism,” Horvát says. “It’s a significant lack of wisdom on our part, because how are we going to fix it if we don’t know what the cause is?
Frey says there may be several explanations for the decline in innovation. One of them is the price of sporadic encounters, which are more likely when other people work in the same place.
Face-to-face meetings also allow other people to gain more knowledge. “If you have lunch together and stuff like that, you get more concepts that filter through you because other people have read a lot of things on their own. “
A third option is what Frey calls the intensity of collaboration, which stimulates innovation by combining existing concepts in other fields.
“Merging concepts takes time and effort,” he says. Sometimes it can be done, but it’s a process. And it’s more complicated if you’re not in the same situation and if you don’t talk very regularly. “
The nature of online communication, with appointments and priorities, is structured and hierarchical, adds Lingfei Wu, a data scientist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, who worked with Frey on the study. This can obstruct casual conversations and the generation of casual concepts and make it more difficult for early-career scientists to talk to more experienced colleagues.
“Everyone who has been through the junior level realizes how difficult it is to get a senior instructor to respond to an email,” Wu says. “But if you bump into a lead instructor in the hallway, then it’s less complicated to say. “You have some ideas. “
This effect on the knowledge collected for the remote collaboration study stands out. By assessing the relative prestige (as a function of the number of citations) of the co-authors of published papers, the research showed that collaborations between researchers of markedly different prestiges were much more common when the two Americans in question shared a workplace or construction site than when they worked remotely from the other.
Lack of collaboration can have negative consequences for scientists at all levels: In a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, Wu’s team shows that younger scientists can make older scientists produce more innovative work.
The organization conducted a study of 241 million articles published by more than 244 million researchers over the past two centuries and tested similar citation patterns. He found that the longer scientists work in a field, the less likely their studies are to be disruptive. This trend has been highest in recent decades. In the 1960s, researchers with 20 years of experience produced more than 2% of the most disruptive paintings. By the 1990s, that figure had fallen to less than 0. 5%.
A finding that will surprise some early-career researchers: Studies of publications and how they are cited have shown that older scientists are much more likely to critique emerging work than to produce cutting-edge studies themselves.
According to Wu, remote collaboration and a lack of sporadic face-to-face meetings can simply create hierarchies and exacerbate the trend.
The price of spontaneous face-to-face encounters to generate ideas, called the water cooling effect, is specifically related to creativity. And a 2022 study by two American social scientists showed that communication screens can’t replicate this personal contact.
Melanie Brucks of Columbia University in New York and Jonathan Levav of Stanford University in California asked pairs of volunteers to think about possible uses for items such as a frisbee disk and bubble wrap. Half of the artistic couples worked in the same room, while the other half communicated via laptops with video calls. The researchers also conducted a similar study with pairs of engineers working on product design in five offices around the world.
Remote collaborations have created fewer concepts than in-person teams. But, in follow-up once the concepts were generated, remote peers were just as effective as in-person peers, or even more so, at analyzing features and deciding which ones to follow. .
How have screens limited your creativity? The eye-tracking generation showed that virtual couples pay more attention to each other, and screens didn’t seem to stop couples from generating emotions of connection and trust, or prevent them from mimicking each other’s language or facial expressions. , researchers argue that focusing on a small screen reduces cognitive focus. This, in turn, disables the intellectual ability to associate and blend concepts, which are the basis of ideation.
Face-to-face meetings can also stimulate creativity, as they allow groups to make the most of collective knowledge, unlike remote collaboration.
“If my teammate is really smart and I see what he’s producing, that has an effect on me,” says Glenn Dutcher, an economist at Ohio University in Athens who has studied this effect.
Like other sectors, some laboratories have identified the price of face-to-face assemblies and have to reinstate them. “We met there for the first time in almost two years last December and we were all amazed at how fantastic it was to all be in the team. “
While video conferencing may not be as effective as an in-person meeting, it still allows for higher quality communication than equipment like email and instant messaging. In fact, psychologists’ phone calls and video calls are “synchronous” mediums, in which real people’s communication in time helps participants converge on the meaning of complex information. Email and messaging, on the other hand, are asynchronous channels better suited for conveying this information. And when other people are working remotely, they tend to send emails.
This effect was demonstrated by IT giant Microsoft, which used the forced shift to remote work as a natural experiment to gauge the reaction of the company’s 61,000 painters in the United States in the first part of 2020. The study showed that remote work has declined. The number of video calls or phone calls across the company as staff transitioned to email and messaging.
Something similar emerges from the data from the Trip. com analysis. According to the study, hybrid employees were more likely to message their colleagues using the phone or communicate with them in person, even when everyone was in the office. .
Horvát says that continued technological innovations can solve some (though not all) of the disruptions of remote work, adding that they have an effect on creativity. Experiments with virtual reality, for example, have shown that participants can use and perceive gestures and frame language, which are a very important component of in-person communication. And sharing files and knowledge via the cloud has simplified the way remote groups carry out joint projects.
“The technology is very different now, especially after COVID-19,” he says.
There are reasons to look to the long-term of at least some remote collaborations.
In a paper published in 2022 (not yet peer-reviewed or published), Frey and colleagues at the University of Oxford looked at remote collaboration and clinical innovation between 1961 and 2020 and found an unexpected twist. After 2010, clinical articles written through remote collaborators were more likely to involve breakthroughs than those written through groups on a single site.
Unlike their 2023 study, which found fewer advancements over time, this research only looks at the results of existing groups that started on-site and transitioned to remote work; It doesn’t capture the impact of groups that were remote.
The post-2010 upgrade makes sense, says Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, because that’s when file-sharing technologies like Dropbox came into play. (Bloom studies remote work and co-authored two papers on the topic. )Frey adds that the trend after 2010 may simply be due to what economists call wisdom spillovers: the painter exposes other members of his household to ideas.
Researchers examining running tactics say there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that optimizes everything job-like, especially in the clinical field. While breakthroughs are vital in research, Dutcher says, they require primary investments, such as bringing in “we want big discoveries, and for them, maybe we want face-to-face meetings,” he says. “But we also want small advances. “
This article is reprinted with permission and was first published on March 4, 2024.
David Adam is a journalist based in London.
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