Research casts doubt on the success of hybrid teams

Since the start of the pandemic, one of the toughest questions for companies — and office building owners and operators — has been where employees do their work. At home or satellite locations for a better work-life balance and more personal productivity? Or in the office to facilitate culture, collaboration, and innovation? (And, perhaps, maybe some habit and suspicion.)

Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa, and Harvard University/National Bureau of Economic Research were able to study software engineers at a Fortune 500 company. The results were more complex than many conversations on the topic might have assumed.

The researchers choose software engineers because they are in “a seemingly ‘best-case’ scenario for purely digital collaboration: the software engineers produce digital output, have established online systems for giving one another required feedback, and meet daily in real-time even when remote.” It is also important to remember that this is a limitation on the study and whether the same results would apply more broadly.

They found a complex tradeoff: “It increases output today, particularly from more senior workers. But it decreases collaboration and training of more junior workers. Young workers and women, who may feel less included at the firm to begin with, see a particularly large decrease in their ability to collaborate with other workers and they quit more often in response.”

There is also a factor of how one employee’s choice to work remotely affects others. Older workers in this study were more likely to work remotely, which means a key factor in the development of skills in younger employees isn’t as available.

Related: How hybrid works best: Developing 4 key workplace personas

The biggest lesson is not that the answer is everyone in the office all the time or no one should have to come in. Instead, the researchers found a balance will need to be set. “This raises the question of whether a few days in the office are enough to spur online interactions,” they wrote. “Similarly, it may be more efficient to have firms or teams sort into being fully in-person or fully remote than to have hybrid teams where a few remote workers affect their in-person colleagues. It will be interesting to see whether we see segregation of in-person and remote workers across or within firms as workers return to the office.”

The answers, if companies look at the subtleties rather than choose an all-or-nothing approach, will have great bearing on the office sector.