COVID-19 and Virtual Work Networks
The coronavirus pandemic has forced many people to work remotely for around 18 months now. While virtual work may have slowed the spread of coronavirus, it has also negatively impacted remote employees’ work networks. Following is a discussion of how work networks have been impacted by the pandemic and what managers can do to mitigate the network-related risks of remote work. In this discussion, assume that remote workers are nodes, and an edge would exist between two workers if they communicate.
According to an article by the MIT Sloan Management Review, physical distance between employees can have a significant impact on who communicates at work because going remote prevents employees from informally meeting colleagues around the office. While employees still communicate with coworkers who are completing the same assignments and their closest friends from work, communication with everyone else decreases when working from home. In addition, interactions that do occur between workers become more intentional. Scheduling a short video meeting or phone call may feel much less natural than walking up to a colleague or supervisor to ask a question. As a result, relationships diminish, and organizations become less interconnected. Finally, relationships that continue despite the move to remote work often become more negative because people are less happy, more distracted, less willing to share and listen to ideas, and less trusting (Levin and Kurtzberg).
The same article mentions several problems that are damaging remote employee work networks. First, a less interconnected network reduces the sense of commitment to one another and the organization. The article brings up the interesting point that “trust and cooperation are harder to achieve when the people you talk to do not also talk to one another” (Levin and Kurtzberg). This relates to the concept of triadic closure discussed in class. Triadic closure, as defined in class, is the principle that ”if two people in a social network have a friend in common, they are likely to become friends themselves at some point. They will meet at a party, at some common work activity, the common friend will bring them together, . . .” (Easley and Halpern). During remote work and quarantine, however, there have been fewer parties, no (in-person) common work activities that would stimulate free-flowing conversation to help form connections, and reduced trust may limit incentives for common friends to bring people together.
Second, MIT asserts that online interactions are typically more negative than offline ones. MIT notes studies that show people don’t bring their best selves to online interactions, leading to “flaming” (posting insults), harsher judgements of each other, less cooperation, more self-serving behavior, and more distracted communications (such as checking messages while talking) that leads to distrust (Levin and Kurtzberg). These negative interactions could disrupt the balance of the network of office relationships if coworkers who used to be friends grow to dislike each other over the course of remote work. According to an article by the Academy of Management Review I read for COMM 3150, negative relationships constitute only 1 to 8 percent of relationships in an organization (Labianca and Brass). The low prevalence of negative relationships means that the most likely dynamic between three coworkers that know each other is all positive relationships. Completely friendly relationships like these are considered “balanced” from a psychological perspective because they do not cause any of the people in the relationship triangle to experience psychological distress (Easley and Halpern). If one of the relationships between coworkers in a relationship triangle becomes negative, which could happen over time due to negative online interactions, then the person caught in the middle between two unfriendly coworkers would likely experience some stress due to pressures to pick a side, leading to lower work satisfaction for all three workers.
MIT offers several recommendations for managers to strengthen their organization’s networks including cultivating a shared sense of mission to make people feel more connected to the organization in the absence of direct communication links to coworkers, using a variety of communication channels to provide more opportunities for connection, creating teams with people who have known each other for a long time to limit the effects of online work on relationships, and setting communication norms that assert the value of focused attention. In addition, MIT also encourages managers to become information brokers (Levin and Kurtzberg). As discussed in class, brokers hold positions of power in a network. One study by Granovetter in 1973 found that people often get their jobs from “weak ties” (acquaintances) rather than “strong ties” (close friends). The reasoning is that networks often have high homophily, meaning nodes with similar attributes tend to associate with each other more than dissimilar nodes (Easley and Halpern). In work contexts, similar employees at similar levels in their career in the same department or team would naturally tend to associate with each other. These similar people likely all have similar information about a task because they get their information from each other. Brokers can foster creativity and improve results by distributing information between two parts of a network that otherwise wouldn’t have a direct communication link between them. The role of brokers becomes even more important in remote work networks that are sparse which result in fewer opportunities for different groups of employees to interact (Levin and Kurtzberg).
The issues the MIT Sloan article brings up are still salient today. Many organizations continue to grapple with the network effects of 18 months of remote work and leaders have varying attitudes towards returning to offices. The degree to which companies return to offices or remain virtual will likely have long-term consequences on the working relationships between employees and the success of each firm. For employees that do return to offices after a period of virtual work it will be intriguing to see how their networks evolve. After having an in-person job during the summer of 2019 and two completely virtual internships during the summers of 2020 and 2021, I personally hope to return to the office to develop more meaningful relationships and learn from my teammates, supervisors, and people I meet serendipitously around the office.
Works Cited
Easley, David, and Joe Halpern. “2850graphtheory.” Sept. 2021. INFO 2040 Lecture PowerPoint.
Labianca, Giuseppe, and Daniel J. Brass. “Exploring the Social Ledger: Negative Relationships and Negative Asymmetry in Social Networks in Organizations.” Academy of Management Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 1 July 2006, https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2006.21318920. Accessed 6 Sept. 2021.
Levin, Daniel Z., and Terri R. Kurtzberg. “Sustaining Employee Networks in the Virtual Workplace.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 27 May 2020, sloanreview.mit.edu/article/sustaining-employee-networks-in-the-virtual-workplace/amp. Accessed 6 Sept. 2021.