Weak ties, Remote Work and Microsoft during the pandemic
For many Americans. the workplace saw a considerable change with the Rise of Covid-19. Those who could worked remote during the initial stages of the pandemic, and remnants of this development still remain today. Faced with the decision about handling remote work moving forward, different companies chose different responses, and now that considerable time has passed since the first mass migration to remote work, that decision can be informed based on real world data.
In a recent journal article, Yang et al. analyzed the impact of the move to remote work on employees at Microsoft. As elaborate in class and also in this article, weak ties are essential for maintaining links to novel information flows, tying together what otherwise might be disparate, unconnected components in a network. Worryingly for Microsoft, the move to remote work seemed to cause the “collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed”, which essentially means that fewer bridges formed between more densely connected areas. As born out by sociological theory and suggested by the authors, this is reason to believe that such a change would make it harder for employees to share information across the firm-wide network, negatively impacting innovation over the long term.
Given the importance of innovation in the modern economy, and especially for technology firms such as Microsoft, an interesting dilemma may be occurring, pitting workers against management. Plenty of recent articles (including one linked below) argue that many tech employees are reticent to return to the office, and thus tech companies may face a challenging decision on whether to force a return to the office in order to encourage novel information flow, or whether to continue to allow remote work in order to retain valued human capital. As suggested by the journal article, a potential compromise might involve having workers split time between the office and home, a significant departure from pre-pandemic days.
Future research should strive to examine more long term impacts of the widespread adoption of remote work. In particular it would be enlightening to compare similar companies who differ in the percentage of employees working remotely.