During the COVID-19 pandemic, employers implemented major changes to the workplace without waiting for research on their impact. 50 million Americans, mostly in white-collar professions, suddenly began working remotely in some capacity. Working parents value this newfound freedom and have since resisted when large companies asked them to return to the office.
Economists Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais conducted research on software engineers at a Fortune 500 technology company. They discovered that remote work improved senior engineers’ productivity, but feedback for junior engineers decreased. The repercussions of remote work, especially with decreased feedback, were more noticeable for female engineers. The study’s preliminary findings are limited to one form of interaction among one company’s knowledge workers. However, they indicate that in-office work contributes to early-career development and that mentoring and in-person training is difficult to replicate through Slack or Zoom.
Before the pandemic, engineering teams were housed within the same building, holding face-to-face meetings and interacting in the cafeteria, or were spread among multiple buildings, communicating virtually to bypass lengthy walks across the company campus. Economists measured feedback by analyzing the amount of comments engineers made on each other’s code. Before the pandemic, engineers within the same building received 21% more feedback than those in different buildings. Once the pandemic caused everyone to work remotely, the feedback gap was eliminated, suggesting that physical proximity, rather than other differences, was the cause of higher feedback levels.
According to the researchers, younger engineers, particularly those under age 30, received more feedback when they worked in the same building as more experienced colleagues. They refer to this phenomenon as the “power of proximity.” That being said, remote work is here to stay. 60% of women and 52% of men reported they’d look for a different job if remote work were no longer an option, according to a survey by FlexJobs. Going forward, companies will need to weigh their policies around in-person versus remote work against the need to maximize the development of young talent and future leaders.
