Can remote work replace in-office work? Many organizations are betting their future on their answer to this question. Some are gambling on remote work, while others insist on returning to the office. Although there has been significant research on the pros and cons of remote work, many questions still need to be answered.

In particular, one of the major driving arguments for returning employees to the workplace is that remote workers are becoming less engaged over time. Consequently, there are less frequent and spontaneous interactions with colleagues, which are vital for organizational performance and innovation.

Given the anecdotal evidence of workers recently disengaging or quietly quitting, one of the ways to observe this effect would be a continual decrease in the number of times remote or hybrid coworkers were engaging — or meeting — with each other. What you find may surprise you.

How Remote Collaboration Has Changed

To more deeply explore the nature of how remote collaboration is changing over time, Harvard Business Review partnered with Vyopta. This software company provides remote meeting and collaboration analytics for large organizations. They gathered metadata from all Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx meetings (involving webcams on and off) from 10 large global organizations (including seven Fortune 500 firms) spanning various fields, including technology, health care, energy, and financial services. Specifically, we compared six-week snapshots of raw meeting counts from April through mid-May in 2020 following the Covid-19 lockdowns and the same six weeks in 2021 and 2022.

All these organizations had at least one of the meeting software tools heavily utilized at the start of this period. Microsoft Teams was the most common across all three years (71% of the meetings across the data). This dataset resulted in more than 48 million meetings for more than half a million employees.

The data analysis uncovered five major ways remote meetings have changed since the pandemic first forced all employees to work remotely:

Remote meetings have become more frequent

There were 60% more remote meetings per employee in 2022 as compared to 2020 (a change of an average of five to eight meetings per week per employee).

 

 

Remote meetings have become shorter

Since 2020, remote meetings have decreased in length by 25%, from an average of 43 minutes per meeting in 2020 to 33 minutes in 2022.

 

Remote meetings have become smaller

The average number of participants per meeting reduced from 20 participants in 2020 to 10 participants in 2022 (a 50% drop). The proportion of one-on-one meetings increased while the size of group meetings remained the same. In 2020, 17% of meetings were one-on-one, but in 2022, 42% were one-on-one. These individual meetings averaged 22 minutes in length compared to group meetings, which averaged 40 minutes in 2022.

Remote meetings have become more spontaneous

In 2020, only 17% of one-on-one meetings were unscheduled, but in 2022, 66% of one-on-one meetings were unscheduled. Furthermore, the growth in one-on-one meetings between 2020 and 2022 was almost solely due to increased unscheduled meetings, whereas scheduled meetings remained relatively constant.

 

Workers who left their organization reversed the trends

People who left their organization after the six-week observation period had 67% fewer spontaneous one-on-one meetings and 22% fewer scheduled one-on-one meetings, and 20% fewer group meetings.

What’s the Real Situation?

These findings suggest that remote workers are becoming more engaged with their colleagues regarding virtual meetings and not less engaged, as indicated in the argument against remote work.

This finding also suggests that remote interactions are beginning to imitate in-person interactions more closely. There have been substantial concerns that remote employees struggle to connect. They miss out on the casual and spontaneous rich interactions that happen in person. These findings indicate that remote employees compensate for the loss of those interactions by increasingly having impromptu meetings remotely.

Some Limitations

There are limitations to this data, however. For one, the information doesn’t account for in-person meetings or interactions, as some employees returned full-time or hybrid to the office post-2020. The findings likely underestimated the extent of the increase in the number of meetings. In 2020, employees could only meet remotely. Yet in 2022, even after some employees in our dataset returned to the office (i.e., there should be fewer remote meetings), we still found an increase in the number of remote meetings per employee.

Additionally, there may be deficits in other areas because of a lack of data beyond meetings. For instance, although spontaneous collaboration benefits organizations, employees may be engaging in more meetings to show they are working but not actually working. This need for performative face time is not novel to remote work. Before Covid-19, office workers pretended to be busy even when they had no work.

Although it is impossible to disprove this counterargument with complete certainty, our data would suggest that the increase in meetings was at least partly due to the rise in engagement rather than an increasing need to pretend to be working. The most disengaged employees in our data had fewer rather than more meetings. Alternatively, those employees who would stick around and thus be more likely to be engaged were the ones who had a greater number of meetings.

Recommendations for Meetings

At least from the perspective of spontaneous individual remote meetings, it would appear that employees have gotten more — not less — engaged over the past three years since remote work became the norm for many knowledge workers. With that in mind, there are three key actionable insights from this data:

Encourage synchronous work schedules for remote workers

For spontaneous remote meetings to happen, some degree of shared work time must occur between employees, even if they are in different time zones. That’s not to compel employees in Asia to work at 3 am to be aligned with their American colleagues, as there can be severe costs (both for recruitment and performance) for pushing employees to work at odd hours.

Instead, where reasonable, aim to encourage employees to work reasonable overlapping hours. Although employees may no longer be in the same “space” as they work remotely, at least being in the same “time” can enable many of the same interactions. Research shows that working overlapping hours with teammates can increase work quality by improving information-sharing.

However, there is a cost to synchronicity and meetings because they can be time sinks. Research also shows that synchronicity can decrease work quantity. Finding the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous work is vital to maximize the balance of work quality and quantity.

Make it easier for people to meet

Beyond aligning employee work hours, finding other ways to decrease the effort and strain required for meetings would also be beneficial. For instance, frequent video meetings can lead to Zoom fatigue. A way to counter that problem is allowing employees to turn off their cameras can reduce video conferencing fatigue.

Additionally, audio-only interactions have shown a host of other benefits, including increasing perceptions of communicator authenticity and building stronger social bonds between communication partners.

The takeaway is to optimize the use of video during calls. Teams can agree that cameras will remain off by default and only turn them on when necessary. After all, video conferencing is not futile; it offers an invaluable contribution in certain situations.

Try to reengage employees who are disengaging

Employees who become more disengaged from their organization also participate in substantially fewer meetings. Given the difficulties in recruiting and training new talent, there is a substantial benefit to trying to re-engage these workers.  There are many ways to identify such employees using communication tools or third-party software.

Importantly, your first step should be to avoid forcing them to attend more meetings. Instead, have open conversations to understand if and why an employee is disengaged. Then, try to resolve the underlying issues. Don’t use data as a tool for invasive micro-management, which can destroy employee trust; instead, leverage data to improve employees’ experiences at work.

Consider how your employees’ meeting patterns have changed over time. Instead of looking at the difference in the number of meetings, check for other reasons for the drop. Such causes could include a change in the employee’s role or a change in their communication methods. You don’t want to misclassify an employee as disengaged based on crude metrics.

If you don’t want to (or can’t) collect employee meeting data, a more straightforward approach is to encourage managers to be open with employees about the degree to which they feel connected to — or disconnected from — their coworkers more regularly. Beyond just being able to identify those employees who are at risk of leaving due to disengagement, this kind of manager openness leads to a host of benefits, including increasing employee motivation and innovation.

The findings from this research study don’t provide all the answers, as much more data is needed to understand the implications of remote work fully. However, they challenge the idea of what may be “lost” about the in-office experience. Employees seem to have adapted to remote meetings — they are increasingly efficient (shorter), more frequent, and more spontaneous.

The findings suggest that remote workers may be compensating for losses due to remote work. They are engaging in behaviors that are more and more similar to office work. So, try to challenge your assumptions about remote work. There may be ways to realize the benefits of allowing employees the option while avoiding some costs.

 

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