Telecommuting worries many business leaders, the Big Bad Elon Musk first. Working remotely would interfere with productive meetings and discussions among employees. This would significantly lower their engagement. A very sad truth? Nothing is less certain: recent research even tends to prove the contrary.
If, with the health crisis, many companies have adopted telework, others are still reluctant to set it up. Many want to see their employees return to their premises. However, far from turning into hermits and avoiding meetings, employees are now favoring other ways of communicating.
Shorter and more spontaneous meetings
Andrew Brodsky, assistant professor at the University of Texas, and Mike Tolliver, director of product management at Vyopta, conducted research to study employee engagement in remote working. They analyzed 48 million remote meetings that were organized within 10 large companies, on tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or even Cisco Webex Meetings. The searches were based on a six-week period in 2020 (during lockdown), 2021 and 2022.
The results are clear: teleworking does not demotivate employees, quite the contrary. Here are the observations made:
- In three years, remote meetings have increased by 60%;
- their duration went from 43 minutes on average to 33;
- the average number of participants decreased from 20 to 10 people;
- the number of unplanned meetings jumped from 17% to 66%.
Research also showed that employees who joined meetings the least often later quit or were fired.
Temperate search results
Telecommuting would therefore improve employee engagement with their colleagues. The latter would compensate for the distance by favoring more frequent and spontaneous points, generally alone. Good news for all business leaders.
However, the study authors found several limitations to their findings. In-person interactions, for example, were not taken into account and some employees returned to the office during the analysis. In addition, the research conducted did not include comparisons with employee habits prior to 2020.
Despite everything, the results clearly show that working from home has a positive impact on engagement. In order to optimize remote interactions, the researchers recommend in particular that managers encourage employees to work in the same time slots, when possible. Privileging audio and not video would also be of considerable help. Finally, teleworking would make it easier to identify demotivated employees. An excellent opportunity for managers to open a constructive dialogue with them, and to reduce the turnover.
Source : Harvard Business Review
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