Zoom or Bust?: An Exploration into Remote Work Productivity and Best Practices

Abstract

COVID-19 pushed millions of workers from the office to Zoom. With remote work becoming the new normal, firms and employees alike continue to wonder about the benefits or drawbacks to remote work on overall productivity. This paper presents a model for a firm of information workers, like that of Microsoft or Apple, and an understanding for how the productivity of such a firm reacts to a shift to remote work. Using real world effects from Microsoft’s own company-wide shift to remote work, we model productivity of a spectrum of firms pre- and post-remote work along with various formal and informal firm structures. We find that across firm types, productivity, as measured by a time-based metric of job-completion for an innovation task and a random task, significantly decreased in a post-remote work world. However, we find that instituting a simple manager network can help ensure a firm is robust to future shifts to remote work. Likewise, encouraging employees to regularly meet with individuals of other worker types and creating large employee gatherings are similarly robust methods of insulating a firm from remote work shocks. The creation and understanding of this model of a firm and its interventions opens up new opportunities for understanding the interplay between intra-/inter- group collaboration, formal/informal firm network dynamics, and helping firms and employees alike navigate a new era of remote work.