Has Your Office Become a Lonely Place?

Pity the 21st century office worker. With increasing amounts of work getting done outside the traditional corporate office — for example, through employees working at home — those left in the office may face a lonelier — and even less productive — office environment. In fact, working remotely may be contagious, because if too many of the people on a team aren’t in the office much, coming into the office has less benefit for the remaining employees, who may then also choose to work remotely.

That’s the implication of a fascinating study described in the paper, “Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work,” published in the December 2015 issue of the journal Academy of Management Discoveries. (See “Related Research.”) The paper’s authors, Kevin W. Rockmann, an associate professor at the School of Business at George Mason University, and Michael G. Pratt, the O’Connor Family Professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, studied a Fortune 100 company that has about 100,000 employees and that generally allows employees substantial flexibility about where they choose to work.

Rockmann and Pratt write that they originally set out to study how employees experienced remote work. However, their initial research findings led them to focus more on what they describe as “the deteriorating experience of the onsite office” when working off-site is widespread.

Rockmann and Pratt first interviewed 29 employees of the Fortune 100 company. Among other things, those interviews suggested that, when given a choice of where to work, two factors that induce employees to choose to come to the office are a desire for social interaction with colleagues and the productivity advantages of being able to interact with colleagues easily face-to-face. However, in an organization where many people work off-site, these advantages are diminished: Some employees reported to the researchers that they could come into the office and find none of their other team members there. As a result, the researchers found, some employees opted to work off-site simply because so many of their colleagues were off-site that they saw little point in coming in.

Rockmann and Pratt then conducted two surveys at the same company, completed by 242 and 386 employees, respectively. In those surveys, employees were asked to choose among six or seven possible reasons they choose to work off-site. In support of the authors’ conclusion that remote work may be contagious, the reason most strongly related to an employee’s choice to work off-site was “Few people (if any) from my team work in the office much, so I do not benefit from coming in.”

What does all this mean? The authors conclude that their research suggests that “once a certain number of individuals are working offsite, everyone is isolated.” What’s more, they write, “At some point between an organization initializing the use of distributed teams, telework flexibility, and so forth, there is a tipping point: A moment in time when the nature of the organizational facility changes from having distributed individuals and groups to having a distributed workforce. What defines this tipping point is the lack of enough physically present coworkers to motivate individuals to come to the office.”

The authors acknowledge that there are limitations to their research (for example, it involved only one organization), but it raises interesting questions for further academic study. It also raises questions for business executives. Among them: How much remote work is too much for your company? What are effective ways to compensate for the feelings of isolation that remote work can cause all employees — both those not in the office and those remaining? How can managers create a sense of community among distributed teams? As Rockmann and Pratt’s research suggests, the dynamics of remote work — and best practices for managing it — continue to evolve.