Originally found at Financial Times by Andrew Hill

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” according to the proverb. Or is it more a case of “out of sight, out of mind”? Lengthy periods of enforced remote working have demonstrated that, for any group of employees, both can sometimes be true.

Organisational cultures are certainly being reshaped by the shock of coronavirus and its consequences. That this is creating fallout in the labour market is not a surprise to Kevin Rockmann, management professor at George Mason University in Virginia. Not everyone who was satisfied in their job before the pandemic will be satisfied after it.

Rockmann and Michael Pratt of Boston College studied the unintended consequences of distributed work at an unnamed technology company in a 2015 paper for the Academy of Management Discoveries journal entitled “Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office”. One central finding was that once a proportion of workers decided to operate remotely, the quality of work in the office was diminished. Staff found themselves “alone in a crowd, surrounded by people but not gaining any meaningful social contact in the on-site office” and ultimately chose to work off-site.

Continue reading the original article at Financial Times.

Read the original research in Academy of Management Discoveries.