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You may remember the first productivity paradox.  The PP premise, promoted by several distinguished scholars and high-end consultants, was that investments in IT were not showing up in the productivity statistics.  Eventually, Eric Brynjolfsson and other economists eventually put that painful criticism to bed.  A more recent productivity paradox might be the long held belief that you have to put employees in offices  or airplanes if you are to harvest productivity benefits.  But a recent article in the New York Times tells quite a different story - one that I believe will be a well spring of new research in management and information systems.  (BTW, the article, "What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?", is also a fine example of a general news story that does a great job reaching out for, and effectively, integrating scholarship.)

The article, while unfortunately languishing behind the NYT paywall, includes three intriguing mini case studies.  One tells the story of a salesman who, prior to the pandemic, flew around the U.S. demonstrating and p[itching industrial grade robot vacuums to hotel chains. Now he is sitting at home selling them like the proverbial hot cakes. The second case involves the consulting firm, Accenture, who sent home almost their entire workforce of 500,000.  A third describes the pandemic-driven transformation of Slack which, prior to C-19, had 95% of their employees operating from company offices. All three cases appear, from a productivity perspective, to be success stories. 

But the article goes well beyond the cases and delves into some pretty serious research.

Below I will not summarize the cases or the rest of the article.  Instead, I highlight some lessons I took away, mostly with short quotes from the article, but with my own attempt to organize them  I close with a suggestion about how to fit the article  into a doctoral program.

Covid-19 and work

• "Erik Brynjolfsson, [and colleagues] reported survey results indicating that half of those who were employed before the pandemic were now working remotely."
• "The coronavirus crisis is forcing white-collar America to reconsider nearly every aspect of office life. "

The productivity bounce

• "…what astonished [an Accenture executive] was that even though they had lost the easy rapport of face-to-face office contact, productivity didn't sink. It went up…"
• This isn't a new phenomenon:  "For those who chose to work remotely, productivity rose by 4.4 percent, according to a study last fall by Prithwiraj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School, and two colleagues"
• "A 2015 case study by Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, and others found that when one Chinese travel agency assigned a random group of employees to work remotely for nine months, their productivity went up by 13 percent, generating an increase of roughly $2,000 in annual profits per employee. "

Oher benefits

• "Historically, "research has shown a powerful correlation between telecommuting and job satisfaction… "
• "With fewer employees in-house, firms can shed space; for the U.S. Patent Office, "real estate savings were immense" - fully $38 million, according to Choudhury."
• "…companies can hire talented employees who can't afford or don't want to relocate to exorbitantly expensive coastal cities."

There are downsides

• "Research finds that work hours encroach on leisure time. And surveillance is a potential hazard,"
• Alienation: "You can feel removed from colleagues even while drowning in digital messages from them."
• Zoom Fatigue: "doing back-to-back Zoom calls was … unexpectedly draining."
• "Long stares, research shows, seem quite threatening."

Transforming Office Work and Meetings

• "[Companies surveyed by Accenture] are figuring out how to "virtualize" every part of work - every meeting, every employee check-in - so that it could potentially be done remotely. "It has accelerated three years of digital cultural adaptation to three months," 
• "In the early days of the pandemic, most of the workers I spoke to told me, they frantically began setting up video meetings to replicate every get-together they would normally hold face to face."
• "But they quickly discovered video meetings didn't flow nearly as well."
• ""It's almost like 'Robert's Rules of Order' have come back in, like Parliament," 
• "It forces people to be more thoughtful about who is in meetings," 

Communications Overload

• "They had reduced the frequency of their formal meetings, yet the communication felt nonstop - a flurry of Slack messages and emails too."
• "You have to communicate way more than you ever thought was necessary"

Redesigning Collaboration Tools

• "Videoconferencing is characterized by remarkably poor design, because we're expected to face the camera and stare."
• "Video chat also makes it harder to achieve "synchrony," a sort of unconscious, balletic call-and-response that emerges when two people are in the same room."
• "It's possible that we're still in an awkward adolescent phase with video calling, that protocols for how to behave correctly haven't yet emerged."
• "One scientist, David Nguyen, says he has found evidence that standing back from your camera can reduce creepiness"
• "maybe the aspect ratio of videoconferencing needs to change." [from landscape to, like on your phone, portrait]
• "The truth is that as newfangled as remote work may seem, it relies on a set of tools that are by now quite old: video calls, discussion boards, chat, shared online documents. They've hardly changed in years."
• "There may also be innovations that let us use video but avoid the fatigue of decoding one another's faces."

Squashing Innovation / Inhibiting Culture

• "… seemingly trivial flights of fancy would occasionally spark genuinely useful new ideas for the business. When remote, they're less frequent."
• "[Ben} Waber suspects that in the long run, a company's culture and creativity risk declining in a remote setup, because that alters the way an organization talks to itself. Specifically, the "weak ties" inside a company might fray."
• "Waber contends that it's those weak ties that create new ideas. "
• ""I think we're going to see just this general degradation of the health of organizations,"
• "If employees are able to meet in person some of the time, it can help build the bonds that make remote collaboration richer."
• "as much as our offices can be inefficient, productivity-killing spreaders of infectious disease, a lot of people are desperate to get back to them."

Research - Research - Research

There is something in the article - far more than I have abstracted - for most of us: surveillance, alienation, measuring productivity, job satisfaction, design science, life work balance, HCI, communication style,  creativity, collaboration tools, culture, zoom fatigue, work design, work place design, tool design. 

 I'd assign it on day one of our first doctoral seminar.  It's all there, or you can segue to it:  constructs, measures, theories, research design, rigor vs relevance, unearthing research questions, implicit hypotheses, design science, field experiment.  And all set in a context that we can all identify with.

You may remember the first productivity paradox.  The PP premise, promoted by several distinguished scholars and high-end consultants, was that investments in IT were not showing up in the productivity statistics.  Eventually, Eric Brynjolfsson and other economists eventually put that painful criticism to bed.  A more recent productivity paradox might be the long held belief that you have to put employees in offices  or airplanes if you are to harvest productivity benefits.  But a recent article in the New York Times tells quite a different story - one that I believe will be a well spring of new research in management and information systems.  (BTW, the article, "What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?", is also a fine example of a general news story that does a great job reaching out for, and effectively, integrating scholarship.)

The article, while unfortunately languishing behind the NYT paywall, includes three intriguing mini case studies.  One tells the story of a salesman who, prior to the pandemic, flew around the U.S. demonstrating and p[itching industrial grade robot vacuums to hotel chains. Now he is sitting at home selling them like the proverbial hot cakes. The second case involves the consulting firm, Accenture, who sent home almost their entire workforce of 500,000.  A third describes the pandemic-driven transformation of Slack which, prior to C-19, had 95% of their employees operating from company offices. All three cases appear, from a productivity perspective, to be success stories. 

But the article goes well beyond the cases and delves into some pretty serious research.

Below I will not summarize the cases or the rest of the article.  Instead, I highlight some lessons I took away, mostly with short quotes from the article, but with my own attempt to organize them  I close with a suggestion about how to fit the article  into a doctoral program.

Covid-19 and work

• "Erik Brynjolfsson, [and colleagues] reported survey results indicating that half of those who were employed before the pandemic were now working remotely."
• "The coronavirus crisis is forcing white-collar America to reconsider nearly every aspect of office life. "

The productivity bounce

• "…what astonished [an Accenture executive] was that even though they had lost the easy rapport of face-to-face office contact, productivity didn't sink. It went up…"
• This isn't a new phenomenon:  "For those who chose to work remotely, productivity rose by 4.4 percent, according to a study last fall by Prithwiraj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School, and two colleagues"
• "A 2015 case study by Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, and others found that when one Chinese travel agency assigned a random group of employees to work remotely for nine months, their productivity went up by 13 percent, generating an increase of roughly $2,000 in annual profits per employee. "

Oher benefits

• "Historically, "research has shown a powerful correlation between telecommuting and job satisfaction… "
• "With fewer employees in-house, firms can shed space; for the U.S. Patent Office, "real estate savings were immense" - fully $38 million, according to Choudhury."
• "…companies can hire talented employees who can't afford or don't want to relocate to exorbitantly expensive coastal cities."

There are downsides

• "Research finds that work hours encroach on leisure time. And surveillance is a potential hazard,"
• Alienation: "You can feel removed from colleagues even while drowning in digital messages from them."
• Zoom Fatigue: "doing back-to-back Zoom calls was … unexpectedly draining."
• "Long stares, research shows, seem quite threatening."

Transforming Office Work and Meetings

• "[Companies surveyed by Accenture] are figuring out how to "virtualize" every part of work - every meeting, every employee check-in - so that it could potentially be done remotely. "It has accelerated three years of digital cultural adaptation to three months," 
• "In the early days of the pandemic, most of the workers I spoke to told me, they frantically began setting up video meetings to replicate every get-together they would normally hold face to face."
• "But they quickly discovered video meetings didn't flow nearly as well."
• ""It's almost like 'Robert's Rules of Order' have come back in, like Parliament," 
• "It forces people to be more thoughtful about who is in meetings," 

Communications Overload

• "They had reduced the frequency of their formal meetings, yet the communication felt nonstop - a flurry of Slack messages and emails too."
• "You have to communicate way more than you ever thought was necessary"

Redesigning Collaboration Tools

• "Videoconferencing is characterized by remarkably poor design, because we're expected to face the camera and stare."
• "Video chat also makes it harder to achieve "synchrony," a sort of unconscious, balletic call-and-response that emerges when two people are in the same room."
• "It's possible that we're still in an awkward adolescent phase with video calling, that protocols for how to behave correctly haven't yet emerged."
• "One scientist, David Nguyen, says he has found evidence that standing back from your camera can reduce creepiness"
• "maybe the aspect ratio of videoconferencing needs to change." [from landscape to, like on your phone, portrait]
• "The truth is that as newfangled as remote work may seem, it relies on a set of tools that are by now quite old: video calls, discussion boards, chat, shared online documents. They've hardly changed in years."
• "There may also be innovations that let us use video but avoid the fatigue of decoding one another's faces."

Squashing Innovation / Inhibiting Culture

• "… seemingly trivial flights of fancy would occasionally spark genuinely useful new ideas for the business. When remote, they're less frequent."
• "[Ben} Waber suspects that in the long run, a company's culture and creativity risk declining in a remote setup, because that alters the way an organization talks to itself. Specifically, the "weak ties" inside a company might fray."
• "Waber contends that it's those weak ties that create new ideas. "
• ""I think we're going to see just this general degradation of the health of organizations,"
• "If employees are able to meet in person some of the time, it can help build the bonds that make remote collaboration richer."
• "as much as our offices can be inefficient, productivity-killing spreaders of infectious disease, a lot of people are desperate to get back to them."

Research - Research - Research

There is something in the article - far more than I have abstracted - for most of us: surveillance, alienation, measuring productivity, job satisfaction, design science, life work balance, HCI, communication style,  creativity, collaboration tools, culture, zoom fatigue, work design, work place design, tool design. 

 I'd assign it on day one of our first doctoral seminar.  It's all there, or you can segue to it:  constructs, measures, theories, research design, rigor vs relevance, unearthing research questions, implicit hypotheses, design science, field experiment.  And all set in a context that we can all identify with.