Felt unproductive yet overworked during the pandemic? You’re not alone!

Adding further heat to the work-from-home versus work-from-office debate, a study of Microsoft’s 61,100 employees conducted by Microsoft claims that remote work diminished communication and collaboration amongst teams.

Assessing rich data on the emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours’ of its own workers, the tech behemoth published the peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

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According to the study, people worked longer hours during the pandemic, driving up the average workweek inside the company by 10 per cent. But it may not mean people were working more, said the researchers. The increase could be due to the spreading out of work across the day with breaks or interruptions for non-work activities.

The study also found that formal business groups and informal communities within the company became less interconnected and more siloed. Overall, the employees added fewer new collaborators and parted away from fewer existing ones.

But sceptics warn that the study was conducted between December 2019 and June 2020, which was an early period in the outbreak. With so much uncertainty and fear in the world, collaboration wasn’t exactly a priority then and not many had started using video conferencing tools like Zoom.

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Work culture has significantly changed in the last year with remote work and communication becoming fairly systematic in many companies. This is why it's important to assess the context of the study before applying the learnings to the present day.