No, Remote Employees Aren't Becoming Less Engaged

'Employees have gotten more — not less — engaged over the past three years since remote work became the norm for many knowledge workers,' argues an assistant professor of management from the business school at the University of Texas at Austin. He'd teamed up with a software company providing analytics to large corporations to measure the number of spontaneously-happening individual remote meetings:
Given the anecdotal evidence of workers recently disengaging or quiet quitting, we had originally predicted that one of the easiest ways to observe this effect would be a continual decrease in the number of times remote or hybrid coworkers were engaging — or meeting — with each other. However, we found quite the opposite.
To more deeply explore the nature of how remote collaboration is changing over time, we gathered metadata from all Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex meetings (involving webcams on and/or off) from 10 large global organizations (seven of which are Fortune 500 firms) spanning a variety of fields, including technology, health care, energy, and financial services. Specifically, we compared six-week snapshots of raw meeting counts from April through mid-May in 2020 following the Covid-19 lockdowns, and the same set of six weeks in 2021 and 2022.... This dataset resulted in a total of more than 48 million meetings for more than half a million employees....

In 2020, 17% of meetings were one-on-one, but in 2022, 42% of meetings were one-on-one... In 2020, only 17% of one-on-one meetings were unscheduled, but in 2022, 66% of one-on-one meetings were unscheduled. Furthermore, the growth in one-on-one meetings between 2020 and 2022 was almost solely due to the increase in unscheduled meetings (whereas scheduled meetings remained relatively constant)... The combination of these findings presents an interesting picture: not that remote workers seem to be becoming less engaged, but rather — at least with respect to meetings — they are becoming more engaged with their colleagues.

This data also suggests that remote interactions are shifting to more closely mirror in-person interactions. Whereas there have been substantial concerns that employees are missing out on the casual and spontaneous rich interactions that happen in-person, these findings indicate that remote employees may be beginning to compensate for the loss of those interactions by increasingly having impromptu meetings remotely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.