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The Case for Remote Work & The Risks
Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It.
For some, the office even stifles creativity. As the pandemic eases in the U.S., a few companies seek to reimagine what work might look like.

“Innovation isn’t always a planned activity,” said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. “It’s bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had.” Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn’t work for culture.”

Yet people who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people.

“The idea you can only be collaborative face-to-face is a bias,” he said. “And I’d ask, how much creativity and innovation have been driven out of the office because you weren’t in the insider group, you weren’t listened to, you didn’t go to the same places as the people in positions of power were gathering?”

He and others suggested reimagining the office entirely — as somewhere people go to every so often, to meet or socialize, while daily work is done remotely.

“There’s credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation,” said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. “But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever.”

“All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,” he said.

Yet Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.

At the same time, technology — like Zoom, Slack and Google Docs — has made idea generation as effective online. Distance matters much less now, she said: “Because of the technology these days, we’re actually inching closer and closer to replicating the office.”

Requiring people to be in the office can drive out innovation, some researchers and executives said, because for many people, in-person office jobs were never a great fit. They include many women, racial minorities and people with caregiving responsibilities or disabilities. Also, people who are shy; who need to live far from the office; who are productive at odd hours; or who were excluded from golf games or happy hours.

Remote work, though, can enable ideas to bubble up from people with different backgrounds. Online, people who are not comfortable speaking up in an in-person meeting may feel more able to weigh in. Brainstorming sessions using apps like Slack can surface many more perspectives by including people who wouldn’t have been invited to a meeting, like interns or employees in other departments.

Office workers who are not white deal with discrimination. In a survey by Future Forum, a research group at Slack, Black office workers were more likely than white workers to say they preferred remote work, because it reduced the need for code-switching (changing behavior in different contexts) and increased their sense of belonging at work.

“When everyone has the same small box on the screen, everyone has an equal seat at the table, literally,” said Barbara Messing, employee experience officer at Roblox, the online gaming company, which is staying remote two days a week, and letting people work wherever they want two months a year.

There are risks in allowing some remote work — if some people are in the office, those who aren’t may be penalized. There are also benefits for creativity to seeing colleagues in person; brainstorming ideas and collaborating on projects requires trust, rooted in personal relationships.

That’s why some experts have suggested a new idea for the office: not as a headquarters people go to daily or weekly, but as a place people go sometimes, for group hangouts. Companies like Ford, Salesforce and Zillow are doing versions of this, and reconfiguring their offices with more hangout spaces and fewer rows of desks.

“One of our big fears is that if we don’t get this right, we create this two-tier employee reality — who’s in the room, who’s not, who’s playing the politics, who’s not,” Mr. Spaulding at Zillow said. “We believe humans want to connect and collaborate. But do you need to do that five days a week, or can you do that once every three months?” nytimes.com