Remote workers aren’t more disengaged

The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people across the world to work from home full-time.

As the situation eased – with the help of testing, vaccinations and treatments – there have been lots of debates and research into whether remote work is actually good for productivity and business bottom lines.

Playing into the discourse is a retention crisis. The ‘Great Resignation’ is more than 18 months old, and organizations’ attrition challenges are compounded by a trend called ‘quiet quitting’ where employees are unmotivated and stop going above and beyond in their job, and then they eventually resign.

Ultimately, this suggests that employees are disengaged, which has been used as evidence that it is time for companies to push for a return to the office, sometimes five days a week.

Therefore, US software company Vyopta decided to explore how engaged remote (or hybrid) workers actually are.

Vyopta analyzed data from 48 million meetings involving 500,000 employees working for 10 global organizations between 2020 and 2022. It predicted that the data would show a decrease in the number of times remote workers engaged (or met virtually) – but what they found was the opposite.

Meetings equal engagement

Instead of remote workers becoming less engaged during the last three years, “at least with respect to meetings — they are becoming more engaged with their colleagues”, according to University of Texas, Austin, assistant professor Andrew Brodsky (who collaborated with Vyopta on the research).

The data showed that between 2020 and 2022 remote meetings were becoming more common, but shorter, smaller and more spontaneous.

There was 60% more meetings in 2022 than in 2020, but the average meeting time declined 25% from 43 minutes to 37 minutes. The number of attendees halved, and one-on-one meetings became more common (they made up 17% of total meetings in 2020, compared to 42% in 2022).

Most interestingly, Vyopta’s research found that ad hoc meetings became more common between 2020 and 2022 – particularly for one-to-one calls.

This suggests “remote interactions are shifting to more closely mirror in-person interactions”.

“There have been substantial concerns that employees are missing out on the casual and spontaneous rich interactions that happen in-person” but “these findings indicate that remote employees may be beginning to compensate for the loss of those interactions by increasingly having impromptu meetings remotely”, Brodsky wrote in Harvard Business Review.

Vyopta’s data found that workers who resigned at the 100 global organizations reversed the trend – they attended fewer meetings, particularly one-to-one spontaneous meetings (-67%).

The report stated “employees who ended up leaving their company participated in only one-third as many ad hoc 1:1s” compared to the average worker.

Ultimately, Vyopta’s research pushes employers to challenge their assumptions on remote work and its impact on disengagement.

Calling employees back to the office will not be the silver bullet for engagement organizations might hope – this is confirmed by lack of flexibility (in hours and location) being a core cause of the ‘Great Resignation’.

Instead, to tackle combined engagement and retention challenges, employers (and particularly managers) must identify who is disengaging, find out the reasons why and figure out solutions.

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