Remote work broke something nobody put on the KPI

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Today’s story is about something remote work did not eliminate. It made it easier to ignore.

Helping each other.

Your own work may be getting done perfectly well. The company can still be getting weaker around it.

Let’s get to work.

Remote-work arguments usually begin with measurable things: productivity, commute time, retention, real-estate cost and whether somebody can answer Slack from a kitchen table.

Peter Cappelli of Wharton and Y. Jasmine Wu of the University of Texas looked at something less visible. They conducted 38 group interviews covering roughly 760 employees at a multinational financial-services company across the U.S., U.K. and India.

Their central finding was uncomfortable: employees remained focused on their own assignments and KPIs, but help-giving and collaborative work weakened. The social ties that once made asking a quick question easy had eroded, especially for newer employees. California Management Review

This matters because companies run on a large amount of work nobody formally assigns.

You ask the person two desks away why a customer always rejects that clause. A senior employee notices you are about to make a mistake and stops you. Somebody explains what the process document forgot to mention. A new hire learns whom to call when the official answer does not work.

None of that looks dramatic on a productivity dashboard. Until it disappears.

Fortune’s account of the research describes one relatively new employee who spent three months trying to get an answer because they had not yet built the relationships that made other people respond quickly. Employees reported that familiar colleagues usually helped fast; unfamiliar colleagues were much easier to postpone. Fortune

That creates a nasty loop. If asking for help repeatedly produces silence, people stop asking. When people stop asking, the relationship gets even weaker. Eventually everybody becomes extremely efficient at completing the portion of the job they already understand.

More meetings did not necessarily fix the problem. Employees described large virtual meetings where cameras were off, people multitasked and follow-up meetings were needed because people had missed what happened in the first one.

The researchers are not saying remote work is inherently bad. Employees valued the flexibility, some people found it easier to concentrate at home, and the study cannot prove remote work caused every problem it observed.

The management lesson is better than another office-versus-home argument.

Collaboration cannot be treated as a side effect of friendship.

If mentoring, helping coworkers and transferring knowledge matter to the business, put them into the work. Coordinate office days so the people who depend on one another are actually there together. Introduce new hires deliberately to people outside their immediate team. Reward employees for making colleagues better, not only for clearing their personal queue.

Because the easiest thing to optimize remotely is your own KPI. The company still needs everything between the KPIs.

The researchers found that sending a message was easy. Getting a useful answer often depended on whether the recipient already knew the person asking. Familiarity became infrastructure.

Microsoft Teams can deliver the message. It cannot make Sarah care.

The company in the study had reduced office space, used hoteling and inconsistently enforced attendance. Employees could commute in and still discover that the people they needed were somewhere else.

Nothing says collaboration like driving 45 minutes to join the same Zoom call.

The study’s authors argue that helping colleagues and mentoring new hires should be included in job expectations and promotion criteria instead of being left to informal goodwill. California Management Review

If only individual output counts, people eventually learn what not to spend time on.

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Write down the five people outside your immediate role whose knowledge regularly makes your work easier. Then ask whether the relationship is strong enough that you could get help quickly when something breaks.

Managers can do the same exercise for new hires. If the answer is simply “they’ll figure out who to ask,” you have not designed onboarding. You have outsourced it to luck.

Build the introductions before the emergency.

Weak internal relationships rarely appear as a budget line. They show up as slower onboarding, duplicated work, preventable mistakes, delayed decisions and experienced people spending time fixing problems that could have been prevented with a five-minute conversation.

Remote work can save real money on space and commuting. Poorly designed remote work can quietly spend some of that money somewhere else.

The useful calculation is not office cost versus remote cost. It is the cost of the whole system.

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NEW HIRE: Who knows how this process actually works?

MANAGER: Sarah. Message her.

NEW HIRE: I did.

MANAGER: What did she say?

NEW HIRE: “Seen.”

MANAGER: Perfect. You’re networking.

Answering a colleague. Teaching the shortcut. Explaining the history. Catching the mistake. Making the introduction.

If the company depends on that work, pretending it will happen automatically is a strange management strategy.

Vote below and tell us whether remote or hybrid work has made it easier—or harder—to get help where you work.

And forward this to the colleague who always answers the question nobody else knows how to answer.

They are probably doing more work than their KPI suggests.

Technically Tuesday. Emotionally waiting for Sarah to reply.

— The Still Monday Desk