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Bonding from home

Philip Coggan: Bartleby columnist, The Economist

Firms will need to find new ways to bring their employees together

WHAT QUALITY will business leaders be emphasising in 2021? The answer, surely, is
teamwork. Corporate life in 2020 was disrupted by the pandemic and the need for many
employees to work at home. Most companies got by, but they were living on the social
capital they had accumulated in previous years. In 2021 they will want to refill the tank.

Many managers will have been surprised by how well the working-from-home
experiment went. Research suggested that, before 2020, employees who stayed at home
tended to be isolated from those who remained in the office. They regarded themselves
as second-class citizens. But the pandemic meant that everyone was in the same boat, or
rather the same living room. Managers learned that staff could be productive when not
in the office; employees got used to taking part in video meetings. A study by the
National Bureau of Economic Research found that home workers put in almost an hour
extra a day compared with when they were in the office.

The new arrangements worked because employees were already familiar with their
roles and were used to the rhythm of the organisation. The weekly planning meeting