How Work From Home Affects Collaboration: A Large-Scale Study of Information Workers in a Natural Experiment During COVID-19
Longqi Yang, Sonia Jaffe, David Holtz, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha,, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, Neha Shah, Kevin Sherman, CJ Lee, Brent Hecht,, Jaime Teevan

TL;DR
This large-scale study uses causal inference to isolate the effects of WFH during COVID-19, revealing that WFH reduces collaboration time but increases focused work, with shifts in collaboration mediums and moderation by prior experience.
Contribution
It introduces a causal analysis of WFH's impact on collaboration during COVID-19, controlling for confounding factors and highlighting nuanced effects on work behaviors.
Findings
WFH leads to less collaboration time but more focus time.
Shift from scheduled meetings to instant messaging for collaboration.
Prior remote collaboration experience moderates WFH effects.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a wide-ranging impact on information workers such as higher stress levels, increased workloads, new workstreams, and more caregiving responsibilities during lockdown. COVID-19 also caused the overwhelming majority of information workers to rapidly shift to working from home (WFH). The central question this work addresses is: can we isolate the effects of WFH on information workers' collaboration activities from all other factors, especially the other effects of COVID-19? This is important because in the future, WFH will likely to be more common than it was prior to the pandemic. We use difference-in-differences (DiD), a causal identification strategy commonly used in the social sciences, to control for unobserved confounding factors and estimate the causal effect of WFH. Our analysis relies on measuring the difference in changes between those who WFH…
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