Employers fear working from home impedes collaboration. Here’s why they’re wrong
Executives often demand an office-centric culture and reject virtual and hybrid work arrangements out of anxiety about losing their innovation edge. Yet extensive research shows that hybrid and remote teams can gain an innovation advantage and outcompete in-person teams.
What explains the discrepancy between executive beliefs and scientific evidence? Through scores of interviews with corporate leaders on the subject of returning to the office, I discovered that the vast majority tried to pursue innovation during COVID lockdowns by adapting office-based brainstorming techniques to virtual meetings. They found that videoconferencing isn’t well-suited to traditional brainstorming and therefore feel the need to go back to the office for most or all of the workweek partly for that reason.
Unfortunately for them, over two-thirds of employees want to work remotely most or all of the time, and many have already resigned after employers tried to force them to return to their offices. Naturally, it’s hard innovate if a large part of your workforce quits.
Employers often fail to adapt because of cognitive biases. For instance, functional fixedness refers to our tendency, once we learn one way of doing something — such as pursuing innovation — to reject new approaches to it. A related cognitive bias is called the not-invented-here syndrome: Leaders tend to feel antipathy toward practices not invented within their organizations, such as novel innovation methods.
The traditional approach to intentional innovation is in-person, synchronous brainstorming, which typically involves groups of four to eight people getting together in a room to come up with innovative ideas about a preselected topic.
Research in behavioral science reveals that the benefit in idea generation from such brainstorming comes from two areas. One involves idea synergy, in which ideas shared by one participant help trigger ideas for other participants. The other is social facilitation, whereby participants feel more motivated when they know they’re collaborating with their peers toward the same goal.
However, these benefits come with counterproductive effects, such as production blocking. That occurs when someone has an innovative idea during a group discussion, but other people are talking about a different topic, and the innovative idea gets lost in the mix. Another major problem for traditional brainstorming is evaluation apprehension: Many group members feel worried about sharing their ideas openly due to social anxiety about what their peers might think.
As a result of these problems, numerous studies show that traditional brainstorming is substantially worse at producing innovative ideas than alternative practices. One such practice that is well-suited to virtual and hybrid settings is virtual, asynchronous brainstorming.
In this method, team members start by generating ideas independently and then digitally and anonymously submitting them through a collabortive tool, which eliminates production blocking and evaluation apprehension while still allowing for social facilitation. Then everyone anonymously rates the novelty and practicality of each idea.
Next, everyone generates revised ideas, followed by another evaluation session. Finally, the team meets virtually, in the case of fully virtual teams, or in person, in the case of hybrid teams, to select the best ideas and decide on next steps for implementing them.
Behavioral economics and psychology research demonstrates the superiority of such virtual, asynchronous brainstorming over in-person brainstorming. Research comparing virtual and in-person groups found that the former method generated both more novel ideas and more ideas overall.
Rather than hastening a full-time return to offices out of fear or bias, employers who want to gain an innovation advantage should embrace hybrid and remote work.