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    Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work
    10 Aug 2020Working Paper Summaries

    Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work

    by Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeffrey T. Polzer, and Raffaella Sadun
    This study of 16 cities is the first large-scale analysis of how digital communication patterns have changed in the early stages of the pandemic. The overall pattern of more meetings and more emails points to a spillover of virtual communication beyond normal working hours.
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    Author Abstract

    We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to pre-pandemic levels, increases in the number of meetings per person (+12.9%) and the number of attendees per meeting (+13.5%) but decreases in the average length of meetings (-20.1%). Collectively, the net effect is that people spent less time in meetings per day (-11.5%) in the post-lockdown period. We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2%), or +48.5 minutes), along with short-term increases in email activity. These findings provide insight from a novel dataset into how the nature of work has changed for a large sample of knowledge workers. We discuss these changes in light of the ongoing challenges faced by organizations and workers struggling to adapt and perform in the face of a global pandemic.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: July 2020
    • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #21-006
    • Faculty Unit(s): Organizational Behavior
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    Evan DeFilippis
    Evan DeFilippis
    Doctoral Student in Organizational Behavior
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    Jeffrey T. Polzer
    Jeffrey T. Polzer
    UPS Foundation Professor of Human Resource Management
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    Raffaella Sadun
    Raffaella Sadun
    Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration (Leave of Absence)
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    • COVID-19
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