Firms will need to find new ways to bring employees together
And not just through drinks on Zoom
By Philip Coggan: Bartleby columnist, The Economist
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.
