Remote work gave leaders Teams, Zoom, dashboards and perhaps more workplace data than ever before. But research suggests it may have simultaneously taken something away: the informal connections through which information travels.

The Microsoft Study

A large-scale study of 61,182 Microsoft employees found that the shift to remote work made collaboration networks more siloed and reduced the number of connections bridging different parts of the organization. Microsoft separately reported that cross-group collaboration fell by approximately 25% compared with pre-pandemic levels.

That matters for more than collaboration.

The Exeuctive Risk

For executives, the risk isn't simply that remote employees communicate less. It's that leaders may receive a narrower picture of their own organization.

In a physical workplace, information doesn't only travel through formal channels. It travels through hallway conversations, relationships across teams, informal observations and unexpected interactions. Research into remote work has found evidence that these "weak ties"—connections between people who don't regularly work together—are harder to form when employees aren't co-located.

An organizational Ombuds cannot replace those connections. But the office occupies an unusual position within a remote organization.

The Value An Ombuds Brings

Employees from different levels, functions and locations independently bring concerns to the same place. While confidentiality prevents an Ombuds from telling leadership who said what, aggregated information can reveal emerging patterns:

"We're hearing this in multiple places."

A concern that looks isolated within one team may look very different when similar concerns are being raised independently elsewhere.

This makes the Ombuds more than a resource for resolving individual workplace concerns. The office can also provide executives with something increasingly difficult to obtain in dispersed organizations: a view across organizational silos.

Remote work hasn't necessarily left executives with less information. In many cases, they have more.

The more important question is whether they're getting the right information.

If remote work has changed how information travels through your organization, how confident are you that the things you most need to know can still reach you?

References

Yang, L., Jaffe, S., Holtz, D., et al. (2022). The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Microsoft Research.

Rajkumar, K., Saint-Jacques, G., Bojinov, I., et al. (2022). A causal test of the strength of weak ties. Science, 377(6612), 1304–1310.