A study of a global manufacturing firm found that scientists and engineers who often walked by one another in the office were significantly more likely to end up collaborating at the beginning of projects.
A researcher that studied the effects of spontaneous work-related communication and found less idea generation for groups that were located in different places. However, being located in different places did not matter for later stages of a project.
Read A Model of Potential Encounteres in the Workplace.
Read Flexible Work and The Effect of Informal Communication on Idea Generation and Innovation.
See also:
- Remote work creates less weak ties which is important for diverse collaboration and creativity.
- Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity
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Remote Teams Are Less Likely to Integrate Knowledge of Their Members
A recent analysis of 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications found that distributed teams are less likely to have a breakthrough discovery than their on-site counterparts. They found that collaboration for remote teams was more likely to happen at later stages where technical tasks are more discreet rather than earlier during the ideation stage. The authors believe that this means remote teams fail to benefit from the shared knowledge of the team and therefore have less new, disruptive ideas.