Since the start of the Covid pandemic more than 2.5 years ago, there have been endless debates about working remotely. At first Zoom and Teams software inspired optimistic futurists to announce that the office was now irrelevant. Then, a militant return-to-the-office demand rose to defy them. The most recent prominent boast came from Tesla founder Elon Musk who told employees: "Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum, and I mean minimum of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla."
Yet office buildings in 10 large cities across the United States remain at about 47.5% occupancy, according to the Kastle Back to Work Barometer. Is this the "new normal?" If so, how will long-term remote work affect productivity and innovation? So far, there has been no shortage of discourse -- but the discourse has lacked data.
This is beginning to change. Our lab at MIT, together with colleagues at Texas A&M University, Technical University of Denmark and the University of Oxford, has published a study based on empirical data with potentially ground-breaking implications. At the end of 2019, we began collecting data on MIT's email network (many studies show that email communications are a good proxy for studying human networks). Then came the pandemic. Amid all its devastation to human lives, the crisis accidentally turned out to be a natural experiment that removed one variable from the social network we were monitoring: physical space.
