Working from the couch, at least a few days per week, is an offer many people can’t refuse. But it’s probably costing them. According to a September 2022 working paper, economists from Harvard, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Iowa found that remote workers have fewer opportunities for advancement for one key reason: They get significantly less feedback than their in-person peers.
The economists—Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais—analyzed the virtual interactions and “quit decisions” of software engineers at a Fortune 500 tech company for their study. When physical offices were open, they found, engineers who went in and sat alongside their teammates received 21% more feedback on their code than engineers working on distributed teams.
