Defying Gravity: What Drives Productivity in Remote Teams?

Thomas Fackler, Michael Hofmann and Nadzeya Laurentsyeva
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Thomas Fackler: ifo Institute, LMU Munich, CESifo, Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard
Michael Hofmann: LMU Munich
Nadzeya Laurentsyeva: LMU Munich, CESifo

No 427, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: How can teams organize for productive online collaboration? The coronavirus pandemic has led to a large and persistent shift toward remote work. Using fine-grained data from the world's largest platform for open-source software development, we find that the pandemic reduced the productivity of previously co-located teams substantially, whereas similar teams with remote work experience remained resilient. While access to remote talent and experience are important for overall team success, our results highlight the crucial role of communication for productive online collaboration. We find suggestive evidence that, with their peers shifting to online work, remote workers become better integrated into their teams' communication. We conclude that while teams' performance may suffer from the shift to remote work, setting up systems for effective online communication can help mitigate productivity loss.

Keywords: gravity model; open source; knowledge workers; knowledge flows; remote work; online labor markets; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 J01 M54 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger, nep-hrm, nep-int and nep-lab
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