The debate over what is lost when remote work replaces an in-person workplace just got an infusion of much-needed data. According to a study conducted at MIT, when workers go remote, the types of work relationships that encourage innovation tend to be hit hard.

Two and a half years after Covid-19 shut down offices and research labs around the world, “we can finally use data to address a critical question: How did the pandemic-induced adoption of remote working affect our creativity and innovation on the job?” says Carlo Ratti, professor of the practice of urban technology and planning, and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. “Until now, we could only guess. Today we can finally start to put real data behind those hypotheses.”

The MIT researchers, with colleagues at Texas A&M University, Italian National Research Council, Technical University of Denmark, and Oxford University, analyzed aspects of a de-identified email network comprising 2,834 MIT research staff, faculty, and postdoctoral researchers, for 18 months starting in December 2019. All of the emails were anonymized and examined to analyze the network structure of their origins and destinations, not their content.

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