Remote working ‘led to missed collaborations and groupthink’

Nowt to do with the rather large shift to newer technologies than email over the last two years in workplaces, such as Teams/Zoom/Slack etc then? Rather a large leap to suggest changes observed solely in the MIT email network led to 'missed collaborations and groupthink'?

The continuing 'hybrid working' experiment is proving to be problematic in many Universities, especially when a rapid response from the Professional Health and Safety team/line managers is required, still the savings in heating and lighting costs passed on to home workers may go some way into paying any fines levied by the HSE/courts...

Thanks for the comment ResearchDweller. That's an important question, and one we considered while doing the research. The paper – which can be found here https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-022-00296-z – goes into more detail on this. In figure 1 (and supplementary figure 30 panel c) the amount of email activity in the daily email networks did not significantly change. In fact many properties of the daily email networks remained unchanged through the pandemic, which is evidence that email was used in similar ways before and after the pandemic. It is of course possible that the content of emails changed (perhaps pre-pandemic emails were more informative while post-pandemic emails involved more scheduling), but we don't have access to that sort of information. While taking into account confidentiality issues, it would be interesting to investigate this aspect further.

To do collaboration and groupthink there are many kinds of software and online services. On the other hand, there are many valuable benefits for remote working i.e. decreasing fossil fuel consumption (like petrol) which is critical for saving the climate and its effect on increasing rainfall.