Research: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from Home
Researchers studied knowledge workers in 2013 and again during the 2020 pandemic lockdown and found significant changes in how they are working. They learned that lockdown helps people focus on the tasks that really matter. They spent 12% less time drawn into large meetings and 9% more time interacting with customers and external partners. Lockdown also helped people take responsibility for our own schedules. They did 50% more activities through personal choice and half as many because someone else asked them to. Finally, during lockdown, people viewed their work as more worthwhile. The number of tasks rated as tiresome dropped from 27% to 12%, and the number we could readily offload to others dropped from 41% to 27%.
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For many years, we have sought to understand and measure the productivity of knowledge workers, whose inputs and outputs can’t be tracked in the same way as a builder, shelf-stacker, or call center worker. Knowledge workers apply subjective judgment to tasks, they decide what to do when, and they can withhold effort (by not fully engaging their brain) often without anyone noticing. This make attempts to improve their productivity very difficult.
In this 2013 HBR article, we presented research showing that knowledge workers spend two-thirds of their time in meetings or doing desk-based work, even though they found these activities mostly tiresome. We proposed some steps people could take to shift time to more worthwhile activities, such as talking to customers or coaching subordinates. Of course, we all get stuck in patterns of activity reinforced by the routines of office life.
But, then, in March 2020, the pandemic struck. Suddenly, many of us were sent home and forced to develop new ways of working. After several months, we now have a good sense of how our own day-to-day schedules have changed. But we don’t know how generalizable our experiences are. So we decided to replicate the 2013 study, using the same questions as before and interviewing respondents with similar profiles.
Here are the key findings:
In sum, lockdown has been positive for knowledge worker productivity in the short term. But it has also created some concerns and challenges around longer-term effectiveness, creativity, and personal resilience. Let’s consider the findings from the research in more depth, then discuss what the opportunities and challenges are for the months and years ahead.
Rather than ask people about their general reflections on their work, we asked them to open their calendar and go to a day from the previous week that was typical of their working life. We then asked them to list between six and 10 discrete activities during that day, such as a meeting, a phone call, or a period of time responding to emails. The interviewer asked the respondent to describe briefly what the activity involved, how long it lasted, and who else was involved, and then asked questions about why they’d engaged in that activity and how valuable it was.
In the 2013 survey we gathered data on 329 specific activities undertaken by 45 knowledge workers. In the 2020 survey, which was conducted in May and early June, we gathered data on 264 activities from 40 individuals. The individuals were selected randomly, subject to a few specific criteria: They had to have at least a bachelor’s degree, five years of full-time work experience, and a job in which effectiveness is determined by the use of brainpower and their capacity to make sound judgments. The age, sector, and experience of the respondents varied.
We broke down activities done into six categories: desk-based work (alone), externally facing work (interacting with anyone outside the company), managing down (interacting with subordinates), managing across (interacting with peers and colleagues), managing up (interacting with the boss or someone else senior), and training and development.
In 2013, knowledge workers spent two-thirds of their time either “managing across” in meetings, often with many colleagues, or doing “desk-based work” on their own. Externally focused work (e.g. talking to customers), managing down (coaching and supporting subordinates) and managing up (interacting with the boss and other senior people) all got very little time, while training and personal development got almost none.
How has this picture changed during lockdown? There were two significant shifts: 12% less time managing across through meetings and 9% more time doing externally focused work. Desk-based work continues to take a third of our time. Other changes — a little less time managing up and a little more time on training and development — were not statistically significant.
Standing back, the evidence suggests lockdown has helped us more effectively prioritize our work. We still need to get through our emails and report-writing. But we are significantly less likely to get drawn into large meetings, and this leaves us more time for client or customer work and for training and development, which most people would argue is a good thing. However, lockdown doesn’t seem to have helped with hierarchy-spanning activities (managing up and down), presumably because it’s impossible to have the short, spontaneous meetings that used to be possible.
While most knowledge workers have a written job description somewhere, it is well understood that they take responsibility for choosing what to do and when to do it based on a variety of factors, including tasks outside of their formal role when it appears sensible to do so.
To get a sense for how these decisions are made, we asked study subjects to choose among four options for every activity: It’s a standard part of my job/my boss asked, a peer or colleagues asked me, I did it spontaneously, or it was important and I found time. In 2013, respondents said 52% of their activities were standard, 18% requested by a peer , 24% independent but important, and 3% independent and spontaneous. In 2020, we are still spending half our time on standard activities, but we are doing only 8% because a colleague asked, and a full 35% because we thought the activity was critical. Both these differences were statistically significant. Spontaneity rose to 6% but this difference was not statistically significant.
What’s going on here? It seems we have been taking more direct charge of our time during lockdown. Working from home gives us a bit of breathing space: We don’t have colleagues or bosses badgering us, and we don’t get drawn into meetings by force of habit, just because we happen to be around. The result is a reassuring increase in us making time for work that matters most to us.
Finally, we asked respondents about how important and energizing they found each activity. The questions and scores for 2013 and 2020 are summarized in the graphic below. The differences are striking (and all statistically significant). In 2020, respondents say their work is more important, less tiresome, less easily offloaded and contributes to the company’s objectives. Not only is their work important, they feel important as well!
Of course, there is some self-justification going on here: When we think our work is important, we are more likely to gain personal utility from it and less prone to delegate it. But it seems there is also some reprioritization occurring, with people stopping some of the less-important activities they used to do and focusing their energy in a more effective way. Overall, the findings here are consistent with the notion that knowledge workers are more intrinsically motivated — and taking more personal ownership — during lockdown, in large part because of the increased degrees of freedom they are getting.
Working in lockdown has helped us to focus and to take responsibility. But that’s not the whole story. Follow-up interviews revealed some of the areas of concern that we as individuals — and as leaders of others — need to understand.
Some respondents cited the potential for shirking: “I am worried there is some slackening of effort. People are starting to get a bit too comfortable working from home,” said one. In our view, this is not a huge problem: There are many ways of informally monitoring how much time your colleagues are putting in via Outlook, Slack and other tools, and we should really be evaluating knowledge workers on their outputs not their inputs anyway.
The bigger areas of concern were around the things people couldn’t do well in a virtual environment. Take managing across first: It’s not so hard for an existing working group to stay on course when working remotely, but the challenges of getting started on something new (the forming/storming stages of team development) or resolving internal conflicts are enormous. Of course, these activities can be done over Zoom – just not as well. Few people are energized by informal online get-togethers. As one person said, “We are slowly losing the social glue that holds us together.”
Managing up and down are no less tricky under lockdown. Most respondents had instituted regular one-on-one catch-ups with their teams and bosses, but they usually focused on immediate task and personal well-being issues, rather than longer-term development. They missed the opportunity to bottom out difficult issues: “You cannot challenge a person quite so well over Zoom. You tend to hold back,” said one. They also lamented the loss of growth opportunities for their teams: “I used to throw people into new assignments, where they learned on the job, watching and learning from experienced colleagues. That’s almost impossible to do in a virtual setting.”
Finally, some people worried about their own development. While time spent on self-education went up during lockdown, this was mostly due to online webinar and course attendance — which helps build knowledge but doesn’t encourage the active experimentation and personal reflection that help us really grow.
For many of us, the new socially distanced mode of working may continue for some time. The good news for knowledge workers from the first phase of this experiment is that lockdown has helped us better manage and prioritize our schedules to favor the most value-added work. The challenge — as we move into the next phase where some face-to-face meetings are allowed — will be to bring back the informal and social elements of office life that are so vital to organizational and individual success.
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Julian Birkinshaw is a professor at London Business School. His most recent book is Fast/Forward: Make Your Company Fit for the Future.
Jordan Cohen is an executive at Lifelabs Learning.
Pawel Stach is a researcher at London Business School.
Research: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from Home
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