| The impact of COVID-19 on digital communication patterns - 24/05/2022 |
| Nature |
| Technical Community and Civil Society | International |
| The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted the way organizations function, just as it disrupted life more generally. As the number of infections increased, governments across the globe closed their borders and shut down physical work sites to reduce the spread of infection caused by the virus. By April 7, 2020, 95 percent of Americans were required to shelter-in-place within their homes, similar to the citizens of many other countries. Organizations responded by altering their work arrangements to accommodate these new realities, including a rapid shift to working from home for large segments of knowledge workers. Many workers were forced to work remotely to perform their jobs regardless of how conducive their home environment or task requirements were to such arrangements. Given the large-scale economic and social upheaval wrought by COVID-19, this abrupt transition to remote work occurred at a time when organizational coordination, decision-making processes, and productivity were never more consequential. This paper provides a large-scale analysis of how formal digital communication patterns changed in the early stages of the pandemic. For all the anecdotes and speculation about working from home during the pandemic, there is still little systematic evidence on how day-to-day work activities changed due to these unexpected shocks. This paper explores, in particular, how the pandemic altered patterns of interactions—measured through a comprehensive set of meeting and email activity metrics—as organizations rapidly moved their activity to remote work. The analysis is based on de-identified meta-data from an information technology services provider that licenses digital communications solutions to organizations worldwide. |
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Source Link Keywords: Digital communications solutions |