Despite many tech companies announcing that workers could remain remote going forward, leaders like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon have called employees back to the office. Their concern about remote work largely centers on difficulties co-workers have sharing knowledge and experience with each other. For many companies, this kind of sharing is valuable — it disseminates best practices and enables those who are fumbling to seek help. It’s often taken as an article of faith that it suffers when employees work remotely. But we’ve found successful practices to facilitate this kind of sharing that can be ported, possibly with greater efficacy, to remote teams.
Research: How Virtual Teams Can Better Share Knowledge
One of the stated reasons for trying to get workers back into the office is the chorus of concern around the difficulties of sharing knowledge and experience amongst remote co-workers. New research, however, suggests a method that could improve this process both in the office and remotely: guided meetings between coworkers, which can easily happen in person or remotely. Compared to monetary incentives (without guidance from management), a combined treatment that combined guided meetings and incentives, and a control group, the guided meetings created a longer, more substantial lift in sales productivity than monetary incentives — and roughly equal results to the combined treatment. Over the 24 weeks that sales data was tracked, the firm being studied realized a 7-figure increase in revenue among those who participated in the guided meetings. The implementation cost was less than $15,000.