One Year of Remote Work: What We Have Learned About Teams, Trust and Burnout

A year ago this month, most office workers in Europe and North America packed up their laptops and went home "for a few weeks". Many have not been back since.

The first months were an emergency. The surprise was how well it worked: video calls replaced meeting rooms, shared documents replaced whiteboards, and most teams kept shipping. Some companies announced that remote work would be permanent. Others are counting the days until everyone returns.

A year in, the picture is more mixed. Last week Microsoft published its 2021 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of more than 31,000 workers in 31 markets in January, plus trillions of anonymised signals from Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn. Its headline findings:

• 54 percent of workers feel overworked, and 39 percent feel exhausted.
• 41 percent are considering leaving their employer within the next year.
• More than 70 percent want flexible remote options to continue, while more than 65 percent want more time in person with their teams.
• Time spent in Teams meetings has more than doubled (2.5 times) since February 2020, and the average meeting is 10 minutes longer.

People want two things that sound contradictory: flexibility and connection. This post looks at what the past year has taught us about how teams actually work, and what managers can do now, before the "return to the office" debate turns into a fight.

1. Productivity held up. People paid for it

The productivity story of 2020 is better than most managers feared. Output in many knowledge jobs did not collapse. That fits earlier research: in a well-known experiment at the Chinese travel company Ctrip, published in 2015, call centre employees randomly assigned to work from home were about 13 percent more productive than the control group, mostly because they took fewer breaks and sick days and worked more minutes per shift.

But last year was not that experiment. Ctrip's volunteers chose to work from home, had a quiet room, and did not have children doing remote school in the next room. Pandemic remote work was forced, sudden and combined with fear, isolation and caring responsibilities.

The Work Trend Index data suggests that much of the productivity was bought with longer and more fragmented days:

Half of respondents say they reply to chats within five minutes. That is not a sign of a productive team. It is a sign of a team that never gets to concentrate.

The lesson: output is a lagging indicator. Burnout, attrition and weaker relationships show up months after the long days that cause them.

2. Burnout is a workplace problem, not a personal failing

It is tempting to treat exhaustion as something individuals should fix with better habits, a meditation app or a weekend off. The World Health Organization's definition says otherwise. Since 2019, the WHO's International Classification of Diseases describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon: a syndrome "resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed". It has three dimensions:

The definition matters because it points at the cause: unmanaged workload and working conditions. A team where meetings fill the whole day and messages arrive at 10pm will produce burnout regardless of how resilient the people are.

The Work Trend Index also shows that the strain is not evenly shared. 60 percent of 18 to 25 year olds say they are merely surviving or flat-out struggling. Many of them started a job remotely, live in small flats or with parents, and have never met their colleagues in person. People who are new to a team or new to work had the least to fall back on.

3. The quiet damage: weaker networks and more silos

One of the most interesting findings in the report is about networks. Microsoft's analysis of anonymised collaboration data found that during the pandemic, people's interactions with their close team became stronger, while interactions with their wider network shrank. Companies became more siloed.

That is a problem that will not show up in this quarter's numbers. Close-team ties help people get the current work done. Weaker ties, the occasional chat with someone in another department, are where new ideas, early warnings and internal job moves come from. Sociologists have known this since Mark Granovetter's 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties". Remote work does not destroy those ties overnight, but it stops new ones forming.

The gap between leaders and everyone else makes it harder to see. In the Microsoft survey, 61 percent of business leaders say they are thriving, about 23 percentage points more than people without decision-making authority. Leaders report stronger relationships with colleagues and more vacation taken. When the people who decide on policy are having a different pandemic from everyone else, they tend to underestimate the problem.

4. Psychological safety matters more when you cannot see each other

When Google studied what made its most effective teams different, a project it called Aristotle, the most important factor was not who was on the team or how senior they were. It was psychological safety: a shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, such as admitting a mistake, asking a naive question or disagreeing with the boss.

The concept comes from Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School, whose 1999 study of work teams showed that teams with higher psychological safety reported more of their errors and learned faster. They did not make more mistakes; they talked about them.

Remote work makes psychological safety harder to build and easier to lose:

• Fewer cues. On a video call, it is hard to tell whether silence means agreement, confusion or fear.
• Fewer informal moments. Many people raise concerns in the corridor after a meeting, not in the meeting. There is no corridor now.
• Higher cost of asking. Sending a message to ask a basic question feels more visible than turning to a colleague.
• Less visibility of struggle. Managers cannot see the person who stays late, looks tired or is quietly stuck.

The good news is that psychological safety is mostly a product of leader behaviour, and that behaviour can be learned. Edmondson's research points to three moves: frame the work as a learning problem ("we have not done this before, so we will need everyone's input"), acknowledge your own fallibility ("I may be missing something here"), and respond productively when people speak up, with thanks rather than defensiveness.

5. Practical rules for remote and hybrid teams

Most of what works is unglamorous. None of it needs new software.

Protect focus time

• Agree on response times by channel. For example: chat within a few hours, email within a day, phone only for urgent issues.
• Block shared no-meeting time, such as two mornings a week.
• Default meetings to 25 or 50 minutes so people have a break between them.

Make meetings earn their place

• Every recurring meeting needs a purpose and an owner. Review them every quarter and cancel the ones nobody would miss.
• Use written updates for status. Keep meetings for decisions, problems and relationships.
• In hybrid meetings, if one person is remote, everyone joins from their own laptop. Otherwise the remote people become spectators.

Rebuild the weak ties deliberately

• Introduce new joiners to five people outside their team in their first month.
• Run short cross-team sessions where teams demo work in progress.
• Leave a few minutes at the start of calls for conversation that is not about work. It is not wasted time; it is how trust is built.

Look after the people with the least slack

• New joiners, junior staff and people with caring responsibilities need more structure, not less. Give them a named buddy and regular check-ins.
• Ask directly about workload. "What would you drop if you could?" gets better answers than "How are you?"

6. Before you decide on the return to the office

Many organisations are making return-to-office plans for the second half of the year as vaccination programmes expand. The Work Trend Index found that 66 percent of business decision makers are considering redesigning physical spaces for hybrid work. That is sensible. Rushing everyone back to the old model is not.

Three questions to answer first:

1. What is the office for? If the answer is "collaboration and connection", design it for that: rooms for workshops and team days, not rows of desks for people to sit on video calls.
2. Who decides? Policies imposed without explanation will be read as a lack of trust. Policies agreed with teams, with a clear reason, are much easier to accept.
3. How will you keep it fair? If people in the office get the interesting projects and the promotions, your remote staff will notice, and the people most likely to stay remote, often parents and people with disabilities, will pay the price.

7. A checklist for managers

• [ ] Look at your team's calendars. If most days are more than half meetings, cut something.
• [ ] Agree response-time norms with your team and write them down.
• [ ] Ask each person, one to one, what is making work harder than it needs to be.
• [ ] Say "I don't know" or "I got that wrong" at least once in a team meeting this month.
• [ ] Thank the person who raises a problem, before you discuss the problem.
• [ ] Introduce someone on your team to someone useful in another team.
• [ ] Make sure every new joiner has a buddy and at least one in-person or video conversation a week that is not about tasks.
• [ ] Check that people are taking holidays, even if there is nowhere to go.

Why this matters

• The costs are delayed. Burnout, attrition and weaker networks lag behind the long days that cause them. By the time they show up in the numbers, they are expensive to fix.
• People are thinking about leaving. When 41 percent of workers are considering a move, the way teams are managed this year will shape who stays.
• The office debate is a trust debate. How the return is decided will say more about a company's culture than any values statement.
• Good remote practice is good practice. Clear goals, focus time, psychological safety and fair treatment help every team, wherever it sits.

Final Thoughts

A year ago, remote work was an emergency measure. Now it is an experiment that most of us are part of, whether we chose it or not, and the early results are in. Work can be done from anywhere. But teams are not only a way of getting work done. They are also how people learn, how they feel they belong, and how ideas move through an organisation. Those things were easy to take for granted when everyone shared a building.

The organisations that come out of this well will not be the ones that pick the right ratio of office days to home days. They will be the ones that treat time, attention and trust as things to be designed, not left to chance.

Sources

• Microsoft, The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work - Are We Ready?, 2021 Work Trend Index (March 22, 2021): survey of 31,092 workers in 31 markets (January 2021) and Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn signals.
• Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying, "Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment", Quarterly Journal of Economics 130(1) (2015).
• World Health Organization, Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases (May 28, 2019).
• Amy Edmondson, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams", Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2) (1999).
• Google re:Work, Guide: Understand team effectiveness (Project Aristotle).
• Charles Duhigg, "What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team", The New York Times Magazine (February 25, 2016).
• Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties", American Journal of Sociology 78(6) (1973).