The work-from-home trend caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is causing creativity to suffer due to challenges in collaborating. In fact, 43% of the C-suite reported their company was forced to delay major launches, campaigns, or initiatives as a result of employees working from home and collaborating virtually. This insight comes from a recent survey by Lucid, which looks at the attitudes and concerns of knowledge workers and their managers towards working from home.
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The survey also revealed an interesting divide between employees and managers when it comes to productivity vs. creativity, and that creativity overall is suffering because of poor collaboration, with more than a third of managers ranking employee productivity as their biggest concern with employees working from home, while employees report collaboration with their teams has suffered the most. In addition:
- 90% of C-suite management rated employee productivity one of their top 3 concerns with employees working from home, compared to 78% among lower level management.
- 1 in four remote managers say that remote work has made their teams less creative overall.
- 37% of remote workers say that constant notifications from collaboration tools actually disrupts their ability to be creative.
Creativity suffers further because knowledge workers are distracted when using current collaboration solutions.
- 62% of remote workers admit to bad behavior while participating in virtual brainstorm meetings from home (1 in 10 have used the bathroom while on a call).
- One in four (25%) remote workers admits to spending at least half of a typical virtual brainstorm meeting distracted.
When asked what would be most exciting about returning to the office, 37% of employees ranked in-person team collaboration as number one, twice as many as the next option (a dedicated workspace without at-home distractions). Nearly 1 in 4 remote workers says that working from home has hurt their creativity, and almost half of that group (46%) identified less facetime with their team as the number one cause(Lucid).
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