Collaboration, creativity suffer from work-at-home situation, study says

The work-from-home trend caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is causing creativity to suffer due to challenges in collaborating, according to results of a recent survey released by South Jordan visual collaboration company Lucid. In fact, 43 percent 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.

The Lucid survey looks at the attitudes and concerns of knowledge workers and their managers towards working from home.

The survey also revealed an interesting divide between employees and managers when it comes to productivity versus creativity. The study found 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.

A full 90 percent of C-suite management rated employee productivity one of their top three concerns with employees working from home, compared to 78 percent among lower-level management. One in four remote managers say that remote work has made their teams less creative overall and 37 percent 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.

When asked what would be most exciting about returning to the office, 37 percent of employees ranked in-person team collaboration as No. 1, twice as many as the next option, a dedicated workspace without at-home distractions. Nearly one in four remote workers says that working from home has hurt their creativity, and almost half of that group (46 percent) identified less facetime with their team as the No. 1 cause.

The Lucid study was conducted in September 2020. The results are based on 1,000 respondents, 300 at the management level and 700 non-management employees. Respondents came from enterprise and mid-sized businesses nationwide in all major industry segments.