[论文解读] From Forced Working-From-Home to Working-From-Anywhere: Two Revolutions in Telework

Darja Šmite, Nils Brede Moe+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jan 20, 2021

Supply Chain Resilience and Risk Management被引用 15

一句话总结

本文研究了新冠疫情初期强制远程办公对跨国公司软件开发的影响，分析了代码提交、沟通方式及员工福祉。尽管最初存在担忧，工程师们仍保持了生产力与福祉水平，推动了‘随时随地办公’模式的形成，标志着远程办公实践的根本性转变。

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility have clearly had a significant impact on the well-functioning of the global supply and demand chain. But what happened to the companies developing digital services, such as software. Were they interrupted as much or at all? And how has the enforced Working-From-Home mode impacted their ability to continue to deliver software? We hear that some managers are concerned that their engineers are not working effectively from home, or even lack the motivation to work in general, that teams lose touch and that managers do not notice when things go wrong. In this article, we share our findings from monitoring the situation in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, USA, and the UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, and Slack communication, as well as the internal reports of WFH experiences and 18 interviews. We find that company engineers continue committing code and carry out their daily duties without significant disruptions, while their routines have gradually adjusted to the new norm with new emerging practices and various changes to the old ones. In a way, our message is that there is no news, which is good news. Yet, the experiences gained with the WFH of such scale have already made significant changes in the software industry's future, work from anywhere being an example of major importance.

研究动机与目标

• 评估突如其来的大规模远程办公对软件开发生产力与团队动态的影响。
• 调查强制居家办公（WFH）是否干扰了软件交付与团队协作。
• 探究工程师在疫情期间如何调整其工作习惯、沟通方式与工作流程。
• 评估远程办公对未来软件工程发展的影响。
• 识别出支持分布式团队持续表现与福祉的新兴实践。

提出的方法

• 收集并分析版本控制系统中的提交数据，以衡量编码活动与生产力。
• 分析日历邀请与Slack沟通日志，评估协作模式与团队互动情况。
• 对18名工程师与管理者进行半结构化访谈，获取关于远程办公体验的定性洞察。
• 查阅公司内部关于居家办公体验的报告，评估福祉、动机及感知挑战。
• 结合定量指标与定性反馈，评估工作流程、效率与团队凝聚力的变化。
• 追踪习惯与实践随时间的变化，识别远程开发中的新兴规范。

实验结果

研究问题

• RQ1 强制远程办公如何影响软件开发的生产力与代码提交模式？
• RQ2 分布式工程团队的沟通与协作方式发生了哪些变化？
• RQ3 在长期远程办公期间，工程师的福祉与动机如何演变？
• RQ4 哪些新实践 emerged 以支持远程环境下的持续生产力与团队凝聚力？
• RQ5 远程办公的转变在多大程度上促成了‘随时随地办公’作为长期可行模式的形成？

主要发现

• 工程师保持了稳定的代码提交频率，表明疫情期间软件交付未出现显著中断。
• 沟通方式转向异步渠道（如Slack），对实时会议的依赖减少。
• 团队协作保持稳定，日历数据显示会议频率与参与度持续。
• 18次访谈显示，工程师对远程办公适应良好，许多人报告工作与生活平衡改善及专注力提升。
• 管理者表示团队表现未出现重大下滑，也未出现远程检测问题的广泛困难。
• 该经历加速了行业向‘随时随地办公’模式的转变，使其成为一种正常化且可持续的模式。