Home » The alarm of scholars: “With smart working, scientific research is less valid: absence from the office reduces the circulation of new ideas”

The alarm of scholars: “With smart working, scientific research is less valid: absence from the office reduces the circulation of new ideas”

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The alarm of scholars: “With smart working, scientific research is less valid: absence from the office reduces the circulation of new ideas”

PISA. The lack of physical proximity, caused by the shift to remote work during the pandemic, has reduced the chance encounters and consequent communication between researchers, which are essential for generating a flow of new ideas. This was revealed by a study published in Nature Computational Science. At the end of 2019, the research group of the Senseable City Lab of the MIT in Boston, which also includes Paolo Santi, research manager of the CNR-Iit of Pisa, launched a study on the exchanges of emails between the researchers of the research center American, but the arrival of the pandemic has suddenly changed the cards on the table and all the MIT staff found themselves working from home, revolutionizing the way they work.

The study, explains a note from the Cnr, “shows that co-presence in the office is essential for the formation of the so-called” weak ties “between colleagues, or relationships between members even of different work groups, and that these interactions have been significantly reduced by I work remotely ».

The research analyzes the email flows of 2,834 faculty and researchers working in more than 100 MIT research departments and laboratories and shows that remote working has caused a 38.7% decline in the number of new weak links formed between the colleagues. Furthermore, the Cnr continues, “the study finds that the so-called” ego networks “(the contact and exchange networks that are specific to each individual) have become more stagnant in the months of work away from the office and, consequently, the researchers they continued to communicate a lot, but only with people with whom they already had open collaborations ».

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The study also examines what work organization might look like in the near future. “This offers – underlines Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab – a better understanding of human interaction and productivity, useful for imagining the long-awaited” new normal. “Does this mean that we have to return 100% to our office? the flexibility of remote working, but we must develop a working regime that emphasizes the best of what physical space can do for us ».

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