To help answer that question, we decided to explore how employees have fared since they began working virtually. To that end, we started surveying a diverse group of more than 600 U.S.-based white-collar employees during the second half of March and have continued to do so every two weeks since then. (This article is based on results collected through May.) Approximately half of our respondents are women, and half are men; they hail from 43 states; nearly half are married; and more than a third have children. About 40% hold management positions. We have been asking them about their job satisfaction, work engagement, perceptions of their own performance, conflicts with colleagues, stress, negative emotions, and current living situation, among other questions. (A fuller description of the survey’s participants is at the end of this article.)

In addition to the survey answers, participants provided written comments. Further, we collected data on the automatically tracked interactions (based on email and calendars) between a separate group of employees of selected organizations from both before and after they began working from home. (While that project is continuing, the interactions we examined for this article began a year before employees began working remotely and ended two months into the lockdown.) Finally, we validated our initial findings through interviews with senior leaders of other organizations who, at the request of their organizations or clients, were investigating the impact of working from home on productivity and creativity.

This information has limitations. Much of it shows results for only a relatively short period of time, and we do not have survey data from before the pandemic, which would have provided us with a better baseline. Still, our research results point to some surprising initial findings.

The Upsides

At the outset, many leaders of organizations we interviewed or who were quoted in the media anticipated that employee performance would significantly deteriorate. But the survey results indicate that workers adjusted to working virtually more quickly than the leaders had feared they would; in many cases, workers felt that they were just as productive as before. As one employee simply put it in a comment, “I’m able to get everything accomplished just like before, and I think everyone else is finding they can too.”

This was a surprise. Given that numerous studies conducted over the years had found that productivity almost always drops following any large-scale change, we would have predicted that the same would have happened this time around. The fact that many employees believe they have successfully navigated this big of a shift in the midst of a pandemic with no productivity loss is remarkable.

Of course, the abrupt switch to remote work wasn’t without growing pains: Job satisfaction and engagement fell sharply after two weeks of working virtually. But they recovered sharply by the end of the second month. “It took some time to get used to it and for things to go right. It was a learning process,” one employee explained. Another called it “getting into a rhythm.”

In part, this involved organizations finding the right balance between meeting and work time: “We have been having virtual meetings and having them more frequently than usual to generate a feeling of company and unity, which has been cutting into the time … [for] my actual work that needs to be done,” one worker reported after one month of all-virtual work. But it also involved increasing comfort levels, discovering new best practices for communicating (“taking our Zoom skills to the next level”), and figuring out how to manage the work-life balance in the new environment (“turning off work [outside of] working hours”).

The last challenge — turning off work at home — has proved especially tough. An examination of data by Humanyze from email, chat, and calendar systems across a global technology company supports our survey results. It revealed that the workday significantly increased at the beginning of all-virtual work: In the weeks immediately after the lockdown began, only half of employees were able to maintain a 10-hour workday or less, whereas nearly 80% had been able to do so previously. These patterns have started to trend back to pre-lockdown levels, although the workdays are still 10% to 20% longer on average.

Since all-virtual work began, employee stress, negative emotions, and task-related conflict have all been steadily falling; each is down at least 10%. At the same time, employees have experienced an approximately 10% improvement in self-efficacy and their capacity to pay attention to their work. A couple of months in, employees reported that they were “falling into a consistent routine,” “forming a pattern [of work time and breaks] with my coworkers,” and “learning what makes me the most productive and how I can best manage my time and energy.” One employee even noted, “I think it’s weird how normal everything has become — the virtual meetings, the emails, everyone looking grungy.” Another stated that it just became “business as usual.”

Comments made by everyone from frontline employees to CEOs revealed a slew of perceived benefits from working from home. One CEO told us he “hoped this put an end to the ‘fly across the country for a one-hour meeting’ expectation forever.” Others reported that they had “more focus time,” “shorter meetings,” and “more flexible time with family” — and, most commonly, were “not missing the daily commute.” By the eighth week, many employees reported getting “into the groove of working from home” and “wanting to continue” working virtually. Several even said, “I love it.”

The survey results above are averages across populations of employees. There are notable differences between groups. One concerns personality traits. Experts have assumed, quite logically, that the key personality dimensions that would predict whether individuals could work from home successfully would be conscientiousness and introversion. Yet we found that the most meaningful personality trait in explaining whether employees adapted better (in terms of the measures above, from satisfaction to stress) was a high level of agreeableness — a trait often associated with an individual’s proclivity toward maintaining positive relationships, feeling others’ emotions, sympathizing with others’ feelings, and being interested in others and their challenges. This disposition, it would seem, made a person better able to adapt as a collaborator and colleague when they switched from working in an office to virtual work. Conversely, those who were highly neurotic — people who tended to exhibit higher levels of conscientiousness and self-awareness but who also, when under stress, tended to suffer anxiety, worry, and fear — had the most trouble adapting to all-virtual work.

Household circumstances mattered too: Over time, those with spouses seemed to be able to better manage stress stemming from working virtually — perhaps because they had someone with whom they could split household responsibilities. Those with children, however, who often also had added childcare and educational responsibilities as schools and daycares closed, fared worse.

In short, most white-collar employees we studied made the transition to virtual work well; in fact, many are beginning to enjoy it — despite challenges such as trying to work and take care of children at the same time. (Though it’s not yet clear in many communities when schools, daycare centers, and summer camps will open and how many children they will accommodate when they do, presumably once they have returned to normal, parents’ satisfaction with working from home will increase.) It also seems to be satisfying the needs of businesses. While much more research will be needed to confirm what we found, these initial results suggest that a combination of impressive human ingenuity, leadership, and organizational support during the pandemic have made virtual work a success.