Does decision making take longer in a remote or hybrid working environment?
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I find the numbers clear (at least for our organisation, which is culturally a meet-in-person culture). Remote is more productive than Hybrid and On Prem.
I would challenge the concept with hard facts that those water cooler conversations to resolve small issues are net positive. The number of issues created requires their resolution. When people are remote they are more likely to work the process and therefore avoid issues. imho. ymmv.
My observation about my company's Return to Office (and those who live in Austin are required to be in the office 4 days/week), is it enables those quick, hallway/water cooler check ins and faster "small issue" resolutions you can get by dropping by someone's desk. I believe overall this actually significantly strengthens alignment across the business and decreases decision-making time.
Well, the number of people in decision making (DM) chains seems to be growing. In sales, for example, that number has grown from an average of 3 or 4 to more than 11. So in general, DM is becoming more of a committee exercise and is taking longer in general (we’ll leave the reasons for that growing DM chain and effectiveness of those final decisions out of it for now). Because virtual or hybrid work environments were forced upon us, they are now a reality, so decisions must be made in this way whether we want them to or not.
To the extent that DM is a collaborative exercise, virtual is less effective due to the absence or paucity of non-verbal cues - body language, if you will. DM isn’t a rational, left-brain event - it’s actually an emotional event supported by rationality. You can sense, if not physically see, people’s angst and uncomfortableness with a decision if you’re in the same room as them. In a “Brady Bunch” Zoom scenario, thieve non-verbal channels of emotional communication are severely limited or missing entirely.
All this is to say that the EFFICIENCY (aka speed) of a geographically dispersed DM chain may be increased in virtual or hybrid environments, but the EFFECTIVENESS of such decisions is more than like suboptimal.
My $0.02
Generally its delayed. But we have seen improvement in Hybrid mode from complete WFH.
Going again the tide here. In my experience, decision making speed is unaffected by remote/hybrid. It's actually more about your company established norms and decision making processes. If you are looking for consensus then it will be very slow regardless.