Results of Study into Remote Working During the Pandemic
High performance, low stress, but still feeling a bit “blah”
Our small piece of research into performance and well-being during the pandemic is showing some, maybe, maybe not, surprising results. Performance has been shown to be consistently high but more surprising is that mental health seems to be very high counter to predictions of what the stress of the pandemic is having on the populations. However, this is a very specific demographic.
The surprising results of the leading brains study into the workplace is that self-reported performance has increased during the pandemic and mental health is high. This is in contrast to our expectations and many reports of the third wave of mental health (which we also predicted).
For the full report please go here. But let’s look at some of the figures.
Performance in the Pandemic
Here we saw very broad consensus of 1. High performance and 2. Better relative performance:
Here we can see very broad consensus with only a very small minority reporting low absolute performance and only 12.6% reporting worse performance than pre pandemic, and 67% reporting better performance. The size of this surprised us. We also conducted some qualitative interviews and probed this item. The reasons are reduced commute, more efficient meetings, and ability to focus.
It is also interesting to see that lower and middle leaders had slightly lower performance levels with individual contributors, specialists, and senior leaders reporting the highest performance.
Personality and Performance
We had hoped to identify personality traits with those that were thriving in remote working contexts. We did find some traits that correlated but mostly modestly or weakly. On closer inspection we could see that contextual differences were more powerful than personality traits i.e. type of job, tasks, home situation, life situation, etc.
The traits that correlated with remote performance were: Risk (inverse), Talkativeness (inverse), Sensory Sensitivity, Modesty, Rational Experience (inverse)
Mental Health – Emotional Needs Fulfilment
Perhaps the larger surprise is that emotional needs fulfilment, which is very indicative of mental health, is in a very good place. When we compare this to comparable date from 2014-17 we can see that emotional needs fulfilment is better (reported below as lower “imbalance”)!
This at first glance seems surprising with so many media reports of stress and burnout. But these have been in specific population groups. This population group of older (median age 43) professional workers in Europe working mostly for multinationals showed mental health is high, and higher than in 2017. There are many potential reasons, but one is certainly multiple reduced stressors such as commuting, massive increase in autonomy, but also with increased performance as reported above improving stress, and self-esteem.
This is specific to this population group but nevertheless still good news.