Remote Teammates Worked Just as Hard—Office Colleagues Assumed Otherwise

On September 3, UNC Charlotte detailed an accepted-manuscript study in which remote participants completed no fewer tasks than office-based participants, yet office workers assigned remote teammates contributed less to the team. The university’s September 3 research briefing says the office participants reduced their contributions because they expected their remote partners to contribute less.

That September 3 account followed the study’s online publication on August 17. The Economic Journal record identifies the work by economists E. Glenn Dutcher and Krista J. Saral as an accepted manuscript: the authors’ final version as accepted by the journal, before copyediting and typesetting.

What the experiment isolated

Participants were randomly assigned to complete a controlled typing task either in a university computer lab or remotely from a location of their choosing. They first worked individually and then completed team rounds with two remote teammates or two office-based teammates.

The design separated total production from the destination of that work. Participants could direct completed effort to an individual account, which paid a piece rate, or to a team account. The researchers also varied the team-payment arrangement, testing a minimum-effort structure and a follow-up revenue-sharing structure.

This makes the central result more specific than a general comparison of working from home and working in an office. The researchers found no statistically significant difference in total tasks completed by remote and office-based participants. Remote participants also directed more effort to the team account on average.

The location effect instead appeared in how people responded to their teammates. Random assignment allowed the researchers to examine whether knowing that partners were remote or office-based changed a participant’s own contribution, rather than confusing location with pre-existing differences in ability.

How an incorrect expectation reduced team effort

The reduction came primarily from office-based participants paired with remote teammates. They expected those teammates to contribute less and responded by allocating less of their own effort to the team account, even though remote participants did not complete fewer tasks.

That sequence supports the headline’s apparent contradiction. The remote participants’ measured output did not fall, but coworkers behaved as though it would. In a shared-effort system, that belief changed the office participants’ incentives and turned an inaccurate expectation into a real team-level cost.

The location-based belief remained influential under the follow-up revenue-sharing arrangement, where concern about free-riding could have displaced the original mechanism. The researchers also compared data collected before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and found evidence that beliefs about remote workers became more pessimistic after the pandemic, while actual effort did not change. The paper does not establish why those beliefs shifted or that every office employee shares them.

A visibility checklist based on output

The experiment did not test a management program. The following measures are proposed workplace implications, not interventions proven by the study. Their purpose is to replace location-based inference with shared evidence about work while avoiding continuous observation as a proxy for performance.

• Define the deliverable. Specify what the team must produce, who owns each component and what counts as complete. A deadline without a defined result still leaves colleagues to infer effort from attendance or availability.
• Show progress at meaningful milestones. Use completed drafts, resolved issues, approved decisions or other role-specific outputs. Milestones can reveal dependencies without recording every intermediate action.
• Track individual and shared contributions separately. Review both personal deliverables and work that advances the team result. This reflects the experiment’s distinction between effort assigned to individual and team accounts.
• Use symmetrical evidence. Apply the same review cadence and completion standards to remote and office-based employees. Otherwise, office presence may receive informal credit while remote work carries an extra burden of proof.
• Compare expectations with results. Before reallocating responsibility or withholding team effort, check an assumption about a colleague against agreed deliverables and completed work.

This approach differs from treating keystrokes, status indicators or connection time as performance measures. Those signals document activity or presence, not necessarily useful output. A related framework for measuring outcomes instead of presence examines that distinction without making surveillance the default.

What the study cannot establish

The experiment provides controlled evidence about one channel: beliefs about teammates’ locations and the resulting allocation of effort. It does not show that remote and office work produce identical performance across operating companies, where communication, creative work, customer contact, management quality, onboarding and home working conditions can affect results.

The typing task was intentionally constrained. Participants were not performing the varied, interdependent work of a continuing organization, and the study did not compare collaboration platforms, monitoring policies or management systems. It therefore cannot establish that the checklist above will correct biased expectations or improve production in the field.

The accepted manuscript nevertheless resolves the narrow question it tested: remote participants did not complete fewer tasks, while office participants’ expectations about remote teammates reduced their own team-directed effort. What remains unknown is whether output-based visibility can correct that behavior in real organizations—and whether it can do so without replacing location bias with intrusive monitoring.

Also read:

• Remote Employee Monitoring: Measure Outcomes, Not Digital Presence
• The Value of One Office Day a Month: How Minimal In-Person Contact Boosts Productivity and Retention in Remote Teams
• Your Office Reveals Less About Personality Than Who Controls the Work