Remote work has changed how institutions function. Whether it has changed how well they function is a question whose answer depends on what you think institutions are for.
The Coherence Question
The mass shift to remote work that the COVID-19 pandemic imposed and that many knowledge workers have retained has changed the conditions of institutional coherence — the shared understanding, the common culture, the informal coordination, and the organisational identity that institutions use to align the behaviour of their members toward collective purposes. The office environment — the shared physical space, the informal conversations, the observed behaviour of colleagues, the rituals and rhythms of institutional life — is the primary mechanism through which institutional culture is transmitted and reinforced. Remote work replaces this environment with the mediated interaction of video calls, instant messages, and asynchronous communication in ways that maintain the formal functions of institutional coordination while attenuating the informal mechanisms through which institutional culture operates.
The institutional coherence consequences of remote work are not uniform across institutional types or institutional functions. Institutions whose primary outputs are individual knowledge work — writing, analysis, software development, individual professional services — have maintained productivity under remote work arrangements without the coherence costs that institutions whose outputs depend more heavily on informal coordination and collective culture have experienced. The distinction reflects the different dependence of different institutional functions on the informal mechanisms that physical proximity enables — and suggests that the governance question about remote work is not whether it is good or bad in the abstract but which institutional functions it serves well and which it undermines.
Remote work has not eliminated the institution — it has changed what the institution must deliberately invest in to maintain the coherence that physical proximity provided automatically. The institution that simply moved its work to remote without reinvesting in the coherence mechanisms that physical proximity was providing is operating with attenuated institutional culture. The institution that understood what physical proximity was doing and rebuilt the equivalent deliberately is managing the transition rather than experiencing it.
Discussion