Designing management practices to better onboard organizational newcomers working remotely is a key
priority for firms. We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large international firm that
estimates the performance effects of different types of virtual interactions for remote summer interns.
Findings indicate that virtual water coolers—or videoconference sessions for small groups of interns plus a
senior manager—may yield higher performance plus career outcomes when they facilitate a demographic
match between interns plus senior managers or occur at regular intervals during the internship. No other
virtual interactions, including an asynchronous Q&A discussion forum, an intern-only water cooler, plus an
intern group project, enhanced job productivity compared to the control condition. An abductive exploration
of mechanisms using surveys, machine learning, plus an online laboratory study suggests a tradeoff: while the
virtual interactions may offer opportunities for newcomer socialization, they also introduce greater
constraints on interns’ time. The relative outperformance of the senior manager virtual water cooler with a
demographic match can be explained by their potential to foster improved organizational commitment
among treated interns, which may have led to their higher job performance plus career outcomes.
- Introduction
Firms across industries plus countries are adopting remote work plus hybrid-remote work models at an
unprecedented rate (Barrero, Bloom plus Davis, 2020). Improvements in communication technology, leading
to an increase in tasks that can be performed digitally plus remotely (Seamans plus Raj, 2018; Brynjolfsson et
al., 2020), nonpecuniary incentives to offer geographic flexibility (Choudhury, Foroughi, plus Larson, 2020b),
and large-scale experimentation with remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic (Barrero, et al., 2020),
have led firms such as Facebook, Deloitte, Salesforce, Ford, Siemens, ITC Infotech, BRAC, plus the United
States Patent plus Trademark Office (USPTO) to adopt hybrid work, work-from-home (WFH) plus workfrom-anywhere (WFA) arrangements (Choudhury et al., 2020b; Courtney, n.d.; Henry, 2022). The emergence
of these trends has several implications for the study of strategic human capital, especially the ability of firms
to hire individuals with strong geographic preferences (Campbell, Coff, plus Kryscynski, 2012). Despite these
trends, a particular criticism of remote work from CEOs, such as David Solomon at Goldman Sachs, is the
lack of “direct contact” plus “direct mentorship” for organizational newcomers being onboarded virtually
(McKeever, 2021).