Contagious Misconduct
According to a forthcoming paper in European Financial Management, UK bankers are better behaved when working from home, compared to working from the office.
The data-collection was enabled by the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented a forced opportunity to compare instances of securities-related misconduct within a group of 162 traders at a top-5 UK bank between March 2020 and March 2021.
The study is limited, both in the sense that this is a small sample size and research period, and in the sense that you can only capture reported misconduct using this method—so the stuff that doesn't trigger a misconduct alert was not legible to these researchers.
That said, the data that was collected was interesting enough to warrant a paper. It suggests that bankers working from home tend to be better behaved than those working from the office, and the difference is substantial: bankers at this big-name bank, working from home during this time period, had a 7.3% chance of triggering a misconduct alert, compared to traders who worked from the office during this period who had a 37.6% chance of the same.
This is a significant difference! And though caution is warranted in drawing too many big conclusions from what is, again, a limited data-set, it does present some questions about the nature of misconduct and whether misconduct-related contagion effects might be tempered by rethinking how we set up our corporate (and perhaps especially financial-world) working arrangements.
"Social contagion" can refer to a lot of things, ranging from people starting to feel sick because someone nearby vomits (despite themselves not being sick) to children believing (and acting as if) they were possessed by demons because other children acted like they were thus afflicted.
Emotional contagion points at a subset of socially contagious behaviors related to our tendency to reflect the emotions demonstrated by the people around us: a crowd of obviously sad people will tend to make us somber, whether we realize it or not, and the same is true (in the opposite direction) of joyous, upbeat groups.
Behavioral contagion refers to an intentional or subconscious copying of the behaviors of the people around us.
If everyone around you suddenly looks up and to the left, there's a good chance you'll do the same—there are survival-related benefits to picking up on such cues and mimicking the actions of those around us because there might be a threat or opportunity up there.
Sometimes the behaviors we copy are more complex, though, resulting in the reinforcement of social ties, tribal norms, or time-tested rituals.
There's a chance—and this is reflected in the researchers' analysis of their findings in the aforementioned paper—that a lack of mimic-able cues (of the norm-setting variety), paired with a reduction in the ability to easily transmit insider information and rumors, may be the cause of this massive drop in bad behavior by these bankers during this period.
When not able to casually cross-pollinate, sharing information and unspoken norms (norms that apparently include regularly doing crimes) with each other, everyone involved resets to a less crime-ridden default.
There are plenty of other variables that might be influencing the findings here, though, so while this gestures at an interesting realm of further study (including to assess the opposite: do the positive sorts of cross-pollination similarly diminish when work-from-home takes hold? And: what other sorts of changes might we expect to see?) it's far from the final word on how these office-related changes might also be changing company culture and employee behavior.