  The mass shift to working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically
changed the way many software development teams collaborate and communicate. To
investigate how team culture and team productivity may also have been affected,
we conducted two surveys at a large software company. The first, an exploratory
survey during the early months of the pandemic with 2,265 developer responses,
revealed that many developers faced challenges reaching milestones and that
their team productivity had changed. We also found through qualitative analysis
that important team culture factors such as communication and social connection
had been affected. For example, the simple phrase "How was your weekend?" had
become a subtle way to show peer support.
  In our second survey, we conducted a quantitative analysis of the team
cultural factors that emerged from our first survey to understand the
prevalence of the reported changes. From 608 developer responses, we found that
74% of these respondents missed social interactions with colleagues and 51%
reported a decrease in their communication ease with colleagues. We used data
from the second survey to build a regression model to identify important team
culture factors for modeling team productivity. We found that the ability to
brainstorm with colleagues, difficulty communicating with colleagues, and
satisfaction with interactions from social activities are important factors
that are associated with how developers report their software development
team's productivity. Our findings inform how managers and leaders in large
software companies can support sustained team productivity during times of
crisis and beyond.
