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Hybrid, In-Person, Or Fully Remote? Case Studies On The Optimal Work Arrangement

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Initial Hype

The barrero stamp, three years on – the evolution of evidence, hybrid models emerge as a compelling middle ground, case study 1: remote software engineers & coders, case study 2: remote knowledge-based workers, case study 3: remote call center workers & police dispatch, addressing the productivity paradox, case study 1:  hybrid call center workers, case study 2: hybrid us pto workers, case study 3: hybrid arrangement at ngo in bangladesh, the verdict on hybrid work, the way forward.

In a post-pandemic era, a central theme has emerged – the nature of work has irrevocably shifted. Remote work has become both a solution and a source of controversy, reshaping the traditional office-centered landscape.  

While the remote work model offers undeniable benefits, its shortcomings in terms of productivity, communication, and mentorship require a balanced perspective. This article explores the evolution of remote work, exposing its realities and shedding light on a more viable alternative – hybrid arrangements – by drawing on recent research and case studies.

Pressed for time? Here’s a quick summary…

• Shifting Perceptions of Remote Work : Early optimism about remote work’s productivity was later challenged by new research, uncovering a productivity gap influenced by mentorship and communication dynamics.
• Benefits Beyond Productivity: Despite some limitations, remote work offers organizational savings, employee retention advantages, and mental and financial well-being for workers.  
• Hybrid: A Balanced Solution: Emerging as a favored model, hybrid work combines remote flexibility with in-person advantages, showing potential for enhanced productivity and job satisfaction.  
• The Future Calls for Tailored Approaches : No universal solution exists. Organizations must consider industry dynamics, role demands, and individual preferences to design effective work arrangements.

The Evolution Of Remote Work: Early Evidence & Shifting Dynamics

At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the widespread adoption of remote work out of necessity for public health garnered high expectations, suggesting it could rival or even surpass traditional in-office arrangements. Preliminary studies and surveys supported this notion, sparking a revolutionary shift in work expectations for employees and employers.

Researchers like Jose Maria Barrero amplified this optimism, presenting evidence that fully remote workers matched or exceeded in-office peers in productivity. This boosted companies’ confidence in offering remote work arrangements, buoying employee morale and hinting at a long-term shift toward remote work models.

Fast-forward three years, and the landscape isn’t as clear cut. New research and global industry data have revealed cracks in the acclaimed image of full remote work. While it remained beneficial for some, it couldn’t universally replace the advantages of in-office collaboration, networking, and hands-on mentorship that contribute to a well-rounded work experience.

Amidst the debates and new data, hybrid work models have gained traction. The arrangement offers the best of both worlds, combining remote flexibility with in-person advantages such as mentorship and more efficient communication .

3 Case Studies That Expose Remote Work Realities

The following case studies were derived from a working paper by esteemed researchers, namely Jose Maria Barrero from ITAM Business School, Steven J. Davis from the University of Chicago and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and Nicholas Bloom from Stanford University’s Department of Economics and NBER. These cases illustrate the productivity gap between in-person and remote work, highlighting the influence of crucial elements like mentorship and communication.

In the field of software engineering, teamwork and constant feedback drive innovation and excellence. This concept is underscored by a study led by Emma Harrington, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, which examined the impact of physical proximity on collaboration among software engineers and coders.

Key Findings:

• Physical Proximity & Feedback: Coders in the same building had a distinct advantage, receiving 20% more feedback than those on distributed teams. Face-to-face interactions facilitated prompt communication and clarification, enhancing collaboration. 
• Drop-In Remote Feedback: With a shift to remote work, the exchange of feedback on code saw a 50% decline compared to the period when the team shared a physical workspace. This decrease raises concerns about potential limitations in work quality and efficiency. 
• Impact On Younger Employees: The impact of less feedback and mentorship was particularly pronounced among younger and less experienced employees. These individuals faced a significant reduction in access to guidance, potentially hampering their professional growth.

The productivity of knowledge-based workers has always been a challenging puzzle for experts, considering the subjective nature of their tasks and the lack of tangible metrics to evaluate their outputs. While remote work offers these professionals the allure of flexibility, it comes with potential drawbacks.  A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review in 2020, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, reveals intriguing insights into both short-term benefits and long-term concerns.

Short-Term Key Findings:

• Lockdown Focus: The sudden shift to remote work during the pandemic led to a 12% reduction in time spent in large meetings and a 9% increase in interactions with customers and external partners, allowing knowledge workers to focus on high-priority tasks. 
• Personal Responsibility: Individuals took charge of their schedules, engaging in 50% more activities driven by personal choice, rather than external requests. 
• Enhanced Work Value: Lockdown conditions prompted workers to perceive their tasks as more valuable to both employers and themselves. Tasks employees deemed “tiresome” dropped from 27% to 12%, fostering a sense of increased worth in their work.

The transition to remote work during the pandemic was positive for knowledge worker productivity in the short term. However, follow-up interviews with leaders reveal concerns about the long-term effectiveness. 

Long-Term Key Findings:

• Communication & Collaboration: Virtual settings hinder spontaneous meetings and collaboration, causing a loss of team “social glue.” 
• Mentorship & Development: Virtual environments challenge on-the-job learning and team growth. Online courses have risen but may lack depth. 
• Potential Slackening O f Effort: Some concerns arise about the comfort leading to complacency in a prolonged remote work setting.    
• Screen Fatigue: Remote knowledge workers often face screen fatigue—a strain caused by prolonged exposure to digital interfaces. This phenomenon can result in diminished productivity and concentration levels. 
• Communication Barriers: Remote work can delay communication, hindering the pace of workflow efficiency, collaboration, and decision-making. 
• Mentorship Risks: The availability of mentorship remains a concern in fully remote settings, which is particularly impactful for newer or younger employees. The absence of direct guidance and learning opportunities could hinder skill development. 

Strong evidence related to productivity emerges from fields with clear measurable outputs, as seen in police dispatches, studied by Barrero, and call center workers, explored by Emma Harrington and Natalia Emmanual.

• In-Person Communication Efficiency: Examining police dispatches revealed that communication efficiency prevailed when both parties, callers who answered 911 calls and dispatchers, were in the same room. 
• Pre-Pandemic Productivity: Before the pandemic, remote call center workers lagged in productivity by 12% compared to their on-site counterparts.
• Remote Work Productivity During Pandemic: When all call center employees worked remotely during the pandemic, the productivity gap between remote and in-person workers shrunk. Still, 4% fewer calls were answered per hour.

While these case studies highlight the drawbacks of remote work, it’s equally important to consider its benefits. Organizations can save on costs with a fully remote model despite potential productivity dips .  

• Office Cost Savings: Embracing remote work can lead to significant savings in office space and related expenses. 
• Employee Retention: US employers spend $2.9 million per day looking for replacement workers. According to Barrero’s research, remote workers are less likely to quit their jobs than fully in-office workers. Offering the option for remote work can curb turnover, retain valuable talent, and save money in the long run.

Organizations also gain an expanded talent pool:  

• Broader Recruitment Efforts: Remote work opens doors to a wider talent pool by enabling companies to recruit skilled professionals from diverse geographical locations.

Although in-person work provides the benefit of face-to-face interactions, which may improve social well-being , remote setups can boost employees’ mental and financial well-being:  

• Mental Well-Being: Remote arrangements can reduce the stress associated with commuting and allow employees to personalize their workspace for comfort, positively impacting their mental health . 
• Financial Well-Being: From commuting expenses to work attire costs, and potentially even relocating to expensive urban areas, returning to the office can be a financial burden. Many employees face a recurring cost of over $100 per week for required in-person work. Remote work eliminates these unnecessary expenses, enhancing financial well-being.

The Middle Ground: Hybrid Solutions

While there are inherent benefits of remote work, such as flexibility, certain limitations—especially in areas like feedback and mentorship—are more prominent. On the other hand, traditional in-person settings offer rich interactions but may lack the adaptability today’s employees seek. 

The solution? A fusion of both worlds—hybrid work models, which marry the strengths of remote and in-person setups.

The effects of hybrid work were examined on 250 call-center employees at cTrip.com, a leading Chinese travel agency. Employees were divided into two groups: one worked from the office full time, while the other worked from home for four days and came to the office for one.

• Heightened Productivity: Remote employees experienced a 13% increase in daily productivity compared to in-office employees. 
• Increased Working Time: Home-based employees exhibited a 9% increase in working time due to shorter breaks and less sick leave. 
• Boosted Efficiency: Remote employees displayed 4% greater efficiency per hour. 

Employees at the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) were allowed to work remotely for four days a week, offering greater flexibility while maintaining optimal performance.

• Increased Work Output: This arrangement yielded a 5% increase in patent actions. 
• The Win-Win Of Flexibility: There was a further 8% increase in patent actions when greater location flexibility was introduced, providing employees with more freedom while improving efficiency.

At a non-governmental organization in Bangladesh, the human resources department randomized workers into hybrid arrangements, unveiling promising findings regarding productivity and job satisfaction.

• Greater Efficiency: Hybrid workers demonstrated a notable increase in email activity, with a higher frequency of emails sent and a greater tendency to draft more intricate and comprehensive content. 
• Improved Job Satisfaction: Job satisfaction improved among workers in hybrid arrangements.

Exclusively remote work is linked to lower average productivity due to communication and professional development challenges. On the other hand, hybrid work shows a neutral to mildly positive impact on performance. 

Some organizations may benefit from embracing fully remote employees for cost savings, while many may find hybrid models to be most effective for productivity, talent acquisition, and employee retention .

So, is a hybrid model the ultimate solution?  

The response is more nuanced: not definitively.  

While a hybrid model presents a strong initial framework, it’s increasingly evident that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to work arrangements. Diverse industries, roles, and individual employee preferences underscore the need for customized strategies. What seamlessly suits a software developer might not align as effectively with a sales executive. 

Rather than applying a uniform policy, it’s crucial to factor in the distinct demands of various roles, industry dynamics, and, most importantly, the desires and needs of individual employees. Embracing a tailored approach is more likely to yield favorable outcomes in productivity, job satisfaction, and overall company culture.

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The massive surge in the number of people working from home may be the largest change to the U.S. economy since World War II, says Stanford scholar Nicholas Bloom .

And the shift to working from home, catalyzed by the pandemic, is here to stay, with further growth expected in the long run through improvements in technology.

Looking at data going back to 1965, when less than 1% of people worked from home, the number of people working from home had been rising continuously up to the pandemic, doubling roughly every 15 years, said Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor in Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Before the pandemic, only around 5% of the typical U.S. workforce worked from home; at the pandemic’s onset, it skyrocketed to 61.5%. Currently, about 30% of employees work from home.

“In some ways, one of the biggest lasting legacies of the pandemic will be the shift to work from home,” said Bloom.

Bloom shared his research on working from home at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute ’s “The Future of Work” Winter 2023 Colloquium, which focused on how the ways we work are changing.

DCI Director Richard Saller moderated the event , which featured scholars from Stanford and beyond discussing working arrangements and attitudes, challenges to office real estate, learned lessons about the power of proximity, and more.

Below are seven takeaways from Bloom’s discussion:

• The employees. About 58% of people in the U.S. can’t work from home at all, and they are typically frontline workers with lower pay. Those who work entirely from home are primarily professionals, managers, and in higher-paying fields such as IT support, payroll, and call centers. The highest paid group includes the 30% of people working from home in a hybrid capacity, and these include professionals and managers.
• The move. Almost 1 million people left city centers like New York and San Francisco during the pandemic. Those who used to go to the office five days a week are now willing to commute farther because they are only in the office a couple days a week, and they want larger homes to accommodate needs such as a home office. This has changed property markets substantially with rents and home values in the suburbs surging, Bloom said. Home values in city centers have risen but not by much.
• The commute. Public transit journeys have plummeted and are currently down by a third compared to pre-pandemic levels. This sharp reduction is threatening the survival of mass transit, Bloom said. These are systems that have relatively fixed costs because the hardware and labor, which is largely unionized, are relatively hard to adjust. A lot of the revenues come from ticket sales, and these agencies are losing a lot of money.
• The office. Offices are changing, with cubicles becoming less popular and meeting rooms more desirable. As some companies incorporate an organized hybrid schedule in which everyone comes in on certain days, they are redesigning spaces to support more meetings, presentations, trainings, lunches, and social time.
• The startups. Startup rates are surging, up by 20% from pre-pandemic numbers. The reasons: working from home provides a cheaper way to start a new company by saving a lot on initial capital and rent. Also, people can more easily work on a startup on the side when their regular job offers the option to work from home.
• The downtime. The number of people playing golf mid-week has more than doubled since 2019. People used to go before or after work, or on the weekends, but now the mid-day, mid-week golf game is becoming more common. The same is probably true for things like gyms, tennis courts, retail hairdressers, ski resorts, and anything else that consumers used to pack into the weekends.
• The organization. More and more, firms are outsourcing or offshoring their information technology, human resources, and finance to access talent, save costs, and free up space. There has been a big increase in part-time employees, independent contractors, and outsourcing. “After seeing how well it worked with remote work at the beginning of the pandemic, companies may not see a need to have employees in the country,” Bloom said.

Interested in hearing more about the future of work? Stanford Continuing Studies will feature Bloom as he discusses “The Future of and Impact of Working from Home” on May 1 as part of the Stanford Monday University web seminar series .

Bloom is also co-director of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research .

A Case Study in Making Remote Work Succeed at Scale

A llstate has about 57,000 employees and 82% of those in the US work remotely. The insurance company sold its sprawling Illinois headquarters last year and shed half of its office real estate overall, saving hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

At a time when many executives are frustrated that employees aren’t spending more time in the office, Allstate CEO Tom Wilson says the remote arrangement is working well for his company. “We decided to jump into the water and see where it goes,” he said during a session at the recent Aspen Ideas Festival . “Our employees decided they wanted that and we’re finding a way to make it work.”

Charter’s Kevin Delaney moderated that session with Wilson and Joanne Lipman, author of Next! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. Here are excerpts from Wilson’s comments, edited for clarity and space, explaining the remote-work arrangement, challenges with it, and what he has learned to do differently as a result:

How Allstate went from about 20% permanently remote pre-pandemic to 82% now:

We went through a process where we top-down said certain departments need to be together. Our investment department, the traders, they need to be together. We just know they need to be looking at each other, looking at their screens. But there’s a lot of other people who don’t need to be together.

We then gave people choices from that. And of the people we gave a choice, 95% said they wanted to work permanently remote, they didn’t want to come into an office.

We also didn’t declare we had a headquarters. It was in suburban Chicago. The mayor of Chicago really wanted us to say Chicago was our headquarters. And we’ve resisted that. We’ve said we’ll always have a big presence there, but we don’t have a headquarters because I don’t know what a headquarters is anymore. A headquarters used to be the center of power. You came there to get noticed and be seen by people and move up. And we don’t have one of those anymore.

Recognizing the limits of executive power to enforce a return:

I don’t think I have all the answers, and if I did, our people wouldn’t necessarily follow me anyway. A bunch of my friends in New York who run financial services companies made this declaration: ‘You will be in the office.’ And nobody came in. Shows you what power you have as a CEO: like zero. So go with the flow, treat employees as customers, treat them with respect, and then they’ll come with you.

How to make remote work feel meaningful:

We’re thinking about the whole work experience. So not just what happens in the office, but how do we make that remote experience better. There’s some really good things here. I used to have to go around the country and do town hall meetings with 500, a thousand people, to try to get our employees. Now we do a Zoom call, we get 20,000 or 30,000 people on the call at once. It saves me a bunch of time, saves them from having to come for a meeting. If I’m boring, they can click off. It’s just better.

We took those meetings and now we had Arthur Brooks come in and talk to our employees just about happiness. Chat went crazy. You couldn’t believe how excited people were.

So there are ways you can think about outside the office. How do we make that experience rewarding?

How to strengthen organizational culture with remote work:

This is going to raise the bar because culture can be transmitted physically. Culture is just like you walk into a building, you walk into an office, it just becomes part of you. In this hybrid world and with the pace of change, whether that’s pace of change on the diversity of your workforce or pace of change with AI and the other stuff, culture becomes a higher bar. And I don’t think as a management science, we have good processes around culture. If you ask people what the definition of culture is, it’s sort of like pornography: you know it when you see it. We tried to develop our own answer, to come up with four components of culture so that we can actually measure it and see if we’re making a difference.

What good managers look like in this new world:

First and foremost it’s that you care a lot for your employees. Second, that you’re really clear about where your company’s going. Here’s our purpose, here’s what we’re trying to achieve, here’s what you want to do.

Remote work raises the bar on decision clarity. It used to be you could walk out of a meeting and if it wasn’t so clear, there’d be a meeting after the meeting. Or somebody walked by your office: ‘What did you say over here? I didn’t understand it.’ But now you click off Zoom and then they go off and you don’t see them for three days. I’m finding it’s harder for me to be clearer and more specific and it takes extra work.

The same thing is true on feedback. If you’ve read Reed Hastings’ book on feedback , on what they do at Netflix—it’s a lot more aggressive than we do, let me just put it that way. But they have really high margins and their people add a lot of value. So obviously it does work for them. But the idea that you’re really crisp and blunt with people so that when they walk out of that meeting, they’re not wondering, do they like me or not? You’ve got to be really clear. So it changes what we have to do. For us, those two elements, when we look at culture and we break it into parts and we break it into processes and say, what are we going to measure? Decision clarity and feedback are two things we’re working really hard on.

On the impact of remote work on diversity and inclusion:

It’s huge. Our diversity hires are up 30% since we went remote. Let’s say you’re a mother who wants to work, but you have two kids in school and you want to be able to take them to school and pick them up at school. But you still have time, you want to work during the day. If you had to drive 22 miles to come to our office, drive 22 miles back to school, you couldn’t work for us. And now you can. Our office was in the northern suburbs of Chicago and Chicago gets whiter and less diverse the farther north you go. So people from the south side didn’t come work for us.

Now the challenge we have—all these things come with challenges—is then you get them spread everywhere. So you’re like, well then what’s your opportunity to actually be able to get them to come back physically and have some connection and not be isolated? We’ve had seven talent centers around the country—do we ring fence it and say, look, you’ve got to live within 50 miles of one of our talent centers because it’s at least some place you can come or can we create pods? If we have two people in Des Moines, we’re not going to have 2,000 square feet of space for them. So it’s complicated, but there’s a real benefit to society.

Read a fuller transcript with Wilson’s comments , including discussion of productivity and the drawbacks of remote work. Watch the video of the session with Wilson, Lipman, and Delaney from the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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Reimagining the postpandemic workforce

As the pandemic begins to ease, many companies are planning a new combination of remote and on-site working, a hybrid virtual model in which some employees are on premises, while others work from home. The new model promises greater access to talent, increased productivity for individuals and small teams , lower costs, more individual flexibility, and improved employee experiences .

While these potential benefits are substantial, history shows that mixing virtual and on-site working might be a lot harder than it looks—despite its success during the pandemic. Consider how Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer ended that company’s remote-working experiment in 2013, observing that the company needed to become “one Yahoo!” again, or how HP Inc. did the same that year. Specific reasons may have varied. But in each case, the downsides of remote working at scale came to outweigh the positives.

These downsides arise from the organizational norms that underpin culture and performance— ways of working , as well as standards of behavior and interaction—that help create a common culture, generate social cohesion, and build shared trust. To lose sight of them during a significant shift to virtual-working arrangements is to risk an erosion over the long term of the very trust, cohesion, and shared culture that often helps remote working and virtual collaboration to be effective in the short term.

It also risks letting two organizational cultures emerge, dominated by the in-person workers and managers who continue to benefit from the positive elements of co-location and in-person collaboration, while culture and social cohesion for the virtual workforce languish. When this occurs, remote workers can soon feel isolated, disenfranchised, and unhappy, the victims of unintentional behavior in an organization that failed to build a coherent model of, and capabilities for, virtual and in-person work. The sense of belonging, common purpose, and shared identity that inspires all of us to do our best work gets lost. Organizational performance deteriorates accordingly.

Now is the time, as you reimagine the postpandemic organization , to pay careful attention to the effect of your choices on organizational norms and culture. Focus on the ties that bind your people together. Pay heed to core aspects of your own leadership and that of your broader group of leaders and managers. Your opportunity is to fashion the hybrid virtual model that best fits your company, and let it give birth to a new shared culture for all your employees that provides stability, social cohesion, identity, and belonging, whether your employees are working remotely, on premises, or in some combination of both.

Avoiding the pitfalls of remote working requires thinking carefully about leadership and management in a hybrid virtual world. Interactions between leaders and teams provide an essential locus for creating the social cohesion and the unified hybrid virtual culture that organizations need in the next normal.

Cutting the ties that bind

If you happen to believe that remote work is no threat to social ties, consider the experience of Skygear.io, a company that provides an open-source platform for app development. Several years ago, Skygear was looking to accommodate several new hires by shifting to a hybrid remote-work model for their 40-plus-person team. The company soon abandoned the idea. Team members who didn’t come to the office missed out on chances to strengthen their social ties through ad hoc team meals and discussions around interesting new tech launches. The wine and coffee tastings that built cohesion and trust had been lost. Similarly, GoNoodle employees found themselves at Zoom happy hour longing for the freshly remodeled offices they had left behind at lockdown. “We had this killer sound system,” one employee, an extrovert who yearns for time with her colleagues, told the New York Times . “You know—we’re drinking coffee, or maybe, ‘Hey, want to take a walk?’ I miss that.” 1 Clive Thompson, “What if working from home goes on … forever?,” New York Times , June 9, 2020, nytimes.com. Successful workplace cultures rely on these kinds of social interactions. That’s something Yahoo!’s Mayer recognized in 2013 when she said, “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together,” having the “interactions and experiences that are only possible” face-to-face, such as “hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” 2 Kara Swisher, “‘Physically together’: Here’s the internal Yahoo no-work-from-home memo for remote workers and maybe more,” All Things Digital, February 22, 2013, allthingsd.com.

Or consider how quickly two cultures emerged recently in one of the business units of a company we know. Within this business unit, one smaller group was widely distributed in Cape Town, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Paris, and other big cities. The larger group was concentrated in Chicago, with a shared office in the downtown area. When a new global leader arrived just prior to the pandemic, the leader based herself in Chicago and quickly bonded with the in-person group that worked alongside her in the office. As the pandemic began, but before everyone was sent home to work remotely, the new leader abruptly centralized operations into a crisis nerve center made up of everyone in the on-site group. The new arrangement persisted as remote working began. Meanwhile, the smaller group, which had already been remote working in other cities, quickly lost visibility into, and participation in, the new workflows and resources that had been centralized among the on-site group, even though that on-site group was now working virtually too. Newly created and highly sought-after assignments (which were part of the business unit’s crisis response) went to members of the formerly on-site group, while those in the distributed group found many of their areas of responsibility reduced or taken away entirely. Within a matter of months, key employees in the smaller, distributed group were unhappy and underperforming.

The new global leader, in her understandable rush to address the crisis, had failed to create a level playing field and instead (perhaps unintentionally) favored one set of employees over the other. For us, it was stunning to observe how quickly, in the right circumstances, everything could go wrong. Avoiding these pitfalls requires thinking carefully about leadership and management in a hybrid virtual world, and about how smaller teams respond to new arrangements for work. Interactions between leaders and teams provide an essential locus for creating the social cohesion and the unified hybrid virtual culture that organizations need in the next normal.

Choose your model

Addressing working norms, and their effect on culture and performance, requires making a basic decision: Which part of the hybrid virtual continuum (exhibit) is right for your organization? The decision rests on the factors for which you’re optimizing. Is it real-estate cost? Employee productivity? Access to talent? The employee experience? All of these are worthy goals, but in practice it can be difficult to optimize one without considering its effect on the others. Ultimately, you’re left with a difficult problem to solve—one with a number of simultaneous factors and that defies simple formulas.

That said, we can make general points that apply across the board. These observations, which keep a careful eye on the organizational norms and ways of working that inform culture and performance, address two primary factors: the type of work your employees tend to do and the physical spaces you need to support that work.

First let’s eliminate the extremes. We’d recommend a fully virtual model to very few companies, and those that choose this model would likely operate in specific industries such as outsourced call centers, customer service, contact telesales, publishing, PR, marketing, research and information services, IT, and software development, and under specific circumstances. Be cautious if you think better access to talent or lower real-estate cost—which the all-virtual model would seem to optimize—outweigh all other considerations. On the other hand, few companies would be better off choosing an entirely on-premises model, given that at least some of their workers need flexibility because of work–life or health constraints. That leaves most companies somewhere in the middle, with a hybrid mix of remote and on-site working.

The physical spaces needed for work—or not

Being in the middle means sorting out the percentage of your employees who are working remotely and how often they are doing so. Let’s say 80 percent of your employees work remotely but do so only one day per week. In the four days they are on premises, they are likely getting all the social interaction and connection needed for collaboration, serendipitous idea generation, innovation, and social cohesiveness. In this case, you might be fine with the partially remote, large headquarters (HQ) model in the exhibit.

If, instead, a third of your employees are working remotely but doing so 90 percent of the time, the challenges to social cohesion are more pronounced. The one-third of your workforce will miss out on social interaction with the two-thirds working on-premises—and the cohesion, coherence, and cultural belonging that comes with it. One solution would be to bring those remote workers into the office more frequently, in which case multiple hubs, or multiple microhubs (as seen in the exhibit), might be the better choice. Not only is it easier to travel to regional hubs than to a central HQ, at least for employees who don’t happen to live near that HQ, but more dispersed hubs make the in-person culture less monolithic. Moreover, microhubs can often be energizing, fun, and innovative places in which to collaborate and connect with colleagues, which further benefits organizational culture.

Productivity and speed

Now let’s begin to factor in other priorities, such as employee productivity. Here the question becomes less straightforward, and the answer will be unique to your circumstances. When tackling the question, be sure to go beyond the impulse to monitor inputs and activity as a proxy for productivity. Metrics focused on inputs or volume of activity have always been a poor substitute for the true productivity that boosts outcomes and results, no matter how soothing it might be to look at the company parking lot to see all the employees who have arrived early in the day, and all those who are leaving late. Applied to a hybrid model, counting inputs might leave you grasping at the number of hours that employees are spending in front of their computers and logged into your servers. Yet the small teams  that are the lifeblood of today’s organizational success thrive with empowering, less-controlling management styles. Better to define the outcomes you expect from your small teams rather than the specific activities or the time spent on them.

Would you like to learn more about our People & Organizational Performance Practice ?

In addition to giving teams clear objectives, and both the accountability and autonomy for delivering them, leaders need to guide, inspire, and enable small teams, helping them overcome bureaucratic challenges that bog them down, such as organizational silos and resource inertia—all while helping to direct teams to the best opportunities, arming them with the right expertise, and giving them the tools they need to move fast. Once teams and individuals understand what they are responsible for delivering, in terms of results, leaders should focus on monitoring the outcome-based measurements. When leaders focus on outcomes and outputs, virtual workers deliver higher-quality work.

In this regard, you can take comfort in Netflix (which at the time of this writing is the 32nd largest company in the world by market capitalization), which thrives without limiting paid time off or specifying how much “face time” workers must spend in the office. Netflix measures productivity by outcomes, not inputs—and you should do the same.

No matter which model you choose for hybrid virtual work, your essential task will be to carefully manage the organizational norms that matter most when adopting any of these models. Let’s dive more deeply into those now.

Managing the transition

Organizations thrive through a sense of belonging and shared purpose that can easily get lost when two cultures emerge. When this happens, our experience—and the experience at HP, IBM, and Yahoo!—is that the in-person culture comes to dominate, disenfranchising those who are working remotely. The difficulty arises through a thousand small occurrences: when teams mishandle conference calls such that remote workers feel overlooked, and when collaborators use on-site white boards rather than online collaboration tools such as Miro. But culture can split apart in bigger ways too, as when the pattern of promotions favors on-site employees or when on-premises workers get the more highly sought-after assignments.

Some things simply become more difficult when you are working remotely. Among them are acculturating new joiners; learning via hands-on coaching and apprenticeship; undertaking ambiguous, complex, and collaborative innovations; and fostering the creative collisions through which new ideas can emerge. Addressing these boils down to leadership and management styles, and how those styles and approaches support small teams. Team experience is a critical driver of hybrid virtual culture—and managers and team leaders have an outsize impact on their teams’ experiences.

Managers and leaders

As a rule, the more geographically dispersed the team, the less effective the leadership becomes. Moreover, leaders who were effective in primarily on-site working arrangements may not necessarily prove so in a hybrid virtual approach. Many leaders will now need to “show up” differently when they are interacting with some employees face-to-face and others virtually. By defining and embracing new behaviors that are observable to all, and by deliberately making space for virtual employees to engage in informal interactions, leaders can facilitate social cohesion and trust-building in their teams.

More inspirational. There’s a reason why military commanders tour the troops rather than send emails from headquarters—hierarchical leadership thrives in person. Tom Peters  used to call the in-person approach “management by walking around”: “Looking someone in the eye, shaking their hand, laughing with them when in their physical presence creates a very different kind of bond than can be achieved [virtually].” 3 See Tom Peters blog , “The heart of MBWA,” blog entry by Shelley Dolley, February 27, 2013, tompeters.com.

But when the workforce is hybrid virtual, leaders need to rely less on hierarchical and more on inspirational forms of leadership . The dispersed employees working remotely require new leadership behaviors to compensate for the reduced socioemotional cues characteristic of digital channels.

Cultivate informal interactions. Have you ever run into a colleague in the hallway and, by doing so, learned something you didn’t know? Informal interactions and unplanned encounters foster the unexpected cross-pollination of ideas—the exchange of tacit knowledge—that are essential to healthy, innovative organizations. Informal interactions provide a starting point for collegial relationships in which people collaborate on areas of shared interest, thereby bridging organizational silos and strengthening social networks and shared trust within your company.

Informal interactions, which occur more naturally among co-located employees, don’t come about as easily in a virtual environment. Leaders need new approaches to creating them as people work both remotely and on-site. One approach is to leave a part of the meeting agenda free, as a time for employees to discuss any topic. Leaders can also establish an open-door policy and hold virtual “fireside chats,” without any structured content at all, to create a forum for less formal interactions. The goal is for employees, those working remotely and in-person, to feel like they have access to leaders and to the kind of informal interactions that happen on the way to the company cafeteria.

Many leaders will now need to “show up” differently when they are interacting with some employees face-to-face and others virtually. By defining and embracing new behaviors that are observable to all, and by deliberately making space for virtual employees to engage in informal interactions—leaders can facilitate social cohesion and trust-building in their teams.

Further approaches include virtual coffee rooms and social events, as well as virtual conferences in which group and private chat rooms and sessions complement plenary presentations. In between time, make sure you and all your team members are sending text messages to one another and that you are texting your team regularly for informal check-ins. These norms cultivate the habit of connecting informally.

Role model the right stance. It might seem obvious, but research shows that leaders consistently fail to recognize how their actions affect and will be interpreted by others. 4 Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, “How to work for a boss who lacks self-awareness,” Harvard Business Review , April 3, 2018, hbr.org. Consider the location from which you choose to work. If you want to signal that you tolerate virtual work, come into the office every day and join meetings in-person with those who happen to be in the building. This will result in a cultural belief that the HQ or physical offices are the real centers of gravity, and that face time is what’s important.

Come into the office every day, though, and your remote-working employees may soon feel that their choice to work virtually leaves them fewer career opportunities, and that their capabilities and contributions are secondary. By working from home (or a non-office location) a couple days a week, leaders signal that people don’t need to be in the office to be productive or to get ahead. In a hybrid virtual world, seemingly trivial leadership decisions can have outsize effect on the rest of the organization.

Don’t rely solely on virtual interactions. By the same token, despite big technological advancements over the years, nothing can entirely replace face-to-face interactions. Why? In part because so much of communication is nonverbal (even if it’s not the 93 percent that some would assert), but also because so much communication involves equivocal, potentially contentious, or difficult-to-convey subject matter. Face-to-face interactions create significantly more opportunities for rich, informal interactions, emotional connection, and emergent “creative collision” that can be the lifeblood of trust, collaboration, innovation, and culture.

Media richness theory helps us understand the need to match the “richness” of the message with the capabilities of the medium. You wouldn’t let your nephew know of the death of his father by fax, for instance—you would do it in person, if at all possible, and, failing that, by the next richest medium, probably video call. Some communication simply proceeds better face-to-face, and it is up to the leader to match the mode of communication to the equivocality of the message they are delivering.

Reimagining the post-pandemic organization

In other cases, asynchronous communication—such as email and text—are sufficient, and even better, because it allows time for individuals to process information and compose responses after some reflection and thought. However, when developing trust (especially early on in a relationship) or discussing sensitive work-related issues, such as promotions, pay, and performance, face-to-face is preferred, followed by videoconferencing, which, compared with audio, improves the ability for participants to show understanding, anticipate responses, provide nonverbal information, enhance verbal descriptions, manage pauses, and express attitudes. However, compared with face-to-face interaction, it can be difficult in video interactions to notice peripheral cues, control the floor, have side conversations, and point to or manipulate real-world objects.

Whatever the exact mix of communication you choose in a given moment, you will want to convene everyone in person at least one or two times a year, even if the work a particular team is doing can technically be done entirely virtually. In person is where trust-based relationships develop and deepen, and where serendipitous conversations and connections can occur.

Track your informal networks. Corporate organizations consist of multiple, overlapping, and intersecting social networks. As these informal networks widen and deepen, they mobilize talent and knowledge across the enterprise, facilitating and informing cultural cohesiveness while helping to support cross-silo collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Because the hybrid virtual model reduces face-to-face interaction and the serendipitous encounters that occur between people with weak ties , social networks can lose their strength. To counter that risk, leaders should map and monitor the informal networks  in their organization with semiannual refreshes of social-network maps. Approaches include identifying the functions or activities where connectivity seems most relevant and then mapping relationships within those priority areas—and then tracking the changes in those relationships over time. Options for obtaining the necessary information include tracking email, observing employees, using existing data (such as time cards and project charge codes), and administering short (five- to 20-minute) questionnaires. It is likely that leaders will need to intervene and create connections between groups that do not naturally interact or that now interact less frequently as a result of the hybrid virtual model.

Hybrid virtual teams

Leadership is crucial, but in the hybrid virtual model, teams (and networks of teams ) also need to adopt new norms and change the way they work if they are to maintain—and improve—productivity, collaboration, and innovation. This means gathering information, devising solutions, putting new approaches into practice, and refining outcomes—and doing it all fast. The difficulty rises when the team is part virtual and part on-site. What follows are specific areas on which to focus.

Create ‘safe’ spaces to learn from mistakes and voice requests

Psychological safety matters in the workplace, obviously, and in a hybrid virtual model it requires more attention. First, because a feeling of safety can be harder to create with some people working on-site and others working remotely. And, second, because it’s often less obvious when safety erodes. Safety arises as organizations purposefully create a culture in which employees feel comfortable making mistakes, speaking up, and generating innovative ideas. Safety also requires helping employees feel supported when they request flexible operating approaches to accommodate personal needs.

Mind the time-zone gaps

The experience of a hybrid virtual team in the same time zone varies significantly from a hybrid virtual team with members in multiple time zones. Among other ills, unmanaged time-zone differences make sequencing workflows more difficult. When people work in different time zones, the default tends toward asynchronous communications (email) and a loss of real-time connectivity. Equally dysfunctional is asking or expecting team members to wake up early or stay up late for team meetings. It can work for a short period of time, but in the medium and longer run it reduces the cohesion that develops through real-time collaboration. (It also forces some team members to work when they’re tired and not at their best.) Moreover, if there is a smaller subgroup on the team in, say, Asia, while the rest are in North America, a two-culture problem can emerge, with the virtual group feeling lesser than. Better to simply build teams with at least four hours of overlap during the traditional workday to ensure time for collaboration.

Keep teams together, when possible, and hone the art of team kickoffs

Established teams, those that have been working together for longer periods of time, are more productive than newer teams that are still forming and storming. The productivity they enjoy arises from clear norms and trust-based relationships—not to mention familiarity with workflows and routines. That said, new blood often energizes a team.

In an entirely on-premises model, chances are you would swap people in and out of your small teams more frequently. The pace at which you do so will likely decline in a hybrid virtual model, in which working norms and team cohesion are more at risk. But don’t take it to an extreme. Teams need members with the appropriate expertise and backgrounds, and the right mix of those tends to evolve over time.

Meanwhile, pay close attention to team kickoffs as you add new people to teams or stand up new ones. Kickoffs should include an opportunity to align the overall goals of the team with those of team members while clarifying personal working preferences.

Keeping track

Once you have your transition to a hybrid virtual model underway, how will you know if it’s working, and whether you maintained or enhanced your organization’s performance culture? Did your access to talent increase, and are you attracting and inspiring top talent? Are you developing and deploying strong leaders? To what extent are all your employees engaged in driving performance and innovation, gathering insights, and sharing knowledge?

The right metrics will depend on your goals, of course. Be wary of trying to achieve across all parameters, though. McKinsey research  shows that winning performance cultures emerge from carefully selecting the right combinations of practices (or “recipes”) that, when applied together, create superior organizational performance. Tracking results against these combinations of practices can help indicate, over time, if you’ve managed to keep your unified performance culture intact in the transition to a new hybrid virtual model.

We’ll close by saying you don’t have to make all the decisions about your hybrid virtual model up front and in advance. See what happens. See where your best talent emerges. If you end up finding, say, 30 (or 300) employees clustered around Jakarta, and other groups in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, ask them what might help them feel a socially supported sense of belonging. To the extent that in-person interactions are important—as we guess they will be—perhaps consider a microhub in one of those cities, if you don’t have one already.

Approached in the right way, the new hybrid model can help you make the most of talent wherever it resides, while lowering costs and making your organization’s performance culture even stronger than before.

Andrea Alexander is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Houston office, where Aaron De Smet is a senior partner and Mihir Mysore is a partner.

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How does working from home affect developer productivity? — A case study of Baidu during the COVID-19 pandemic

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• Published: 14 March 2022
• Volume 65 , article number  142102 , ( 2022 )

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• Lingfeng Bao 1 ,
• Xin Xia 3 ,
• Kaiyu Zhu 2 ,
• Hui Li 2 &
• Xiaohu Yang 1  

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Nowadays, working from home (WFH) has become a popular work arrangement due to its many potential benefits for both companies and employees (e.g., increasing job satisfaction and retention of employees). Many previous studies have investigated the impact of WFH on the productivity of employees. However, most of these studies usually use a qualitative analysis method such as surveys and interviews, and the studied participants do not work from home for a long continuing time. Due to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a large number of companies asked their employees to work from home, which provides us an opportunity to investigate whether WFH affects their productivity. In this study, to investigate the difference in developer productivity between WFH and working onsite, we conduct a quantitative analysis based on a dataset of developers’ daily activities from Baidu Inc., one of the largest IT companies in China. In total, we collected approximately four thousand records of 139 developers’ activities of 138 working days. Out of these records, 1103 records are submitted when developers work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that WFH has both positive and negative impacts on developer productivity in terms of different metrics, e.g., the number of builds/commits/code reviews. We also notice that WFH has different impacts on projects with different characteristics including programming language, project type/age/size. For example, WFH has a negative impact on developer productivity for large projects. Additionally, we find that productivity varies for different developers. Based on these findings, we get some feedback from developers of Baidu and understand some reasons why WFH has different impacts on developer productivity. We also conclude several implications for both companies and developers.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB1003904), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U20A20173, 61902344), and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. LY21F020011).

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Bao, L., Li, T., Xia, X. et al. How does working from home affect developer productivity? — A case study of Baidu during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 65 , 142102 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3278-4

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3278-4

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A 2-Year Stanford Study Shows the Astonishing Productivity Boost of Working From Home

The jury was out on the productivity effect of working from home. it has returned with a surprising verdict..

There has been much debate about working from home and whether or not it's a productivity boost or major productivity drain . Paranoid managers envision employees lying on their couches at home in Metallica concert T-shirts eating Doritos off their belly and watching Ellen .

But Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom has definitive data that paints a very different picture and indicates it's time once and for all to embrace and enable the benefits of working from home.

Bloom found a willing lab rat for a ground-breaking experiment in his graduate economics class at Stanford--James Liang, co-founder and CEO of Ctrip, China's largest travel agency, with 16,000 employees. The CEO was interested in giving employees the work-from-home option because office space in the company's Shanghai HQ is supremely expensive and because employees had to endure long commutes to work (not being able to afford city living). The result was horrendous attrition.

So Liang wanted to make the work-from-home move but needed proof it wouldn't tank productivity.

Enter Bloom, who helped design a test whereby 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions).

You can watch Bloom describe the study and the findings in his 2017 TEDx talk below.

Bloom expected the positives and negatives to offset each other. But he was wrong.

Instead, the robust, nearly two-year study showed an astounding productivity boost among the telecommuters equivalent to a full day's work . Turns out work-from-home employees work a true full-shift (or more) versus being late to the office or leaving early multiple times a week and found it less distracting and easier to concentrate at home.  

Additionally (and incredibly), employee attrition decreased by 50 percent among the telecommuters, they took shorter breaks, had fewer sick days, and took less time off. Not to mention the reduced carbon emissions from fewer autos clogging up the morning commute.

Oh, and by the way, the company saved almost $2,000 per employee on rent by reducing the amount of HQ office space.

One surprising finding did put a cautionary veneer over going all in on work-from-home, however. More than half the volunteer group changed their minds about working from home 100 percent of the time--they felt too much isolation. 

The research comes with a valuable recommendation.  

The sum total of the research led Bloom to recommend going for it with work from home but enabling it just a few days a week versus its being a constant.

I think Bloom is right on with his recommendation. Here's why.

I switched from a corporate, office-driven environment to the work-from-home life (except when I'm keynoting) of an author, speaker, and coach.

I feel I'm consistently at the most productive I've ever been in my entire life. My morning commute is a seven-second walk to my study and I actually start working far earlier than I did in the corporate world.

While I make it a point to not work any later than I did at a corporate office, I'm working more deeply with far fewer breaks in concentration. I quite often "get on a roll" that lasts four-plus hours at a time. I can't remember the last such streak working in an office.

I'm able to be so intense and productive that on most days I intentionally break my day up with exercise, which refreshes me and recharges me for another "burst" in the back half of the day. I was never able to do this in a corporate office setting.

I've written before about the one downside of working from home day in and day out --it can be lonely. I can absolutely see how it could impact team cohesion. So Bloom's recommendation to dive in but keep an eye toward maintaining face-to-face contact and cohesion makes a lot of sense.

The nature of every job does not necessarily lend itself perfectly to working from home, even a few days a week. The bigger thought here is that it's time to erase the stigma about telecommuting in general.

It's time for working from home to formally find a home in your company's portfolio of engagement tools.

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

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Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?

Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..

• By Rebecca Stropoli
• August 18, 2021
• CBR - Economics
• Share This Page

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t your typical office worker. He was No. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. But there’s at least one thing Zuckerberg has in common with many other workers: he seems to like working from home. In an internal memo, which made its way to the Wall Street Journal , as Facebook announced plans to offer increased flexibility to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he would work remotely for at least half the year.

“Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” Zuckerberg wrote. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebook’s employees to be fully remote within the next decade.

The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage in many countries, and variants are complicating the picture, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, people are desperate for life to return to normal—everywhere but the office. After more than a year at home, some employees are keen to return to their workplaces and colleagues. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Somewhere between their bedrooms and kitchens, they have established new models of work-life balance they are loath to give up.

This has left some companies trying to recreate their work policies, determining how best to handle a workforce that in many cases is demanding more flexibility. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Goldman’s CEO David Solomon, in February, called working from home an “aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.” And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said of exclusively remote work: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”

This pivotal feature of pandemic life has accelerated a long-running debate: What do employers and employees lose and gain through remote work? In which setting—the office or the home—are employees more productive? Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. But this giant, forced experiment has only just begun.

An accelerated debate

A persistent sticking point in this debate has been productivity. Back in 2001, a group of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, led by Robert E. Kraut , wrote that “collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than collaboration when members of a work group are collocated.” Two decades later, this statement remains part of today’s discussion.

However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that “dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration.” For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.

Two decades later, remote-work technology is far more developed. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that, even in pre-pandemic 2019, more than 26 million Americans—approximately 16 percent of the total US workforce—worked remotely on an average day. The Pew Research Center put that pre-pandemic number at 20 percent, and in December 2020 reported that 71 percent of workers whose responsibilities allowed them to work from home were doing so all or most of the time.

The sentiment toward and effectiveness of remote work depend on the industry involved. It makes sense that executives working in and promoting social media are comfortable connecting with others online, while those in industries in which deals are typically closed with handshakes in a conference room, or over drinks at dinner, don’t necessarily feel the same. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a person’s line of work.

The productivity paradigm

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom  was bullish on work-from-home trends. His 2015 study, for one—with James Liang , John Roberts , and Zhichun Jenny Ying , all then at Stanford—finds a 13 percent increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency.

But in the early days of the pandemic, Bloom was less optimistic about remote work. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom told a Stanford publication in March 2020. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”

To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barrero  of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis  launched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 20–64 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019.

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.

The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com .

In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7 percent higher than they expected. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy.

“Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted,” Bloom says.

No commute, and fewer hours worked

Some workers arguing in favor of flexibility might say they’re more efficient at home away from chatty colleagues and the other distractions of an office, and that may be true. But above all, the increased productivity comes from saving transit time, an effect overlooked by standard productivity calculations. “Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time,” Davis says. Eliminate commuting as a factor, and the researchers project only a 1 percent productivity boost in the postpandemic work-from-home environment, as compared with before.

It makes sense that standard statistics miss the impact of commutes, Davis explains. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesn’t shift significantly in the aggregate. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity.

Before the pandemic, US workers were commuting an average of 54 minutes daily, according to Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. In the aggregate, the researchers say, the pandemic-induced shift to remote work meant 62.5 million fewer commuting hours per workday.

People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.

Infographic: People want working from home to stick after the pandemic subsides

With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero  of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom , and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis . The researchers launched a survey of US workers, starting in May 2020 and continuing in waves for more than a year since, to capture a range of information including workers’ attitudes about their new remote arrangements.

Read more >>

Aside from commuting less, remote workers may also be sleeping more efficiently, another phenomenon that could feed into productivity. On days they worked remotely, people rose about 30 minutes later than on-site workers did, according to pre-pandemic research by Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia  of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and SUNY Empire’s Victoria Vernon . Both groups worked the same number of hours and slept about the same amount each night, so it’s most likely that “working from home permits a more comfortable personal sleep schedule,” says Vernon. “Teleworkers who spend less time commuting may be happier and less tired, and therefore more productive,” write the researchers, who analyzed BLS data from 2017 to 2018.

While remote employees gained back commuting time during the pandemic, they also worked fewer hours, note Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. Hours on the job averaged about 32 per week, compared with 36 pre-pandemic, although the work time stretched past traditional office hours. “Respondents may devote a few more minutes in the morning to chores and childcare, while still devoting about a third of their old commuting time slot to their primary job. At the end of the day, they might end somewhat early and turn on the TV. They might interrupt TV time to respond to a late afternoon or early evening work request,” the researchers explain.

This interpretation, they write, is consistent with media reports that employees worked longer hours from home during the pandemic but with the added flexibility to interrupt the working day. Yet, according to the survey, this does not have a negative overall effect on productivity, contradicting one outdated stereotype of a remote worker eating bonbons, watching TV, and getting no work done.

Remote-work technology goes mainstream

The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. This technology will boost work-from-home productivity by 46 percent by the end of the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic situation, according to a model developed by Rutgers’s Morris A. Davis , University of North Carolina’s Andra C. Ghent , and University of Wisconsin’s Jesse M. Gregory . “While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption,” the researchers note.

There are significant costs to leaving the office, Rutgers’s Davis says, pointing to the loss of face-to-face interaction, among other things. “Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always,” he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast.

One reason, he says , has to do with the function of cities as business centers. “Cities exist because, we think, the crowding of employment makes everyone more productive,” he explains. “This idea also applies to firms: a firm puts all workers on the same floor of a building, or all in the same suite rather than spread throughout a building, for reasons of efficiency. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes.” While some employees are more productive at home, that’s not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration “implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic,” he says.

How remote work could change city centers

What will happen to urban business districts and the cities in which they are located in the age of increasing remote work?

About three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to need less office space in the future, according to a May 2021 poll. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.

And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregory’s model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. While physical proximity may be superior, working from home is far more productive than it used to be. Had the pandemic hit in 1990, it would not have produced this rise in relative productivity, per the researchers’ model, because the technology available at the time was not sufficient to support remote work.

A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Citing the 5.4 percent increase in US labor productivity in the first quarter of 2021, as reported by the BLS, the researchers attribute at least some of this to the rise of work-from-home technologies. The pandemic, they write, has “compressed a decade’s worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year.” The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue.

Lost ideas, longer hours?

Not all the research supports the idea that remote work increases productivity and decreases the number of hours workers spend on the job. Chicago Booth’s Michael Gibbs  and University of Essex’s Friederike Mengel  and Christoph Siemroth  find contradictory evidence from a study of 10,000 high-skilled workers at a large Asian IT-services company.

The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.

Total hours worked during that time increased by approximately 30 percent, including an 18 percent rise in working beyond normal business hours, the researchers find. At the same time, however, average output—as measured by the company through setting work goals and tracking progress toward them—declined slightly. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings also increased, while uninterrupted work hours shrank. Additionally, employees spent less time networking and had fewer one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, find the researchers, adding that the increase in hours worked and the decline in productivity were more significant for employees with children at home. Weighing output against hours worked, the researchers conclude that productivity decreased by about 20 percent. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. “Of course, that time was spent in productive work instead of sitting in traffic, which is beneficial,” they acknowledge.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules.

Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? It could take more data to answer this question. “I suspect that a high fraction of employees of all types, across the globe, value the flexibility, lack of a commute, and other aspects of work from home. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity,” says Gibbs.

The findings of his research do not entirely contradict those of Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, however. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesn’t necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. “While the average effect of working from home on productivity is negative in our study, this does not rule out that a ‘targeted working from home’ regime might be desirable,” they write.

Additionally, the research data are derived from a single company and may not be representative of the wider economy, although Gibbs notes that the IT company is one that should be able to optimize remote work. Most employees worked on company laptops, “and IT-related industries and occupations are usually at the top of lists of those areas most likely to be able to do WFH effectively.” Thus, he says, the findings may represent a cautionary note that remote work has costs and complexities worth addressing.

As he, Mengel, and Siemroth write, some predictions of work-from-home success may be overly optimistic, “perhaps because professionals engage in many tasks that require collaboration, communication, and innovation, which are more difficult to achieve with virtual, scheduled interactions.”

Attracting top talent

The focus on IT employees’ productivity, however, excludes issues such as worker morale and retention, Booth’s Davis notes. More generally, “the producer has to attract workers . . . and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, they’re going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.”

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. The data from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis reveal that some workers are willing to take a sizable pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely two or three days a week. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman—who said at the company’s US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”—a bit less bite. Meanwhile, Duke PhD student John W. Barry , Cornell’s Murillo Campello , Duke’s John R. Graham , and Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma  find that companies offering flexibility are the ones most poised to grow.

Working policies may be shaped by employees’ preferences. Some workers still prefer working from the office; others prefer to stay working remotely; many would opt for a hybrid model, with some days in the office and some at home (as Amazon and other companies have introduced). As countries emerge from the pandemic and employers recalibrate, companies could bring back some employees and allow others to work from home. This should ultimately boost productivity, Booth’s Davis says.

Or they could allow some to work from far-flung locales. Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury  has long focused his research on working not just from home but “from anywhere.” This goes beyond the idea of employees working from their living room in the same city in which their company is located—instead, if they want to live across the country, or even in another country, they can do so without any concern about being near headquarters.

Does remote work promote equity?

At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and women—but only to a point.

“In my mind, there’s no question that it has to be a plus, on net,” says Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Before the pandemic, many women deemphasized their careers when they started families, she says.

Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi  and Northeastern University’s Barbara Larson  analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime.

“Work from anywhere offers workers geographic flexibility and can help workers relocate to their preferred locations,” Choudhury says. “Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers.”

He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. “In addition to benefits to workers and organizations, WFA might also help reverse talent flows from smaller towns to larger cities and from emerging markets,” he says. “This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.”

More data to come

It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. People who were sent home to work because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more motivated than before to prove they were essential, says Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist. Additionally, there were fewer distractions from the outside because of the broad shutdowns. “The world helped them stay motivated,” she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would.

Before the pandemic, workers who already knew they performed better in a remote-working lifestyle self-selected into it, if allowed. During the pandemic, shutdowns forced remote work on millions. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. “The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still don’t have great data,” Fishbach says.

Adding to the less optimistic view of a work-from-home future, Booth’s Austan D. Goolsbee says that some long-term trends may challenge remote work. Since the 1980s, as the largest companies have gained market power, corporate profits have risen dramatically while the share of profits going to workers has dropped to record lows. “This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time,” he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. Companies may try to claw back time from those who are remote, he says, by expecting employees to work for longer hours or during their off hours.

And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men).

Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. “Managers may specify that the entire team meets in person every Monday morning, for example,” he says. “R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.”

Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. Japanese workers are reportedly still mostly opting to go to the office, even as the government promotes remote work. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. While only about 28 percent of US office workers were back onsite by June 2021, employees who had become used to more flexibility were demanding it remain. A May survey of 1,000 workers by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News finds that about half of millennial and Gen Z workers, and two-fifths of all workers, would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about work-from-home policies. And additional research from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis finds that four in 10 Americans who currently work from home at least one day a week would look for another job if their employers told them to come back to the office full time. Additionally, most employees would look favorably upon a new job that offered the same pay as their current job along with the option to work from home two to three days a week.

The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. A study by Chicago Booth’s Jonathan Dingel  and Brent Neiman  finds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. Of these jobs, the majority—including many in engineering, computing, law, and finance—pay more than those that cannot be done at home, such as food service, construction, and building-maintenance jobs.

Barrero, Bloom, and Davis project that, postpandemic, Americans overall will work approximately 20 percent of full workdays from home, four times the pre-pandemic level. This would make remote work less an aberration than a new norm. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings.

Works Cited

• Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis,  “Why Working from Home Will Stick,”  Working paper, April 2021.
• ———,  “60 Million Fewer Commuting Hours per Day: How Americans Use Time Saved by Working from Home,” Working paper, September 2020.
• ———,  “Let Me Work From Home Or I Will Find Another Job,”  Working paper, July 2021.
• John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham, and Yueran Ma,  “Corporate Flexibility in a Time of Crisis,”  Working paper, February 2021.
• Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying,  “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,”   Quarterly Journal of Economics , October 2015.
• Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson,  “Work-from-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographic Flexibility,”   Strategic Management Journal , forthcoming.
• Morris A. Davis, Andra C. Ghent, and Jesse M. Gregory,  “The Work-at-Home Technology Boon and Its Consequences,”  Working paper, April 2021. 
• Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman,  “How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?”  White paper, June 2020.
• Allison Dunatchik, Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, Jerry A. Jacobs, and Haley Stritzel,  “Gender, Parenting, and the Rise of Remote Work during the Pandemic: Implications for Domestic Inequality in the United States,”   Gender & Society , March 2021.
• Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth,  “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals,”  Working paper, May 2021.
• Robert E. Kraut, Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan, and Jane Siegel, “Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work,” in  Distributed Work , eds. Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
• Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Victoria Vernon,  “Telework and Time Use in the United States,”  Working paper, May 2020.

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WFH Case Study: A Closer Look At Working Remote

By: amanda young.

Work From Home Case Study:  50% of the US workforce is employed with a job that is compatible with at least partial telework. 

80% to 90% of the US workforce says they would like to work remotely at least part time (2-3 days a week).

Fortune 1000 companies around the globe are entirely reinventing their workspace around the fact that employees are already working remotely. studies have shown that these employees are not at their desk 50-60% of the time..

Moving a company to work completely remote is financially and mentally unburdening. Here are the pros and cons of ditching an HQ:

Pros: Work From Home

• Increased productivity
• Flexible hours
• Time saving
• Money saving
• Increased talent pool

Con: Work From Home

• Less collaboration
• Harder to climb the company ladder
• Cyber security  
• Possible communication difficulties
• Lack of discipline

Some amazing companies at scale with no HQ: 

Automattic .

At Automattic employees get to pick their place of work.  In fact, the company is spread out across 70 countries.  To give employees a chance to meet in person, Automattic holds an event for a whole week for employees to meet up. This meeting lets employees meet in their teams to brainstorm and bond. Automattic provides employees parental leave, career coaching, an open vacation policy, paid-for home office setup, wellness opportunities, and other perks. 

GitLab in San Francisco 

GitLab hires employees all over the world rather than hire employees to work all from one location. 

For the past 10 years, Clevertech has been allowing employees to work from anywhere in the world. Clevertech works to make their employees feel like they have a purpose while also encouraging employees to meet one unifying goal. Clevertech believes in flexible work spaces; flexible work time; not judging employees on how long it takes to do something, but rather the actual results; and building a strong international community.

43% of remote workers feel that it is important to work for a company where all employees are remote

38% of remote workers saw lack of commute as a top benefit, with that time instead spent with family (43%), working (35%), resting (36%), and exercising (34%)

86% of respondents believe remote work is the future

52% of remote workers believed they have increased their productivity and 48% believe that they have increased efficiency. 

Chris has led brand campaigns across creative and technical landscapes for British Telecommunications & Toni & Guy.

He’s helped build creative agencies from the ground up with to his universal design acumen and ability to manage creative talent!

At J. Arthur & Co, he is a key pillar to our team due to his innate ability to connect brand vision with user interface/experience concepts, finished with stellar execution.

When things need to happen behind the scenes — He’s our guy.

Having started his career in finance, Tom has been working in Ecom going on 5 years now.

Although he changed industries, he really values his time in finance picking up a lot of valuable and transferable skills.

Tom’s passion is the customers and the relationships he’s built with them over the years.

He’s been extremely effective for us in balancing many tasks, strategic planning, logistics management and always coming up with ways to thrill customers.

Having studied Music Production & Music Business at Point Blank Music School in London, when he’s not working hard, Tom runs a small record label with a group friends.

“Be it expediting orders, overseeing our ambassadors program, or assisting with marketing needs, I’m a jack of all trades (master of none).

My ethos has always been to keep things fun & light hearted, but professional at the heart of it.

You’ll even sometimes catch me in the gym…

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

What’s up guys, I’m Jeff and I started this shop in 2014 out of my bedroom.

I had moved into an apt with a buddy, lived on $200/mo rent and got going.

You had to walk through my room to get to the kitchen and that room became sort of a hybrid br/office.

It took me a couple failed ideas before gaining traction with J. Arthur and for a period of almost two years I slept on a couch to get the company off the ground.

First in that room and then the back of our first (real) office. Both times a couch.

I love delivering results for clients, working with our team here and growing this co (obviously), which now has a humble but global base of both team and customers.

We have just barely started and I know the sky is the limit.

Admittedly I don’t have that many hobbies, But I enjoy all types of physical training and you can usually catch me doing things like: expounding on the pitfalls of fractional reserve banking, discussing the standards of American liberty, or eating unreasonable quantities of food.

I also like to read.

Love spending time with family.

Thanks to Lensa for tightening up my hairline in exchange for my facial dna in some Orwellian database 🙂

Jo has worked in the advertising and design industry since 2015 and has over 8 years of experience with visual communication and design.

Product is her passion with a deep focus in sportswear design and creative direction.

Her key expertise combines many years in both retail and manufacturing with a proactive vision of creating new products and driving them successfully to market.

“I believe in keeping things simple, having honest intentions, and making things fun. Working in an ego-less manner, I bring my whole self to every project, always aiming to exceed expectations and create work that is well thought through and commercially compelling.”

And exceeding expectations she does. We’re very lucky to have Jo’s rare combination of marketing creative, outstanding product design, ambitious strategy and true dedication to her craft.

In Joanna’s free time her hobbies include yoga & aerial fitness, functional training at the gym and occasionally snowboarding.

You can catch much more of her branding magic at @physiqapparel 💪

Aish graduated with a bachelor of engineering in computer science, freelancing for several years before joining J. Arthur as a Junior Web Developer. She’s now been with the company for 3 years.

Aish has the intangible qualities that make a fantastic developer: the desire for continual learning, a “whatever it takes” mentality, and an intense focus on the (ever-changing) task at hand.

She meets every obstacle with optimism and has grown to become a core member of our team who we’re all grateful to work alongside everyday.

In her off time she likes to get outside and go for a much needed walk. She also loves reading books + daily news to learn something new every day. And of course, watching movies 🍿

Shortly after getting a marketing degree from Clemson University, Denton amassed a large following on Twitter after creating several viral, funny tweets that touched on everything from pop culture to music and sports 📲

Realizing he had a knack for creative writing and social media, he decided to continue developing his talents even further.

As a content manager at J. Arthur, he’s has been able to show off his creativity and bring unique ideas to the table.

He’s currently based in Raleigh, NC with his fiancé and their two cats (Nova & Bean).

In his free time you’ll find him playing tennis, listening to music, or knee deep in a good book.

We appreciate his creative adaptability, consistency & steadfast commitment to deliver success on every account.

Dhan is a multidisciplinary solution architect who helps people translate ideas from words and visuals into prototypes and applications, using code that helps organizations address business challenges.

He motivates people to think positively through the power of technology by helping solve a large number of critical situations quickly.

Having been involved in both collaborative and independently-driven roles, he is a forward-thinking leader with refined analytical and critical thinking skills, with deep experience in translating business priorities to IT roadmaps and fine-tuned IT Operating models.

In his spare time, he enjoys traveling playing (and building) video games, watching movies and listening to music.

Dhan is responsible for making our critical IT and technology decisions and has been with J. Arthur for 5 years and we greatly value his leadership.

He’s a grandmaster in complex problem solving, rapid analysis and delivery, high level infrastructure planning, and full stack engineering.

His character is proven time and again by always working in our clients best interests and never failing to deliver a solution to even the most brain busting and urgent issues, with a coolness and poise to be admired 🙌

He studied Computer Science in Brazil before coming to the States four years ago and now works out of our Newport office.

If you’re a J. Arthur client you’ve probably been in contact before, as he works directly with the team and clients to bring projects to completion.

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Paulo is responsible for tracking an often high paced workflow between project management, design, development and vendors to ensure successful delivery to customers.

We admire his patience, agile ability to learn new skills, and laser focused commitment to problem solving 👏

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What keeps her motivated throughout the day? A combination of matcha lattes, espresso, and Liquid IV (often consuming all of them at the same time).

Outside of work, Hannah likes to unwind with yoga, check out local coffee shops, and spend time outside in the sunshine.

We value her outstanding communication, marketing savvy, ability to bring positivity to every situation and too many other traits to list 🙌

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3 Reasons Why Working From Home Isn’t as Easy as It Looks

In reality, the work-from-home life isn't as dreamy as it looks. here's why..

Updated July 22, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

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• Working from home offers freedom and autonomy that many employees crave.
• However, working from home also comes with some hidden drawbacks.
• Remote employees may struggle with blurred boundaries, feelings of isolation, and sleep problems.

Imagine a life where you reclaim your time, working hard yet stress -free in your own space. At home, you can meditate or exercise without the hassle of commuting, enjoy great coffee whenever you like, and have healthy lunches and snacks at your fingertips. No more dealing with uncomfortable office temperatures or poor lighting.

The stress of a corporate open office setup fades away, and you no longer wake up before dawn to sit in traffic for hours, nor do you spend your evenings stuck in the same gridlock.

Expensive, unsatisfying lunches and fake office niceties have become things of the past. Instead, you find yourself healthier and happier, with more time to spend with your spouse and children. While this scenario sounds quite appealing to some, others living the same reality may disagree.

The shift to remote work, initially welcomed with enthusiasm during the pandemic, has significantly transformed the way people perceive work. While remote work offers numerous benefits, it also conceals drawbacks that can affect people’s well-being and productivity .

1. Blurring Work-Life Boundaries

Working from home offers incredible flexibility, allowing individuals to set their schedules and work from any environment. This flexibility is particularly beneficial for parents, enabling them to structure their work around family needs. However, this same flexibility can blur work-life boundaries , creating challenges in maintaining a clear separation between professional and personal life.

For instance, without defined work hours, employees may find themselves working longer than intended. Distractions at home can interrupt work, stretching a 6-hour task into a 12-hour ordeal. Over time, this lack of clear boundaries can lead to decreased productivity and burnout .

A 2022 study investigated the long-term effects of working from home during various phases of the pandemic and identified three primary challenges people faced in maintaining boundaries within their homes:

• Time and place: There was difficulty in separating work hours from personal time and workspaces from living spaces.
• Care and housework: The overlap between professional responsibilities and domestic duties, including caregiving , proved to be challenging.
• Emotional, social, spiritual , and aesthetic labor: Remote work folds emotional, social, spiritual, and aesthetic labor into home life, leading to blurred boundaries and increased stress. Imagine a scenario where you have gotten half-ready for a Zoom call, with your toddler screaming for lunch, a friend crashing at your place for the weekend, and your to-do and self-care lists hanging over your head like a guillotine. This is what a bad work-from-home day can look like.

Women, in particular, reported higher levels of integration between professional work and domestic responsibilities, such as caregiving and housework.

One mother said, “I work on my laptop either on the couch or at the dining table…Our home office is used by my husband. When the kindergartens closed in the spring, and the children were at home, I worked in the sauna as it was the quietest place in the house.”

2. Social Isolation and Loneliness

“Perhaps empathy diminishes a little when people don’t meet and are just distant faces on the screen. You can’t see the reactions of others and have become more ‘business-oriented,’” said another participant.

Remote work can be a lonely experience, lacking social interactions inherent in an office environment. Office settings offer opportunities for casual conversations, team-building activities, and after-work socializing, which are essential for building a sense of community and belonging. For individuals living alone or those who are introverted, the isolation of remote work can be particularly challenging over a long time.

“The cheering up of coworkers has diminished as I find myself working a lot in my bubble. In the office, I circulated to say hi and got people smiling. I also spontaneously praised others. In telework, spontaneous expression of emotions is clearly more difficult, but not completely forgotten,” said one participant.

A 2023 survey conducted by Buffer asked participants about their experiences of remote work. While over 90 percent of respondents expressed a positive attitude towards remote work in terms of flexibility and autonomy, 23 percent indicated that it is a lonely experience. A February 2023 study published in Personality and Individual Differences and other research also highlights the absence of a social environment and the feeling of loneliness experienced by remote workers.

Another study suggested that employees who experienced high levels of loneliness related to their work reported higher levels of emotional exhaustion, poorer work-life balance, increased minor counterproductive work behaviors, depression , and insomnia . Loneliness can exacerbate feelings of isolation and stress, leading to adverse outcomes.

3. Impaired Sleep Schedule

The flexibility of remote work can disrupt sleep patterns. Employees may work late into the night to meet deadlines or handle unexpected tasks, leading to irregular sleep schedules. Poor sleep, as we now know quite well, can have severe consequences on physical and mental health—impaired cognitive function, weakened immune system, and increased risk of chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.

In one study , researchers were surprised to find that remote health workers were more likely to develop insomnia than those providing in-person care during the pandemic, with women and older workers being at higher risk.

This was likely due to the added pressures of childcare and overseeing online education while working from home, which contributed to worse sleep for health workers with children. Additionally, changes in work schedules, reduced exposure to sunlight, and prolonged psychological stress were identified as potential factors disrupting sleep.

“It’s the reason why everyone is walking around in a fatigued state. Our circadian system is dysregulated, we’re not getting enough light during the day, and then add in all the psychological stressors,” explained the researchers.

While the allure of remote work lies in its promise of flexibility and autonomy, it’s essential to acknowledge and address the hidden challenges that can undermine these benefits. Diving into a remote working arrangement without mentally and logistically preparing yourself can have a direct impact on your physical and emotional well-being.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com.

Mark Travers, Ph.D., is an American psychologist with degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder.

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6 work from home office essentials you need in 2024.

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Remote work is more than just a laptop and a seat; you need to create a welcoming space in which you ... [+] feel most energized and productive while at home

There's a science to working from home.

There's more to remote work than your company-provided laptop, work phone, and a sofa or dining chair.

To work effectively and perform your best in your remote job, you need to surround yourself with the right environment.

The good news is that you don't even need a massive room to have the perfect home office space. You can implement some of the below ideas with a small space. And the items don't need to cost you a fortune either, but they will significantly help you stay focused and productive while maintaining your health and wellbeing.

In an interview, several experts shared their top tips for how to design your work-from-home office space and what factors you should bear in mind when working remotely:

Mark Mcshane, founder of Cupid PR has extensive experience in running large enterprises and start-ups, and is currently leading a fully remote team, which has given him insights into creating effective work-from-home office spaces. His advice on features, color schemes, essential items, and considerations for the home office?

"In designing a work-from-home office, the criterion should be such that it is functional and inspiring. I would begin with a basic color scheme situated around soft grays, whites, and beiges to help bring about a calm and professional environment," he says. "Enunciate this neutrality with pops of color in deep blues or greens for the commanding effect, which puts energy and interest into a room without being too much to distract."

Mcshane also recommends adding decorative features that allow for personal touches, making the space. "These may include fine art prints, plants, and stylish storage. Lighting is equally important: check that you are getting sufficient natural light and supplement it with adjustable desk lamps fitted with LED bulbs, which help guard against straining your eyes," he advises.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, low-cost office essentials for your remote job.

On a shoestring budget? These must-have items have you covered:

1. Ergonomic Chair

"Comfort is everything, as an ergonomic chair will help in supporting your posture and gives you lesser instances of back pain," recommends Mcshane. His personal favorite is the Hbada Office Task Desk Chair, which is a budget-friendly option currently available on Amazon for $99.

"You will want your desk to be sturdy. You might want to check the SHW Home Office 48-Inch Computer Desk on Amazon; it provides ample space without breaking the bank," Mcshane says.

3. Lighting

"Invest in quality lighting, such as LED task lights and overhead fixtures," recommends Ryan Norman, founder of Norman Builders , a home remodeling company in New Hampshire. "Proper lighting reduces eye strain and improves focus. For those on a budget, natural light is free—place your desk near a window."

3. Laptop Stand and Keyboard/Mouse Combo

"For keeping your screen at eye-level, preventing strained necks, a laptop stand is quite a worthy investment," Mcshane says, "like the Amazon Basics Ventilated Adjustable Laptop Stand." Laptop stands can also help prevent overheating of your laptop, which can result in malfunctions.

Keyboard and mouse combos can help with your typing comfort and efficiency, such as Mcshane's recommended Logitech combo.

Incorporate calming color schemes with pops of color for a bolder, sophisticated, or artsy look

5. Storage Solutions

Last but not least, storage is important to declutter and help you stay focused. One easy and inexpensive storage option that Mcshane recommends is the Keter Modular Drawer System. In addition to Amazon, storage solutions, as well as a chair and desk can often be found at retailers such as Staples, IKEA, Target, Office Depot, and Walmart, in options that fit most budgets and are generally good quality.

6. Artwork, Plants, And Other Personal Touches

And if you have some money to spare, you can add to these essentials with inexpensive (or expensive if you prefer) touches to add character to your space. Like Maria Szandrach, CEO of Mentalyc , says, "Prioritize essentials first and gradually add more items as your budget allows."

Kristin Kintlian, co-owner of Bonsai Builders , a luxury home construction company in Massachusetts, recommends: "Add personal touches to make the space your own. Artwork, photos, or live plants can boost creativity and motivation."

Szandrach shares that she even has a few succulents and a snake plant in her work from home office.

What To Consider When Setting Up Work From Home Office Space

What are some things you should consider before purchasing items for your work from home space?

1. Your Routine

"Consider how you’ll use the space and set it up for your needs," Kintlian continues. "Measure the area, create a floor plan, and think about your daily routine. The right office configuration will make working from home seamless."

In Kintlian's home office, she has a desk facing away from the window to avoid glare on her monitor, a bookcase for reference materials, and cabinets to keep everything organized.

Ergonomics should be your number one consideration when choosing essentials for your work from home ... [+] office space

2. Color Scheme

Ashley Southworth is a founder and creative director at Southworth Interior Design located in Bakersfield, California, and she has been working remotely since July 2023. She recommends her clients to choose a color scheme that they naturally gravitate towards. "Considering the psychology of color is also a beneficial approach as studies have shown that colors such as blue, yellow, or green can boost efficiency and creativity while red and orange can promote higher activity levels," Southworth says.

"When it comes to design, I personally love a dark and moody room but I would try to steer a client away from using this approach in a home office as it may prevent productivity and instead encourage a few too many siestas."

Naptime or mid-afternoon slumps anyone?

According to Southworth, World Market carries a wide variety of comfortable and stylish desk chairs at excellent prices if you're looking to go more up-market. "The Paige Charcoal Gray Linen Square Back Office Chair is a great classic option while the Rifle Paper Co. x Cloth & Company Oxford Office Chair comes in a variety of colors with whimsical designs."

"Target consistently carries stylish desk accessories that don't break the bank," she says. But for art, her go-to is digital art downloads on Etsy. "There are literally thousands of printable art options with many being under $10. I purchased this Vintage Southwestern Gallery Wall Set by Arte Serene Co. for my personal home office and I am obsessed! For a more high end look I recommend having your digital art printed on giclee; however, I doubt anyone will notice if you print yours from your local neighborhood 1 hour printing service."

4. Noise Level

"Choose a quiet area, if possible, or soundproof, if necessary," advises Alina Samchenko, COO of tech start-up HireDevelopersBiz.

5. Lighting

Reiterating what Mcshane and Norman mentioned earlier, Pam Hutter , a California-based architect, says, "Focus on natural light by placing your desk near a window. Add task lighting, ambient lighting and overhead lighting for different needs."

Hutter also suggests that you should plan your office with purpose and efficiency in mind. "The right setup and gear make working from home both productive and enjoyable. Invest in the essentials, then add personal touches to inspire you. Your home office should motivate you to start and end each workday," she says.

6. Work/Life Balance

Last but not least, Norman adds, "If possible, separate your office from living spaces with a room divider or partition. The physical barrier helps establish work-life boundaries."

Samchenko reminds professionals:

Plants and artwork add personality to your office, enabling you to focus and enjoy your remote job

"Remember, the trick to a working home office is finding or creating a space in which you can be both comfortable and productive. In other words, it pays to take some planning time and make an investment in your setup—it could make half the difference between your productivity and well-being."

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FAQs for Individuals in H-1B Nonimmigrant Status

The following information addresses common questions by individuals in H-1B nonimmigrant status, particularly related to applying for lawful permanent resident (LPR) status, job changes or terminations, international travel, and dependent family members.

For example, did you know:

• An eligible H-1B worker can change employers as soon as the new employer’s nonfrivolous H-1B petition is properly filed with USCIS.
• We will not revoke a Form I-140 petition approval solely due to the termination of the petitioner’s business or the employer’s withdrawal, as long as the petition has been approved for at least 180 days or the associated adjustment of status application has been pending for at least 180 days, and the petition approval is not revoked on other grounds. In this scenario, the H-1B worker will retain their priority date.
• When an H-1B worker’s employment is terminated (either voluntarily or involuntarily), they typically may take one of several actions to remain in a period of authorized stay in the United States beyond 60 days.

The chart below summarizes some common scenarios for H-1B workers. The information in this chart is general and does not capture all relevant details or considerations. Please review the FAQs further below and accompanying links for more specific information.

Q. I am currently in the United States in another nonimmigrant status. Do I have to depart the United States to obtain H-1B nonimmigrant status?

A. Nonimmigrants in the United States who wish to obtain a different nonimmigrant status generally either apply for a change of status with USCIS or, after USCIS approves their benefit request, consular process by applying for a visa in the new classification at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate abroad and then requesting admission to the United States in the new classification.

In general, you may change to H-1B nonimmigrant status without departing the United States. An employer who files an H-1B petition on your behalf can request a change of status on the  Form I-129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker . To be eligible to change your status, you must have been lawfully admitted to the United States as a nonimmigrant, your nonimmigrant status must remain valid, you must not have violated the conditions of your status, and you must not have committed any act that would make you ineligible to receive a nonimmigrant benefit. Also, certain nonimmigrant categories are ineligible for a change of status (see  Change My Nonimmigrant Status  for a list).

If you need to depart the United States – for example, if your current nonimmigrant status expires before your employer is able to file Form I-129 requesting a change of status to H-1B classification – you would generally need to apply for and obtain an H-1B visa stamp from a U.S. Embassy or Consulate abroad and present yourself at a port of entry for admission in H-1B status with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after the approval of the H-1B petition filed on your behalf. See Requirements to Timely File a Request to Extend Stay or Change Status in the  USCIS Policy Manual .

Q. How long may I remain in the United States in H-1B status?

A. The maximum period of admission for H-1B workers is generally 6 years. However, as detailed below, there are some common exceptions to this limit.

Q. When and how long can I extend my H-1B status beyond 6 years?

A. Your employer may submit  Form I-129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker , on your behalf, requesting an H-1B extension beyond 6 years in certain scenarios. For example, your employer may request to extend your H-1B status beyond 6 years if at least 365 days have passed since a  permanent labor certification was filed on your behalf with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) or since an immigrant visa petition (typically Form I-140), enabling you to apply for lawful permanent residence once a visa is available, was filed on your behalf with USCIS under one of the  employment-based immigrant visa categories . We may grant extensions on this basis in up to 1-year increments.

More commonly, your employer may also request to extend H-1B status beyond 6 years if you are the beneficiary of an approved   Form I-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Workers , in the  first, second, or third preference category and are eligible to be granted lawful permanent resident status, except for the fact that an immigrant visa is not available, as reflected in the  U.S. Department of State Visa Bulletin . Your petitioning employer must demonstrate that the visa is not available as of the date the H-1B extension petition is filed with USCIS, a s determined by your Form I-140 priority date and the relevant visa bulletin chart from the time of filing the H-1B extension request. See the  USCIS Policy Manual for additional information on visa availability. We may grant extensions on this basis in up to 3-year increments.

Additional information about extending H-1B status beyond 6 years, including specific requirements and points at which you are no longer eligible for such extensions, is available on our  H-1B Specialty Occupations page under “Period of Stay.”

Q. Must I presently hold H-1B status to request H-1B status beyond 6 years?

A. You do not have to hold H-1B status at the time you request H-1B status beyond the sixth year. Regulations authorizing H-1B status beyond 6 years apply to individuals who are currently in or previously held H-1B status.

For example, imagine you previously held H-1B status for 6 years but had no basis to timely extend beyond 6 years before your 6 years in H-1B status were reached. You then changed to O-1 status. While in O-1 status, a Form I-140 petition in the first, second, or third preference category was approved on your behalf, but an immigrant visa is not available in the category under which you are adjusting status based on your priority date. Your employer may then file a petition requesting a 3-year period of H-1B status on your behalf. This petition could either request a change of status to H-1B while still in the United States, assuming you are otherwise eligible for a change of status, or consular notification. H-1B petitions approved by USCIS for consular processing are forwarded to the Department of State for review. After review, a U.S. Consulate or Embassy may issue a visa for travel to a United States’ port of entry.

Q. Does my time outside of the United States count towards my 6-year maximum in H-1B status?

A. Only time spent in the United States as an H-1B beneficiary counts towards the 6-year maximum. Time spent outside the United States exceeding 24 hours, commonly referred to as “recapture time” or “remainder time,” does not count towards your 6-year limit, and you are eligible to recapture those periods of time. The burden is on your petitioning employer to request and establish eligibility for recapture time. Documentation of time outside of the United States may include passport stamps, Form I-94 Arrival/Departure Records and travel history from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, airline tickets, and boarding passes, along with an accompanying chart indicating dates outside of the United States. Your petitioning employer may include such documentation to establish your eligibility for recapturing time when they submit an H-1B petition on your behalf.

Q. I only work in H-1B status for short periods of time throughout the year. Does the 6-year maximum duration still apply to me?

There is not a limitation of stay if your employment in the United States is seasonal or intermittent or for a total of 6 months or less per year, or if you do not reside continually in the United States. Your petitioning employer must provide clear and convincing proof that you qualify for such an exception of the 6-year maximum duration. This proof must consist of evidence such as arrival and departure records, copies of tax returns, and records of employment abroad.

Q. When can I begin a new 6-year period of H-1B status?

A. You may be eligible to begin a new period of 6 years in H-1B status if you have been outside of the United States for 1 continuous year, with the exception of brief trips to the United States for business or pleasure.  If you start a new 6-year period of H-1B status you are subject to  H-1B cap limitations  if your employment is cap-subject.

Q. My H-1B status is about to expire. Do I have to leave the United States to extend my H-1B status?

A. In general, you do not have to leave the United States to extend your H-1B status. Your employer can submit an H-1B petition with a request to extend your H-1B status. To be eligible to extend your status, you must have been lawfully admitted to the United States as a nonimmigrant, your nonimmigrant status must remain valid, you must not have violated the conditions of your status, and you must not have committed any act that would make you ineligible to receive a nonimmigrant benefit. See  How Do I Extend My Nonimmigrant Stay in the United States (PDF, 121.18 KB) ?

If the H-1B petition requesting an extension of status on your behalf is filed after the end of your H-1B status period – in other words, if it was not “timely filed” -- then we, in our discretion and under certain conditions, may excuse the failure to timely file if the delay was due to extraordinary circumstances beyond your control. If we approve the late-filed petition to extend status, the approval is effective as of the date of the expiration of your prior H-1B admission period. See the  USCIS Policy Manual .

If we deny the extension of status request, whether it was filed on time or not, you will be considered to have been out of valid status as of the expiration date of your H-1B status that you sought to extend (in other words, your I-94 expiration date). Please see the  USCIS Policy Manual  for more information.

Q. My H-1B status is about to expire but a petition requesting an H-1B extension on my behalf is pending at USCIS. What is my status once my H-1B expires? May I continue to work while the extension request is pending?

If your H-1B expires and a timely-filed non-frivolous H-1B extension request is pending on your behalf, you are in a period of authorized stay – even after your H-1B status expires. Note, however, that an authorized period of stay is not the same as a status. If the petition is seeking extension of the same employment for the same employer, you are authorized to continue employment for a period not to exceed 240 days from the date your H-1B status expired. If we deny the extension request before the 240-day period expires, your employment authorization will automatically terminate when USCIS notifies your petitioning employer of the denial. If the petition is requesting a change in employment or change in employer under H-1B portability, you are authorized to work in the new employment for the entire time the petition is pending at USCIS. If we deny the request, your employment authorization based on portability will automatically terminate when USCIS notifies your petitioning employer of the denial. See “Changing Employers or Employment Terms with the Same Employer (Portability)” in our  H-1B Specialty Occupation webpage.

Q. What happens if my H-1B status expires while I have a pending application to change to another nonimmigrant status?

A. A pending application to change status ( Form I-129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker , or  Form I-539, Application to Extend/Change Nonimmigrant Status ) does not provide lawful immigration status. However, you may be in an authorized period of stay during the period when a timely filed nonfrivolous application to change status is pending with USCIS. If we approve your timely-filed application to change status, the start date for your new nonimmigrant status is effective on the date of approval. If there is a gap of time between the expiration date of your H-1B status and the start date of your new status, we consider you to have continued to maintain a lawful status as long as you timely filed the change of status (COS) application, we granted the request to change status, and you did not violate any terms and conditions of your H-1B status.

If your request to change status was not filed on time – in other words, if it was not filed before the end of your H-1B status -- then we, in our discretion and under certain conditions, may excuse the failure to timely file if the delay was due to extraordinary circumstances beyond your control. If we approve the late filed change of status application, the change of status takes effect on the approval date. In this scenario, we will consider you to have maintained lawful status during the excused period. See the  USCIS Policy Manual .

If we deny the application to change status, whether it was filed on time or not, you will be considered to have been out of valid status as of the expiration date of your H-1B status (your I-94 expiration date).

Q. What happens if my H-1B status expires and I have an approved compelling circumstances Employment Authorization Document (EAD)?

A. If your H-1B status expires and you have a compelling circumstances EAD, you will be in a period of authorized stay, but you will no longer be maintaining a nonimmigrant status. You generally will not accrue unlawful presence in the United States while the EAD is valid or, if you filed a non-frivolous application for the EAD before the expiration of your H-1B status, while your application was pending.

If you are working in the United States under a compelling circumstances EAD and a nonimmigrant or immigrant petition is filed on your behalf, you would not be eligible to change status, extend status, or adjust status to lawful permanent resident from within the United States. After the petition is approved, you would need to apply for a visa and/or admission from outside the United States to begin working in accordance with that petition.

See additional information at  Employment Authorization in Compelling Circumstances .

Q. I have a controlling interest in a company. Can this company qualify as my petitioning employer to sponsor my H-1B status?

A. A company in which you have a controlling interest – meaning, you own more than 50% or have majority rights – may qualify as your employer and may petition for H-1B status on your behalf. In this scenario you would be both an owner of the petitioning employer and a beneficiary of the petition (a “beneficiary owner”).

Previously, more restrictive requirements on employer-employee relationships between H-1B petitioners and beneficiaries may have resulted in H-1B beneficiary owners being ineligible. However, in 2020 we rescinded the 2010 policy memorandum, “Determining Employer-Employee Relationship for Adjudication of H-1B Petitions, Including Third-Party Site Placements,” which impacted such eligibility. See the  USCIS Policy Memorandum (PDF, 379.71 KB) .

The Oct. 23, 2023, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), Modernizing H-1B Requirements, Providing Flexibility in the F-1 Program, and Program Improvements Affecting Other Nonimmigrant Workers,  proposed to codify the ability of beneficiary owners to obtain H-1B status. We continue to consider comments in response to this NPRM. However, beneficiary owners may already be eligible for H-1B status under existing regulations and policies. You must still be coming temporarily to the United States to perform services in a specialty occupation. Additionally, Department of Labor requirements related to labor condition applications, including requirements concerning the appropriate prevailing wage and wage level, still apply.

The United States remains a destination for top talent around the world. Our ability to attract and retain entrepreneurs is essential for spurring innovation, job creation, and new industries and opportunities for all Americans. We encourage entrepreneurs to use the H-1B program, or other appropriate pathways, to live and work in the United States. See  Options for Noncitizen Entrepreneurs to Work in the United States .

Q. I hold H-1B status and have a pending adjustment of status application. If my H-1B expires, will my adjustment of status application be denied?

A. A pending adjustment of status application does not provide lawful status or cure any violation of nonimmigrant visa status. If you file Form I-485 while you are in H-1B status, however, the expiration of that H-1B status while the Form I-485 is pending generally will not make you ineligible for adjustment of status, as long as you do not engage in unauthorized employment or otherwise become inadmissible. See the  USCIS Policy Manual .

Q. I hold H-1B status and have a pending adjustment of status application. If my H-1B expires, may I continue to work and travel?

A. A pending  Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status , does not automatically confer employment authorization and does not serve as a basis for readmission to the United States. However, you may submit applications for employment authorization and advance parole with your Form I-485. If you file  Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization , based on your pending Form I-485, and receive an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), you may use this EAD to work. EADs based on a pending adjustment of status application are unrestricted as to employment type and location. If you file Form I-131, Application for Travel Document , and receive an Advance Parole Document based on your pending Form I-485, you may present your valid Advance Parole Document at a port of entry for reentry to the United States.

The validity period for your EAD will generally be  5 years . If you file both Form I-131 and Form I-765 and USCIS approves both applications, we will generally issue one document which serves as both your EAD and Advance Parole Document (known as a combination card, or combo card). The combo card will be an EAD with the notation “SERVES AS I-512 ADVANCE PAROLE.” (See  Information About Your Immigration Document .) If you do not file the Form I-131 and I-765 together, and/or if we cannot adjudicate both applications together, you will receive separate employment authorization and Advance Parole Documents. In this case, your EAD will indicate “NOT VALID FOR REENTRY TO U.S.” and your Advance Parole Document will be issued separately.

Q. I am an international student on an F-1 visa, currently in a period of optional practical training (OPT). Do I need to obtain H-1B status for my employer to file an immigrant petition on my behalf?

A. As an F-1 student on OPT, you do not have to obtain H-1B status before an immigrant petition is filed on your behalf. In general, nonimmigrants are admitted for a specific temporary period of time and, at the time of admission or extension of stay, must intend to depart the United States at the expiration of their authorized period of admission or extension of stay. See the  USCIS Policy Manual . To be eligible for F-1 classification, a student must intend to depart the United States after their temporary period of stay and have a foreign residence they do not intend to abandon. However, as a student you may be the beneficiary of a pending or approved immigrant petition and still be able to demonstrate an intent to depart. See the  USCIS Policy Manual .

Q. I have an approved immigrant petition and am waiting for a visa number to be available. Why is there such a long wait for a visa number to be available to me?

A. Availability of immigrant visas is subject to statutory limits, and demand for these visas is generally much higher than the limits can accommodate. Statutory constraints on immigrant visa numbers can only be changed by Congress. See  Employment-Based Adjustment of Status FAQs  for additional information.

Q. I have now become a lawful permanent resident. Do any employment restrictions apply to me? What guidance is available?

A. As a lawful permanent resident you are authorized to work for any employer. You may use your Permanent Resident Card (Green Card) for readmission to the United States after travel abroad, though if you are outside of the country for a long duration – generally 1 year or more – you may need to apply for a reentry permit. Note that, depending on the length and circumstances of the trip abroad, the trip may lead to a determination that you have abandoned your lawful permanent resident status. (See the  USCIS Policy Manual ). Additional conditions and requirements apply to those granted conditional permanent resident status, usually granted to those who applied for lawful permanent residence based on marriage or investment. See  After We Grant Your Green Card for more detailed information and resources. 

Q. What is “porting”?

A. There are two kinds of job portability, or “porting,” available based on two different kinds of employer petitions:

H-1B petition portability : Eligible H-1B nonimmigrants may begin working for a new employer as soon as the employer properly files a new H-1B petition (Form I-129) requesting to amend or extend H-1B status with USCIS, without waiting for the petition to be approved. More information about H-1B portability can be found on our  H-1B Specialty Occupations  page.

Immigrant worker petition portability : A worker with an adjustment of status application (Form I-485) that has been pending for at least 180 days with an underlying valid immigrant visa petition (Form I-140) can transfer the underlying immigrant visa petition to a qualifying new offer of employment in the same or similar occupational classification with the same or a new employer. For example, if you move from a software developer position to an information systems manager position, this may be considered a same or similar occupation. More information about this kind of porting (sometimes known as “ INA 204(j)  portability”) can be found in the  USCIS Policy Manual .

If you seek to port to a new offer of employment under INA 204(j), you must submit  Form I-485 Supplement J, Confirmation of Bona Fide Job Offer or Request for Job Portability Under INA Section 204(j) , to document your new job offer and transfer your Form I-140 to the new job offer.

If the Form I-140 is in an employment-based immigrant visa category which does not require a job offer – namely, individuals seeking a  national interest waiver of the job offer requirement or individuals seeking classification as a person of  extraordinary ability – you do not need to request job portability under INA 204(j).

Eligibility for immigrant visa classifications and specific requirements are described in the  USCIS Policy Manual and in the  Employment-Based Adjustment of Status FAQs .

Q. How do I leave my current employer to start working for a new employer while remaining in H-1B status?

A. Under H-1B portability provisions, you may begin working for a new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous H-1B petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on the petition, whichever is later. You are not required to wait for the new employer’s H-1B petition to be approved before beginning to work for the new employer, assuming certain conditions are met. For more details about H-1B portability, see our  H-1B Specialty Occupations  page, under “Changing Employers or Employment Terms with the Same Employer (Portability).”

Q. What are my options if my H-1B employment is terminated?

A. When nonimmigrant workers are laid off, they may not be aware of their options and may, in some instances, wrongly assume that they have no option but to leave the country within 60 days.

If your employment is terminated, either voluntarily or involuntarily, you typically may take one of the following actions, if you are eligible, to remain in a period of authorized stay in the United States:

• File an application for a change of nonimmigrant status;
• File an application for adjustment of status;
• File an application for a compelling circumstances Employment Authorization Document; or
• Be the beneficiary of a nonfrivolous petition to change employer.

If one of these actions occurs within the up to 60-day grace period, your period of authorized stay in the United States can exceed 60 days, even if you lose your previous nonimmigrant status. If you take no action within the grace period, you and your dependents may then need to depart the United States within 60 days, or when your authorized validity period ends, whichever is shorter.

For more detailed information, see our page on  Options for Nonimmigrant Workers Following Termination of Employment .

Q. My employer filed a Form I-140 immigrant worker petition on my behalf. What happens if I leave my job, or if my employer withdraws the Form I-140? Will I retain my priority date? Am I still eligible to adjust status?

A. First, let’s assume that your priority date is not yet current (meaning it is not earlier than the applicable cutoff date in the Visa Bulletin).

Starting from the moment that the Form I-140 filed on your behalf is approved:

• Your priority date is generally locked in for use in subsequently filed Form I-140 petitions (also known as priority date retention). The only way you can lose your priority date is if the I-140 approval is revoked on certain grounds such as agency error, fraud, or willful misrepresentation of a material fact.
• If you are otherwise eligible for H-1B status, this I-140 approval may be the basis to extend your H-1B status beyond the general 6-year period of admission limitation, in up to 3-year increments.
• Your spouse, if in H-4 nonimmigrant status or seeking a change of status to H-4 nonimmigrant status, would be eligible to apply for an Employment Authorization Document.

Within 180 days of the Form I-140 approval, if your employer withdraws the I-140 petition approval that was filed on your behalf, USCIS is obligated to automatically revoke the I-140 approval. You would not lose your priority date , but you would need a new basis in order to extend your H-1B status beyond the general 6-year limitation and ultimately adjust status.

After the Form I-140 filed on your behalf has been approved for at least 180 days, however:

• Even if your employer withdraws the Form I-140 approval, USCIS would not revoke the I-140 approval for that reason alone. You would continue to have an approved I-140, and would continue to be eligible for H-1B extensions beyond the general 6-year limitation if you are otherwise eligible for H-1B status. USCIS would only revoke the I-140 approval on certain grounds such as agency error, fraud, or misrepresentation of a material fact. You would, however, need a new basis on which to seek adjustment of status.

Next, let’s assume that your priority date becomes current, you have an approved I-140, and you properly file  Form I-485 (the application to adjust status).

• Once your Form I-485 has been pending for 180 days, you can “port” the offer of employment in the Form I-140 approval to a new job offer (same or different employer) as long as the new job offer is in a “same or similar” occupational classification when compared to the job offer in the Form I-140 petition. The new employer does not have to submit a new I-140 on your behalf, although you would need to file a “ Supplement J ” to request this job portability. (Technically, you can submit a Supplement J to port a pending I-140 even before it’s approved, but this scenario is less common. See the relevant  form instructions (PDF, 323.82 KB) on when you must submit a Supplement J.)

Finally, let’s consider one alternative scenario: More than 365 days have passed since the filing of a  PERM labor certification application or a Form I-140 petition on your behalf:

• You are eligible to extend your H-1B status beyond the general 6-year limitation, in up to 1-year increments. (As described above, the 3-year increments are only possible with an approved I-140 and a priority date that is not current.)  Thus, even if you are not eligible for the up to 3-year extension because your priority date is current, you may still be eligible for extensions in increments of up to 1 year if at least 365 days have passed since the filing of the PERM labor certification application or Form I-140 petition (or other employment-based immigrant petition, such as Form I-360) on your behalf.
• Your spouse, if in H-4 nonimmigrant status or seeking a change of status to H-4 nonimmigrant status, would be eligible to apply for an Employment Authorization Document if you have been granted an extension beyond the end of the general 6-year limitation on this basis.

Q. I have an approved Form I-140 but I know I will be waiting a long time for an immigrant visa to become available. Do I need to be the beneficiary of a valid, approved Form I-140 for the whole time I’m waiting?

A. You are not required to be the beneficiary of a valid, approved Form I-140 for the entire time you are waiting for an immigrant visa to become available. Generally, your first approved Form I-140 establishes your priority date. You do need a valid Form I-140 once an immigrant visa becomes available and you file your Form I-485, but it does not need to be the same I-140 that you used to establish your priority date.

In other words, an H-1B worker could establish their priority date with an approved I-140 from Employer A, then use H-1B petition portability to work for a number of other employers who do not file an I-140, and ultimately apply to adjust status based on a second approved I-140 from Employer Z (or use the approved I-140 from Employer A to “port” to a same or similar job offer from Employer Z, if eligible).

Please see the previous Q&A for more details about these scenarios.

Q. I believe my employer has retaliated against me. What protections are available to me?

A. You have a right to be protected from retaliation regardless of your immigration status. Immigration law may provide certain protections to you as an H-1B worker if you report suspected fraud or abuse. Normally, H‑1B workers are not eligible to extend or change their status if they have lost or failed to maintain their H-1B status. However, if they can demonstrate “extraordinary circumstances,” we may use our discretion to excuse this requirement on a case-by-case basis. We may consider a situation to be an instance of “extraordinary circumstances” if you:

• apply to extend your H-1B status or change your nonimmigrant status,
• indicate that you faced retaliatory action from your employer because you reported a Labor Condition Application violation,
• provide credible documentary evidence of such a report and retaliation, and
• lost or failed to maintain your H-1B status.

For more details, see  Combating Fraud and Abuse in the H-1B Visa Program .

For more general information on worker protections, visit  Worker.gov .

For additional information about protection for noncitizen workers who are involved in labor agency investigations, see  DHS Support of the Enforcement of Labor and Employment Laws .

Q. My employer filed an H-1B petition on my behalf, and it is pending at USCIS. If I travel internationally, will the H-1B petition be affected?

A. Only a beneficiary who is continuing to maintain nonimmigrant status may apply for a change of status. If you depart the United States while a petition requesting a change of status to H-1B is pending, we will consider the change of status request abandoned. If we approve the petition, the approval notice will be issued as a consular notification and will not confer H-1B status. In this scenario, you would generally need to apply for and obtain an H-1B visa stamp from a U.S. Embassy or Consulate abroad and present yourself for admission to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to obtain H-1B status. See the  U.S. Department of State website for information on the visa application process and the  CBP website for information on travel to the United States.

You must be physically present in the United States at the time your employer files a petition requesting an extension of stay on your behalf. However, departure from the United States while an H-1B petition requesting an extension of stay is pending will generally not serve as a basis to deny the extension request. Your employer may request that USCIS send notification of the H-1B extension approval to the consular office abroad where you will apply for a visa.

Q. I am in the process of applying for lawful permanent resident status while holding H-1B status. Will international travel affect my adjustment of status application?

A. For most adjustment of status applicants, if you depart the United States with a pending  Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status , without first obtaining an advance parole document, we will deny Form I-485 for abandonment. Exceptions to this rule exist for a narrow set of nonimmigrants, including those holding valid H-1B status. An individual in H-1B status who is not under exclusion, deportation, or removal proceedings may travel while Form I-485 is pending without first obtaining an advance parole document if:

• Upon returning to the United States they remain eligible for H-1B status;
• They are returning to the United States to resume employment with the same employer for which their H-1B is authorized; and
• They are in possession of a valid H-1B visa.

Alternatively, an individual in H-1B status who has a pending Form I-485 and who has been granted an Advance Parole Document based on an approved  Form I-131, Application for Travel Document may depart the United States without abandoning their Form I-485 application, so long as they depart and return during the advance parole document’s validity period.

Q. I filed Form I-131 requesting advance parole and Form I-765 requesting employment authorization with my Form I-485. If I leave the United States before the advance parole and employment authorization are issued, will the applications be denied?

A. Departure from the United States generally will not on its own serve as a basis of denial of  Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization . However, if you file Form I-131, Application for Travel Document , requesting an Advance Parole Document and depart the United States without already having an Advance Parole Document that is valid for the entire time you are outside the United States, we will consider your Form I-131 abandoned and will deny that application.

You may be eligible for expedited processing of your applications. We consider expedited processing of Form I-131 if you have a pressing or critical need to travel for an unexpected event, such as the need to obtain medical treatment in a limited time or the death or grave illness of a family member or close friend. Expedited processing of a travel document may also be warranted if you have a pressing or critical need to travel outside the United States for a planned event, such as a work or professional commitment, academic commitment, or personal commitment, but processing times prevent USCIS from issuing the travel document by the planned date of departure. When the need to expedite issuance of a travel document is related to a planned event, we consider whether you timely filed the Form I-131 or timely responded to a request for evidence. A desire to travel solely for vacation generally does not meet the definition of a pressing or critical need to travel. See additional information in the  USCIS Policy Manual and our webpage on  Expedite Requests .

Q. I have an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) based on compelling circumstances and am no longer maintaining H-1B status. Can I travel abroad?

A. An EAD based on compelling circumstances does not serve as a travel document or otherwise provide eligibility for readmission into the United States. However, having an EAD based on compelling circumstances does not prevent you from applying for a nonimmigrant or immigrant visa at a consular post abroad to return to the United States, assuming you are otherwise eligible.

We consider an applicant with a valid EAD based on compelling circumstances to be in a period of authorized stay. In addition, we consider the time during which the EAD application was pending to be a period of authorized stay. Therefore, you generally do not accrue unlawful presence during the validity period of the EAD or during the time that a timely filed non-frivolous application is pending. Departing the United States to apply for a nonimmigrant or immigrant visa at a consular post abroad while working using the compelling circumstances-based EAD will not trigger the unlawful presence grounds of inadmissibility, as long as you are not subject to those grounds of inadmissibility from other circumstances. See additional information at  Employment Authorization in Compelling Circumstances .

Q. Can my H-4 dependent family members work?

A. H-4 dependents are not automatically employment authorized on the basis of their nonimmigrant status. Only H-4 dependents who affirmatively apply for and receive employment authorization from USCIS are authorized to work, and only certain H-4s are eligible for employment authorization. H-4 spouses may file  Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization , if the H-1B worker is the beneficiary of an approved  Form I-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Workers , or has been granted H-1B status beyond 6 years based on 365 days having passed since a labor certification was filed with the Department of Labor or an immigrant visa petition was filed with USCIS on the H-1B worker’s behalf. See Employment Authorization for Certain H-4 Dependent Spouses .

Q. Are my H-4 dependent family members also subject to the 6-year maximum period of stay?

A. Dependent family members’ time in H-4 status is generally limited to the duration of the H-1B worker’s status. If an individual obtains H-1B extensions beyond 6 years, then their H-4 dependent family members are also eligible for extension of H-4 status for that same duration. Time spent in H-4 status does not count towards the 6-year maximum for H-1B status, so an individual who has spent 6 years in H-4 status my still obtain their own H-1B status for a period of 6 years.

Q. I am seeking lawful permanent resident status with my dependent family members, including my H-4 child. What happens when my H-4 child turns 21? Are they still eligible for LPR status?

A. Once your child turns 21 or gets married, they no longer meet the definition of a child under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and therefore will no longer be eligible for H-4 status.  At this point, to maintain nonimmigrant status your child would need to change to another nonimmigrant status – for example, F-1 or H-1B – for which they independently qualify.

Additionally, they may still be eligible to adjust status or apply for an immigrant visa under the Child Status Protection Act (CSPA), which protects certain beneficiaries from losing eligibility for adjustment of status and immigrant visas due to aging during the immigration process. If your child benefits from the CSPA, they will still lose their H-4 status after turning 21, but they will remain eligible to adjust status as a derivative beneficiary of your own adjustment of status application and immigrant worker petition despite being age 21 or over, assuming otherwise eligible. See the  USCIS Policy Manual for detailed information about CSPA, as well as  Employment-Based Adjustment of Status FAQs (Family Members).

Q. What actions has USCIS taken to support H-1B nonimmigrants seeking to adjust or change status in the United States?

Congress sets the  annual immigrant visa limits . Historically, demand for these visas, regardless of country of origin, is much higher than the annual limits can accommodate.

USCIS has taken several actions to help those who will be waiting a long time for an “immediately available” immigrant visa number, including a 2015 rule that allows certain  spouses of H-1B nonimmigrants  to apply for employment authorization, and a 2016 rule that has  improved job flexibility for H-1B workers and their families.

More recent improvements since 2021 include the following:

Operational improvements

• Issuing an unprecedented number of  employment-based green cards  in fiscal years 2022 and 2023.
• Increasing the maximum validity period of Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) to 5 years for adjustment of status applicants and bringing back “combo cards” that provide evidence of both employment authorization and advance parole.
• Expanding  premium processing to all filers of Form I-140, Immigrant Petition for Noncitizen Workers, as well as certain filers of Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization, and Form I-539, Application to Extend/Change Nonimmigrant Status.
• Updating policy guidance on  expedite requests , including when USCIS may expedite adjudication of an Application for Travel Document (Form I-131) when an applicant demonstrates a pressing or critical need to leave the United States, whether the need to travel relates to a planned or unplanned event. In addition, the guidance clarifies  expedite requests supported by a government agency .
• Removing the biometrics fee and appointment requirement for  applicants for a change or extension of nonimmigrant status (Form I-539). When legally permitted or when resources and operational efficiency allow, USCIS may “bundle” the adjudication of derivative applications that are filed together with the associated principal petition. For example, USCIS is currently “bundling” forms I-129 and I-539 for certain classifications, which provides near-contemporaneous adjudication of the derivative form I-539 with the principal Form I-129.
• Announcing process enhancements for  deferred action requests by workers , including H-1B workers, to support labor and employment agency investigations.
• Making progress on  reducing processing times (PDF) .

Policy improvements

• Strengthening the integrity of the H-1B program with a  final rule that created a new beneficiary-centric selection process for the FY 2025 H-1B registration period. This new rule has resulted in dramatically fewer attempts to game the system, as evidenced by  H-1B registration data . In addition, under the new beneficiary-centric selection process, if a worker has multiple legitimate job offers and any of these registrations are selected, then the worker may choose which employer to work for.
• Updating   policy guidance for international students , including clarification that F and M students must have a foreign residence that they do not intend to abandon, but that such students may be the beneficiary of a permanent labor certification application or immigrant visa petition and may still be able to demonstrate their intention to depart after a temporary period of stay. In addition, the guidance specifies how F students seeking an extension of optional practical training (OPT) based on their degree in a STEM field may be employed by startup companies, as long as the employer adheres to the training plan requirements, remains in good standing with E-Verify, and provides compensation commensurate to that provided to similarly situated U.S. workers, among other requirements.
• Updating the agency’s interpretation of the Child Status Protection Act to provide  additional protection for child beneficiaries of noncitizen workers from “aging out” of child status and allowing them to seek permanent residence along status with their parents, including clarification of the  “sought to acquire” requirement .
• Publishing  updated guidance on when a Form I-140 beneficiary may transfer, or “port,” to a new job, providing  clarity to those seeking to change employers during the lengthy process of becoming a lawful permanent resident.

Greater clarity

• Publishing resources for  nonimmigrant workers following termination of employment , to ensure that nonimmigrant workers who are laid off are aware of options that may permit them to remain in the country past the regular 60 day grace period.
• Issuing guidance on the eligibility criteria for  compelling circumstances Employment Authorization Documents (EADs). For example, a principal applicant with an approved immigrant visa petition in an oversubscribed visa category or chargeability area, who has lived in the United States for a significant amount of time, could submit evidence such as school or higher education enrollment records, mortgage records, or long-term lease records to support a potential finding of compelling circumstances. Compelling circumstances could include, if, due to job loss, the family may otherwise be forced to sell their home for a loss, pull their children out of school, and relocate to their home country.
• Individuals of extraordinary ability ( O-1 )
• Individuals of extraordinary ability and outstanding professors and researchers ( EB-1 )
• Individuals with advanced degrees or exceptional ability who can self-petition with a National Interest Waiver ( EB-2 NIW )
• Start-up founders growing their companies in the United States under the  International Entrepreneur Rule .

Meanwhile, the Department of State has launched an  Early Career STEM Research Initiative as part of the J-1 visa program, as well as a  domestic visa renewal pilot program.

We will keep working within our legal authority to provide as much flexibility, predictability, and dignity as possible for all those waiting for their chance to become a lawful permanent resident and ultimately a U.S. citizen.

• H-1B Specialty Occupations
• Employment-Based Adjustment of Status FAQs
• Employment Authorization for Certain H-4 Dependent Spouses .
• Employment Authorization in Compelling Circumstances
• Options for Nonimmigrant Workers Following Termination of Employment
• Options for Noncitizen STEM Professionals to Work in the United States
• Options for Noncitizen Entrepreneurs to Work in the United States

Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-j-d-vances-past-statements-and-relationship-with-trump

Fact-checking JD Vance’s past statements and relationship with Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Former President Donald Trump has selected Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump wrote July 15 on Truth Social.

Vance, 39, won his Senate seat in 2022 with Trump’s backing. He would be one of the youngest vice presidents in U.S. history.

But before becoming one of Trump’s fiercest allies and defenders, Vance sharply criticized the former president. During the 2016 presidential election, Vance wrote that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a–hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

WATCH: 2024 RNC delegates react to Trump shooting

He has since sounded a different tone including in defending Trump’s actions in the events leading up to and during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Vance was critical of Vice President Mike Pence’s handling of the 2020 election results certification and in an interview with Kaitlan Collins on CNN questioned whether the vice president’s life was actually endangered during the riots. Vance also vocally condemned what he sees as the tenor of political rhetoric, which he tied to an assassination attempt during Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance posted on X shortly after the shooting. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Who is J.D. Vance and what is his relationship with Trump?

Before winning his Senate seat in 2022, Vance worked as an investor, commentator and bestselling author.

Vance, who was born in Middleton, Ohio, served in the U.S. Marine Corps before attending Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He worked as a corporate lawyer before moving into the tech industry as a venture capitalist.

WATCH: JD Vance’s evolution from Trump critic to running mate

Vance rose to fame through his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which describes his growing up in poverty and details the isolation, violence and drug addiction that often surrounds poor white communities in middle America.

When the book was released, Vance started talking to the media about issues important to people in his community — and started criticizing Trump.

Vance told ABC News in August 2016 that, although Trump successfully “diagnoses the problems” people are facing, he didn’t see Trump “offering many solutions.” In an October 2016 interview with journalist Charlie Rose, Vance said he was a “never-Trump guy.”

In another 2016 interview about his book, Vance told a reporter that, although his background would have made him a natural Trump supporter, “the reason, ultimately, that I am not … is because I think that (Trump) is the most-raw expression of a massive finger pointed at other people.”

Vance began to publicly change course when he launched his Senate campaign in 2021. He deleted tweets from 2016 that included him calling Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” In another deleted tweet following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Trump said fame enabled him to grope women, Vance wrote: “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.”

He apologized about his Trump criticisms in a July 2021 Fox News interview, and asked people not to judge him based on what he had said. “I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance said. “I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

In June, after news circulated that Vance was on Trump’s short list for vice president, Fox News host Bret Baier asked Vance about the comments. Vance said he was wrong about Trump. “He was a great president, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term,” he said.

Trump endorsed Vance in the Ohio GOP Senate primary, helping him win the race and the general election.

As a senator, Vance lobbied to defeat Ohio’s constitutional amendment that ensured access to abortion, calling it a “gut punch” after the measure passed.

After the hazardous East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment in 2023, which ignited a fire and led to evacuations and a controlled release of chemicals, Vance worked with Ohio’s senior senator, Democrat Sherrod Brown, to introduce rail safety legislation.

PolitiFact has fact-checked Vance 10 times. He’s received two Pants on Fire ratings, three Falses, two Mostly Falses and two Half Trues. He also received one Mostly True rating before he was a politician in 2018.

In March, Vance echoed a popular Republican talking point, saying that “100% of net job creation under the Biden administration has gone to the foreign-born.” We rated that Mostly False. Since Biden took office in early 2021, the number of foreign-born Americans who are employed has risen by about 5.6 million. But over the same time period, the number of native-born Americans employed has increased by almost 7.4 million. We rated False Vance’s claim in February that the $95 million Ukraine supplemental aid package included a “hidden impeachment clause against President Trump.” The measure doesn’t mention impeachment.

Because it’s the president’s job to spend congressionally appropriated funds, experts said whoever is elected president next will be responsible for spending the money allocated in the law. It doesn’t target former Trump; it would apply the same way to Biden, should he be reelected.

On immigration, Vance falsely claimed in 2022 that Biden’s “open border” meant that “more Democrat voters were “pouring into this country.” Immigrants who cross the border illegally cannot vote in federal elections. The process for immigrants to become citizens and therefore gain the right to vote can take a decade or longer.

PolitiFact also addressed controversial comments Vance made in 2021, surfaced during his Senate run, about rape being “inconvenient.”

Vance didn’t directly say “rape is inconvenient.” But when he was asked in an interview whether laws should allow people to get abortions if they were victims of rape or incest, he said that society shouldn’t view a pregnancy or birth resulting from rape or incest as “inconvenient.”

In the interview, which occurred before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Vance was also asked whether anti-abortion laws should include rape and incest exceptions. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said in response. “At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

​When asked again about the exceptions, Vance said: “The question portrays a certain presumption that is wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

Since being on Trump’s vice presidential short list, Vance has expressed a more moderate view on abortion.

On July 7 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for example, Vance said he supports access to the abortion pill mifepristone after the Supreme Court dismissed the case against it — echoing what Trump said days before during the presidential debate.

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Chaos and Confusion: Tech Outage Causes Disruptions Worldwide

Airlines, hospitals and people’s computers were affected after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, sent out a flawed software update.

• Share full article

By Adam Satariano ,  Paul Mozur ,  Kate Conger and Sheera Frenkel

• July 19, 2024

Airlines grounded flights. Operators of 911 lines could not respond to emergencies. Hospitals canceled surgeries. Retailers closed for the day. And the actions all traced back to a batch of bad computer code.

A flawed software update sent out by a little-known cybersecurity company caused chaos and disruption around the world on Friday. The company, CrowdStrike , based in Austin, Texas, makes software used by multinational corporations, government agencies and scores of other organizations to protect against hackers and online intruders.

But when CrowdStrike sent its update on Thursday to its customers that run Microsoft Windows software, computers began to crash.

The fallout, which was immediate and inescapable, highlighted the brittleness of global technology infrastructure. The world has become reliant on Microsoft and a handful of cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike. So when a single flawed piece of software is released over the internet, it can almost instantly damage countless companies and organizations that depend on the technology as part of everyday business.

“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of Britain’s National Cyber Security Center and a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

A cyberattack did not cause the widespread outage, but the effects on Friday showed how devastating the damage can be when a main artery of the global technology system is disrupted. It raised broader questions about CrowdStrike’s testing processes and what repercussions such software firms should face when flaws in their code cause major disruptions.

How a Software Update Crashed Computers Around the World

Here’s a visual explanation for how a faulty software update crippled machines.

How the airline cancellations rippled around the world (and across time zones)

Share of canceled flights at 25 airports on Friday

50% of flights

Ai r po r t

Bengalu r u K empeg o wda

Dhaka Shahjalal

Minneapolis-Saint P aul

Stuttga r t

Melbou r ne

Be r lin B r anden b urg

London City

Amsterdam Schiphol

Chicago O'Hare

Raleigh−Durham

B r adl e y

Cha r lotte

Reagan National

Philadelphia

1:20 a.m. ET

CrowdStrike’s stock price so far this year

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Regional challenges concerning derivation of suspended particulate matter concentration and water turbidity from water reflectance. A case study in the western Black Sea

• Constantin, Sorin
• Șerban, Ioan-Daniel
• Doxaran, David
• D'Ortenzio, Fabrizio

Assessment of water quality indicators, such as Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) concentration and water turbidity (TUR) is essential for marine ecosystems health evaluations. This work focuses on the estimation of these two variables from water-leaving reflectance measurements, either derived from in-situ observations or satellite data, for the western Black Sea basin. The regional characteristics of the water optically active constituents can have important impact on the quality of such estimations if not properly accounted for. We test several existing inversion algorithms and quantify their accuracy. New, regionally adapted methods are then proposed, together with a new formulation for a multi-conditional switching mechanism. Calibration of these models is performed based on SPM and TUR in-situ measurements. It is shown that the improvements achieved through regional adaptation can be significant. Application of these algorithms to Sentinel-3 OLCI satellite data reveals the consistency of the proposed methodology. Also, it shows the degree of uncertainty if improper formulations are used, with major impact on the absolute values of retrieved SPM or TUR.

• Suspended particulate matter;
• Water turbidity;
• Water-leaving reflectance;
• Sentinel-3;

No Sources Found