case study work from home

More From Forbes

3 new studies end debate over effectiveness of hybrid and remote work.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Experts say hybrid and remote working are signs of the future, and new science-backed studies show ... [+] mental health benefits to "the new normal."

The debate over remote and hybrid work continues to grow. Some companies resisted, and iron-fisted leaders pulled the old hat trick (“It’s your job to work hard and deal with stress, so grin and bear it.”), arguing against the concept of remote work. Others cited productivity concerns and tactical problems that limited a supervisor’s ability to observe and coach employees. A handful of business leaders pushed back. Josh Feast, CEO of Cognito Corporation, argued that supervisors could find innovative ways to connect with and manage workers from afar “by ensuring their colleagues feel heard and know they are not alone. Exhibiting heightened sensitivity to emotional intelligence—particularly in a time where physical isolation has become a necessity—is vital.” Alice Hricak, managing principal of corporate interiors at Perkins and Will, said working from home showcases new approaches and debunks old ideas that it leads to low productivity, less visibility and little opportunity for collaboration.

What Does The Scientific Data Show?

To resolve the debate, it’s time to go beyond subjective opinion and look at the objective science. David Powell, president of Prodoscore said their data showed that if an employee was highly productive in-office, they’ll be productive at home; if an employee slacked off at the office, they’ll do the same a home. “After evaluating over 105 million data points from 30,000 U.S.-based Prodoscore users, we discovered a five percent increase in productivity during the pandemic work from home period,” he said. “Although, as we know, any variant of the Covid-19 virus is unpredictable, employee productivity is not.”

Two studies in early 2022 validated the views of remote/hybrid work advocates. Research from Owl Labs found that remote and hybrid employees were 22% happier than workers in an onsite office environment and stayed in their jobs longer. Plus, remote workers had less stress, more focus and were more productive than when they toiled in the office. Working from home led to better work/life balance and was more beneficial for the physical and mental well-being of employees.

A study from Ergotron sampled 1,000 full-time workers. It found that as workers become more acclimated to hybrid and remote office environments since the onset of Covid-19, the hybrid workplace model has empowered employees to reclaim physical health, and they are seeing mental health benefits, too.   A total of 56% of employees cited mental health improvements, better work-life balance and more physical activity. Key highlights from the study include:

• Job Satisfaction. Continuing to embrace flexibility is essential. Most employees (88%) agree that the flexibility to work from home or the office has increased their job satisfaction.
• Physical health. The hybrid workplace has empowered employees to reclaim physical health. Three-quarters of respondents (75%) stated that they move more frequently and have a more active work style when working remotely.
• Work-life balance . Three quarters of respondents say their work-life balance has improved as a result of hybrid or remote working. Even though some employees are dedicating more time to their work, if they’re able to fit it in and around other aspects of their lives, they say they feel the positive effects of a better work-life balance.
• Comfortable work environments. Of the workers surveyed, 62% said improved workspaces with comfortable, ergonomic furniture are important and improve company culture. 
• Wellness programs. More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) revealed that their employers implemented wellness programs to support mental and physical health, with 30% of those being brand new since the onset of the pandemic.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024.

“Promoting health and wellness among employees can improve well-being and productivity,” said Chad Severson, CEO of Ergotron. “Over the past two years, employees have adapted to the hybrid and remote work landscape—and they now prefer it. As employers look to attract and retain talent, focusing on practices that promote well-being and help employees thrive wherever they work will be critical.”

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

• Wellness Platform
• Health Content
• Health Coaching
• Wellness Services
• Health Fairs

Thrive Account

• Tobacco Cessation
• Single Challenge
• All Resources

Events & Webinars

Research hub, 2024 employee wellness industry trends.

Lifestyle Spending Account: Comprehensive Guide & Top Providers

Wellable: Employee Wellness, Reimagined

Wellable weekly: latest insights for a thriving workplace.

Wellness Program Comparative Analysis

• Why Wellable
• Lifestyle Spending Account
• Health Plans
• Wellness Program 101
• Events & Webinars
• Wellable Blog

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.

Other Articles In Future of Work

A Guide To Ergonomics In The Workplace

15 Company Retreat Ideas To Unite Your Team

The Importance Of Employee Well-Being In The Workplace

A Guide To Financial Wellness Programs For Employees

How To Start A Wellness Program At Work

6 Strategies To Motivate Your Employees To Engage In Wellness Programs

A Guide To Small Business Wellness Programs In 2024

Summer Wellness Challenges For The Workplace

How To Budget For Workplace Wellness: Affordable, High-Impact Strategies

Global Running Day: Fun Activities & Best Practices For The Workplace

Why working from home should be standard practice

Share this idea.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

And if your boss is on the fence, here’s a compelling case study — from economics professor Nicholas Bloom — to show her.

Quick — imagine a person working from home. If you pictured somebody in pajamas watching videos on their laptop, you’re not alone. “Many people think of working from home as shirking from home,” says Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom ( TEDxStanford Talk: Go ahead, tell your boss you are working from home ).

But Bloom thought there had to be more to telecommuting than binge-watching Netflix. The professor — who co-directs the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the US’s National Bureau of Economic Research — had worked from home at a previous job, and he recognized that it’s becoming more and more common around the world. In the US, the number of employees who telecommute has tripled over the past 30 years, although it’s still only 2.4 percent. “Out of the 150 million Americans who work, that means roughly 3.6 million Americans work from home,” says Bloom. However, in developing countries — where mobile technology and improving digital connectivity have coincided with congestion and skyrocketing rents in cities — between 10 and 20 percent of employees work remotely at least part of the time.

He found few unbiased studies on the subject . “Everything I saw was pro-working from home and put out by people who were for it from the outset. The people against it have stayed quiet,” Bloom says. Plus, it’s not an easy subject to investigate. “It requires close monitoring and enough participants to fill experimental and control groups, and the participants need to be willing to continue with the experiment for an extended period of time,” Bloom explains. Finally, researchers must find a company that is willing to experiment with their workers.

Fortunately, Bloom knew someone with access to the critical elements. In his graduate economics class was James Liang, cofounder and CEO of Ctrip , China’s largest travel agency, with a workforce of 16,000. “One day while James and I were talking, he mentioned Ctrip was interested in allowing its Shanghai employees to work from home,” Bloom says. Office space in the Chinese megacity was expensive, and the company was experiencing high attrition rates, in part due to workers getting priced out of living in the city center and having to endure long, difficult commutes. But without hard data to inform their decision, the company was reluctant to make dramatic changes to their telecommuting policy.

Bloom and Liang designed a randomized controlled trial to put remote work to the test. More than 500 employees in the company’s call center volunteered, and about half met the study qualifications, which included having a private room at home from which to work, having been at Ctrip for at least six months, and decent broadband access. Those with even-numbered birthdays were selected to telecommute four days per week; those with odd-numbered birthdays remained in the office as a control group.

Would employees be able to resist the three main pitfalls of being at home: the bed, the TV and the fridge? Adding to managers’ concern was the fact that call center workers are among the youngest in the company, and they might be especially prone to distraction without in-person supervision. The study lasted for nine months, and Bloom guessed the experiment would basically break even in terms of benefits and drawbacks.

When they reviewed the results , Ctrip management and Bloom were stunned. “It was unbelievable. Ctrip saved $1,900 per employee over the course of the study on office space, and we knew this would happen,” Bloom says. “But to our amazement, the work-from-home employees were far from goofing off — they increased productivity by 13.5 percent over those working in the office. That’s like getting an extra day’s work from each employee.” The people working from home also reported shorter breaks and fewer sick days and took less time off.

The gains went beyond productivity — attrition rates among the at-home group were 50 percent lower than those who worked in the office. In interviews with researchers, the remote employees also reported higher job satisfaction. Still, to the surprise of Ctrip management, more than half of the volunteer group changed their minds about working from home — they felt too much isolation. And for a number of them, being at home was not alone enough . “Some of the employees who lived with their parents were quite ready to get back to the office,” reports Bloom.

Bottom line: the study shows that companies have little to lose — and much to gain — by allowing employees to work from home. “My advice for companies who are curious is to examine different ways to do it,” Bloom says. Some options: it could be offered on a contingency basis when severe weather events are forecast, or for summer days when people’s children are out of school; it could be given on an individual, probationary basis; it could be part of a promotion; or it could be granted in lieu of a raise or a bonus. And if productivity falls, an employee can return to being in the office full-time.

One or two days a week is probably the ideal amount of time to work from home, suggests Bloom. “You don’t want to go much higher because you risk jeopardizing the cohesion of your team.” As companies compete to hire and retain the best employees, being able to offer the option to work from home can sweeten the deal. “The need to go into a workplace five days a week started because people had to go to a factory and make products,” he says. “But companies that still treat employees like that are increasingly finding themselves at a disadvantage.”

About the author

Ari Surdoval is a writer, editor and content strategist, and the founder of Spoonful Communications a boutique strategic communications and content creation agency. He lives in Nashville with his wife, two children and an ever-expanding pack of rescued animals.

• future of work
• the way we work
• thriving at work
• work life balance

TED Talk of the Day

How to make radical climate action the new normal

3 strategies for effective leadership, from a former astronaut

Feeling unseen by your boss? Here’s what you can do 

Let’s stop calling them “soft skills” -- and call them “real skills” instead

There’s a know-it-all at every job — here’s how to deal

The 7 types of people you need in your life to be resilient

Perfectionism holding you back? 3 ways to shift the habit

The unseen forces that can cause your great new idea to crash and burn

Have you quietly quit? Your next step: Go to the neutral zone

6 ways to give that aren't about money

Working from home and feel like you're working all the time here’s what to do.

Is empathy overrated?

Desperate to quit your job? Read this first.

The dark side of charisma

Along with Stanford news and stories, show me:

• Student information
• Faculty/Staff information

We want to provide announcements, events, leadership messages and resources that are relevant to you. Your selection is stored in a browser cookie which you can remove at any time using “Clear all personalization” below.

• Research led by Nicholas Bloom shows that employees who work from home for two days a week are just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers.
• The study found that hybrid work had zero effect on workers’ productivity or career advancement and dramatically boosted retention rates.

It is one of the most hotly debated topics in today’s workplace: Is allowing employees to log in from home a few days a week good for their productivity, careers, and job satisfaction?

Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist and one of the foremost researchers on work-from-home policies, has uncovered compelling evidence that hybrid schedules are a boon to both employees and their bosses. 

In a study, newly published in the journal Nature , of an experiment on more than 1,600 workers at Trip.com – a Chinese company that is one of the world’s largest online travel agencies – Bloom finds that employees who work from home for two days a week are just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers.

On a third key measure, employee turnover, the results were also encouraging. Resignations fell by 33% among workers who shifted from working full-time in the office to a hybrid schedule. Women, non-managers, and employees with long commutes were the least likely to quit their jobs when their treks to the office were cut to three days a week. Trip.com estimates that reduced attrition saved the company millions of dollars. 

“The results are clear: Hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention,” says Bloom, who is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

The findings are especially significant given that, by Bloom’s count, about 100 million workers worldwide now spend a mix of days at home and in the office each week, more than four years after COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns upended how and where people do their jobs. Many of these hybrid workers are lawyers, accountants, marketers, software engineers, and others with a college degree or higher. 

Over time, though, working outside the office has come under attack from high-profile business leaders like Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who argue that the costs of remote work outweigh any benefits. Opponents say that employee training and mentoring, innovation, and company culture suffer when workers are not on-site five days a week.

Blooms says that critics often confuse hybrid for fully remote, in part because most of the research into working from home has focused on workers who aren’t required to come into an office and on a specific type of job, like customer support or data entry. The results of these studies have been mixed, though they tend to skew negative. This suggests to Bloom that problems with fully remote work arise when it’s not managed well.

As one of the few randomized control trials to analyze hybrid arrangements – where workers are offsite two or three days a week and are in the office the rest of the time – Bloom says his findings offer important lessons for other multinationals, many of which share similarities with Trip.com.

“This study offers powerful evidence for why 80% of U.S. companies now offer some form of remote work,” Bloom says, “and for why the remaining 20% of firms that don’t are likely paying a price.”

The research is also the largest to date of hybrid work involving university-trained professionals that rely on the gold standard in research, the randomized controlled trial. This allowed Bloom and his co-authors to show that the benefits they identified resulted from Trip.com’s hybrid experiment and not something else.

In addition to Bloom, the study’s authors are Ruobing Han, an assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and James Liang, an economics professor at Peking University and co-founder of Trip.com. Han and Liang both earned their PhDs in economics from Stanford.

The hybrid approach: Only winners

Trip.com didn’t have a hybrid work policy when it undertook the six-month experiment starting in 2021 that is at the heart of the study. In all, 395 managers and 1,217 non-managers with undergraduate degrees – all of whom worked in engineering, marketing, accounting, and finance in the company’s Shanghai office – participated. Employees whose birthdays fell on an even-numbered day of the month were told to come to the office five days a week. Workers with odd-numbered birthdays were allowed to work from home two days a week.

Of the study participants, 32% also had postgraduate degrees, mostly in computer science, accounting, or finance. Most were in their mid-30s, half had children, and 65% were male. 

In finding that hybrid work not only helps employees, but also companies, the researchers relied on various company data and worker surveys, including performance reviews and promotions for up to two years after the experiment. Trip.com’s thorough performance review process includes evaluations of an employee’s contributions to innovation, leadership, and mentoring. 

The study authors also compared the quality and amount of computer code written by Trip.com software engineers who were hybrid against code produced by peers who were in the office full-time.

In finding that hybrid work had zero effect on workers’ productivity or career advancement and dramatically boosted retention rates, the study authors highlight some important nuances. Resignations, for example, fell only among non-managers; managers were just as likely to quit whether they were hybrid or not.

Bloom and his co-authors identify misconceptions held by workers and their bosses. Workers, especially women, were reluctant to sign up as volunteers for Trip.com’s hybrid trial – likely for fear that they would be judged negatively for not coming into the office five days a week, Bloom says. In addition, managers predicted on average that remote working would hurt productivity, only to change their minds by the time the experiment ended. 

For business leaders, Bloom says the study confirms that concerns that hybrid work does more harm than good are overblown.

“If managed right, letting employees work from home two or three days a week still gets you the level of mentoring, culture-building, and innovation that you want,” Bloom says. “From an economic policymaking standpoint, hybrid work is one of the few instances where there aren’t major trade-offs with clear winners and clear losers. There are almost only winners.”

Trip.com was sold: It now allows hybrid work companywide.

[email protected]

Advertisement

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

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

Cite this article

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

9510 Accesses

39 Citations

3 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

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.

Article PDF

Download to read the full article text

Similar content being viewed by others

Satisfaction and performance of software developers during enforced work from home in the COVID-19 pandemic

To Work from Home (WFH) or Not to Work from Home? Lessons Learned by Software Engineers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Predictors of well-being and productivity among software professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic – a longitudinal study

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Shin B, El Sawy O A, Sheng O R L, et al. Telework: existing research and future directions. J Organ Comput Electron Commer, 2000, 10: 85–101

Article   Google Scholar  

Spark R. Accessibility to work from home for the disabled: the need for a shift in management style. In: Proceedings of the 14th Web for All Conference on the Future of Accessible Work, 2017. 1–4

Hill E J, Ferris M, Märtinson V. Does it matter where you work? A comparison of how three work venues (traditional office, virtual office, and home office) influence aspects of work and personal/family life. J Vocat Behav, 2003, 63: 220–241

Meyer A N, Barton L E, Murphy G C, et al. The work life of developers: activities, switches and perceived productivity. IIEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2017, 43: 1178–1193

Wolf T, Schroter A, Damian D, et al. Predicting build failures using social network analysis on developer communication. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, 2009. 1–11

Neufeld D J, Fang Y. Predicting telecommuter productivity. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004

Neufeld D J, Fang Y. Individual, social and situational determinants of telecommuter productivity. Inf Manage, 2005, 42: 1037–1049

Baker E, Avery G C, Crawford J. Satisfaction and perceived productivity when professionals work from home. Res Practice Human Resour Manag, 2007, 15: 37–62

Google Scholar  

Laihonen H, Jääskeläinen A, Lönnqvist A, et al. Measuring the productivity impacts of new ways of working. J Facil Manage, 2012, 10: 102–113

Campbell K M. Flexible work schedules, virtual work programs, and employee productivity. Dissertation for Ph.D. Degree. Minneapolis: Walden University, 2015

Kamei Y, Shihab E, Adams B, et al. A large-scale empirical study of just-in-time quality assurance. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2013, 39: 757–773

Walston C E, Felix C P. A method of programming measurement and estimation. IBM Syst J, 1977, 16: 54–73

Devanbu P, Karstu S, Melo W, et al. Analytical and empirical evaluation of software reuse metrics. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1996. 189–199

Nguyen V, Huang L, Boehm B. An analysis of trends in productivity and cost drivers over years. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering, 2011. 1–10

Xia X, Bao L F, Lo D, et al. Measuring program comprehension: a large-scale field study with professionals. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2018, 44: 951–976

von Krogh G, Spaeth S, Lakhani K R. Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study. Res Policy, 2003, 32: 1217–1241

Bao L F, Xia X, Lo D, et al. A large scale study of long-time contributor prediction for GitHub projects. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2021, 47: 1277–1298

Melo C, Cruzes D S, Kon F, et al. Agile team perceptions of productivity factors. In: Proceedings of AGILE Conference, 2011. 57–66

Meyer A N, Fritz T, Murphy G C, et al. Software developers’ perceptions of productivity. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, 2014. 19–29

Paiva E, Barbosa D, Lima R, et al. Factors that influence the productivity of software developers in a developer view. In: Proceedings of Innovations in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering, 2010. 99–104

Zhou Y M, Leung H, Xu B W. Examining the potentially confounding effect of class size on the associations between object-oriented metrics and change-proneness. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2009, 35: 607–623

Wilcoxon F. Individual comparisons by ranking methods. Biometrics Bull, 1945, 1: 80–83

Cliff N. Ordinal Methods for Behavioral Data Analysis. London: Psychology Press, 2014

Book   Google Scholar  

Coenen M, Kok R A W. Workplace flexibility and new product development performance: the role of telework and flexible work schedules. Eur Manage J, 2014, 32: 564–576

Kazekami S. Mechanisms to improve labor productivity by performing telework. TeleCommun Policy, 2020, 44: 101868

Yan M, Xia X, Lo D, et al. Characterizing and identifying reverted commits. Empir Softw Eng, 2019, 24: 2171–2208

Nilles J M. Making Telecommuting Happen: A Guide for Telemanagers and Telecommuters. New York: van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994

Kurkland N B, Bailey D E. The advantages and challenges of working here, there anywhere, and anytime. Organ Dyn, 1999, 28: 53–68

Pérez M P, Sánchez A M, de Luis Carnicer M P. Benefits and barriers of telework: perception differences of human resources managers according to company’s operations strategy. Technovation, 2002, 22: 775–783

Felstead A, Henseke G. Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well-being and work-life balance. New Tech Work Employ, 2017, 32: 195–212

Aguilera A, Lethiais V, Rallet A, et al. Home-based telework in France: characteristics, barriers and perspectives. Transpation Res Part A-Policy Practice, 2016, 92: 1–11

Ford D, Milewicz R, Serebrenik A. How remote work can foster a more inclusive environment for transgender developers. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering (GE), 2019. 9–12

Perry D E, Staudenmayer N A, Votta L G. People, organizations, and process improvement. IEEE Softw, 1994, 11: 36–45

Bailey B P, Konstan J A, Carlis J V. The effects of interruptions on task performance, annoyance, and anxiety in the user interface. In: Proceedings of INTERACT, 2001. 593–601

Chong J, Siino R. Interruptions on software teams: a comparison of paired and solo programmers. In: Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2006. 29–38

Czerwinski M, Horvitz E, Wilhite S. A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In: Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2004. 175–182

Horvitz E C M C E. Notification, disruption, and memory: effects of messaging interruptions on memory and performance. In: Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction: INTERACT, 2001

Parnin C, DeLine R. Evaluating cues for resuming interrupted programming tasks. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010. 93–102

van Solingen R, Berghout E, van Latum F. Interrupts: just a minute never is. IEEE Softw, 1998, 15: 97–103

Sanchez H, Robbes R, Gonzalez V M. An empirical study of work fragmentation in software evolution tasks. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), 2015. 251–260

Albrecht A J. Measuring application development productivity. In: Proceedings of IBM Applications Development Joint SHARE/GUIDE Symposium, 1979

Minelli R, Mocci A, Lanza M. I know what you did last summer-an investigation of how developers spend their time. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension, 2015. 25–35

Cataldo M, Herbsleb J D, Carley K M. Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2008. 2–11

DeMarco T, Lister T. Programmer performance and the effects of the workplace. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1985. 268–272

Boehm B W. Improving software productivity. Computer, 1987, 20: 43–57

Vasilescu B, Blincoe K, Xuan Q, et al. The sky is not the limit: multitasking across github projects. In: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2016. 994–1005

Khan I A, Brinkman W P, Hierons R M. Do moods affect programmers’ debug performance? Cogn Technol Work, 2011, 13: 245–258

Meyer A N, Zimmermann T, Fritz T. Characterizing software developers by perceptions of productivity. In: Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2017. 105–110

Ralph P, Baltes S, Adisaputri G, et al. Pandemic programming: how COVID-19 affects software developers and how their organizations can help. 2020. ArXiv:2005.01127

Download references

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).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

Lingfeng Bao & Xiaohu Yang

Baidu Inc., Beijing, 100085, China

Tao Li, Kaiyu Zhu & Hui Li

Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xin Xia .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

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

Download citation

Received : 18 December 2020

Revised : 10 March 2021

Accepted : 19 May 2021

Published : 14 March 2022

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

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• developer productivity
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Newsletters
• Best Industries
• Business Plans
• Home-Based Business
• The UPS Store
• Customer Service
• Black in Business
• Your Next Move
• Female Founders
• Best Workplaces
• Company Culture
• Public Speaking
• HR/Benefits
• Productivity
• All the Hats
• Digital Transformation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Bringing Innovation to Market
• Cloud Computing
• Social Media
• Data Detectives
• Exit Interview
• Bootstrapping
• Crowdfunding
• Venture Capital
• Business Models
• Personal Finance
• Founder-Friendly Investors
• Upcoming Events
• Inc. 5000 Vision Conference
• Become a Sponsor
• Cox Business
• Verizon Business
• Branded Content
• Apply Inc. 5000 US

Inc. Premium

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

Privacy Policy

5 spots left: Last chance to join our upcoming Masterclass, starting on 24 September.

The Business Case For Remote Work

Global Workplace Analytics published a comprehensive report on the benefits to employers, employees, the environment, and society. The findings are crystal clear: remote work is here to stay.

Learning from the pandemic

The report , titled 'The business case for remote work', draws from a wide range of research papers and surveys and provides an interesting insight into the potential benefits of sustained remote work.

Many like to make the conversation about remote work black or white— either everyone is in the office, or everyone is remote. This is both shortsighted and unwise.

Why? Because as with many things in life, beauty lies in the balance.

Consider this: Roughly 95 percent of U.S. office workers worked from their homes for three or more days a week during the pandemic. Ninety-five freaking percent. That’s basically one big test case that most everyone was forced to participate in, to an extent.

And guess what? 82 percent of the workers surveyed said they’d like to keep working remotely at least once per week after the pandemic is over. On the other hand, a slightly insignificant (and probably robotic) three percent said they’d rather forgo working remotely post-pandemic. Okay.

Anyway, at the same time, less than a fifth (19 percent) say they want to work fully remote. The majority prefer a mix of both. In the U.S., the preference averages out to be 2.5 days a week.

Why? Because they are fearful that a fully remote approach would likely lead to the erosion of the established work culture at that business. This notion seems a bit blah at first, but moving from fully on-premises to fully remote can actually make it more difficult for these companies to onboard new employees, make things harder for parents who have young children running all over the place and screaming at home, and even deprive young employees of the subtle mentorship and guidance that happens when they are physically around more experienced colleagues.

Luckily, remote work shouldn't be a problem for many. The benefits for those with remote-compatible jobs (45 percent) are omnipresent and can be summarized into three categories: those for employees, employers, and environment & society.

Employee benefits

Employees who can work remotely at least a few times a week—and actually want to—can preserve three valuable commodities: time, money, and their health.

1. More time

Aside from being liberated from the need to wear pants, the first thing most people think about when toying with the idea of working from home is the elimination of the daily commute—which is potentially a massive time-saver for many.

Think about it. U.S. workers spend the equivalent of 28 days a year commuting. Imagine spending the entire month of a non-leap year February stuck in a perpetual commute. Working remotely even half the time would shave off 14 of those days, leaving you with just a half of a February spent commuting.

Roughly 20 percent of non-remote workers have it even worse: their one-way commutes exceed an hour a day, equating to 60 days a year. Half-time remote work would lop off a full 30 days of being stuck in traffic, which most would surely take unless they have an inherent affinity for red lights, subways, and bus stops.

What would you do with an extra 14-30 days’ worth of hours each year? Well, you can do whatever you want, obviously, but it definitely won’t be spent in traffic.

2. More money

Yes, reducing the commute also means having more money in the bank.

By working from home half the time, a typical worker can save anywhere from $640 to $6,400 a year by reducing their spending on things like transportation, parking, gas, work clothes (and dry cleaning), food, and serendipity spending on stuff like gifts, impulsive lunchtime shopping, etc. Just whatever you spend by going into work, cut it in half in this scenario; that’s the point.

Oh, and these hypothetical figures account for increased utility bills and food at home, in case you were about to bust out a “well, actually” in response.

Depending on their situations, some workers could further reduce costs by:

• Selling their car
• Negotiating a new auto insurance premium (since they won’t be commuting as much)
• Moving to a different, less expensive area that’s not as close to their physical workplace
• Lowering any daycare, after-school, or eldercare costs

Whatever your work situation is, staying home half the time presents multiple opportunities to save some cash.

3. Better health

More remote work doesn't just bring in more time and money, it also benefits the health of employees.

Not that you need a study to really prove this, but long commutes have been linked to higher levels of stress (surprise), increased anxiety and depression, higher risks of heart issues like hypertension, increased obesity, and really just poor heart health in general. All of this, simply from long commutes.

Here are some stats gleaned from what surveyed remote workers say:

• 77% report having a better work/life balance between
• 69% report an improvement to their well-being—due to factors like more sleep and less stress
• 54% report eating healthier
• 48% report exercising more often

Employer benefits

The fact that employees benefit from policy change is, in most companies, not enough to actually make a change happen. However, when employers benefit from more money, more time, and more productivity, all of a sudden, an interest to change is sparked.

Luckily, for remote work, that's the case. So let’s discuss three of the most important ones.

1. Reduced office costs

Let's start with the three biggest reasons as to why company leaders enact change: money, money, money.

An employer that shells out $7,700 per employee, per year for their hallowed office space would save nearly $2k per half-time remote worker per year. How? By simply reducing their real estate footprint by a measly 25 percent for each half-time remote worker on staff. And as for the most expensive cities in the U.S.? The savings would increase by a factor of nearly five times that amount.

While there's some extra cost involved for giving stipends to purchase home office equipment, better tools, and stuff like that (around $666 per remote worker per year), there's still quite a lot to be saved.

So yes, it’s true that employers may implement remote work as a strategy to cut costs, but many see that the true value of remote work centers on human capital benefits.

You’re clearly intrigued, so let's look at some of those.

2. Increased productivity

Another one of those favorite yardsticks for success: productivity. Even in those terms, remote work gets shit done. Again, let’s turn to those who were surveyed:

• Remote workers said they gained an average of 35 working minutes a day due to fewer interruptions at their home (as opposed to constant interruptions at an office).
• Remote workers also reported voluntarily working an average of 47 percent of the time they would have otherwise spent stuck in their typical commute. That’s an additional seven days per year of good ‘ol productivity.

When considering these two factors, a half-time remote worker increases their productivity by the equivalent of 16 workdays a year.

Productivity, productivity, productivity. Every employer and C-suite type just loves increased productivity. And remote work increases it—which means they should love remote work.

Because productivity.

3. Reduced absenteeism

Here’s a fact: Most workers who call in sick are extremely not sick. Statistics show that nearly 70 percent of unplanned work absences are actually due to personal situations, family issues, stress, or being literally sick of work. Sick of work to the point of calling in sick to work.

That’s an astounding number. Depressing, even.

Fortunately, remote work reduces absenteeism because remote workers:

• Are not as exposed to sick coworkers who still come into work
• Limit their exposure to occupational and environmental risks
• Are still capable of working—even if they don’t feel well enough to physically show up at work
• Can handle personal appointments without the need to take the entire day or half-day off
• Lessen the stresses that come from commuting, interruptions, and all the standard office politics bullshit
• Tend to sleep better (and longer), eat healthier, and exercise more

Plenty of case studies have shown that the option to work remotely can reduce absenteeism anywhere from 26 percent to 88 percent. That’s actually kind of a hilarious window between two figures, but even the bottom number of 26 percent is a vast improvement.

When adding and subtracting some more numbers (details here ), the report concludes as follows:

"[A] typical U.S. employer can save $11,000 a year for each half-time (2 to 3 day a week) remote worker. That’s over $1M for every thousand employees!"

What's not to love?!

Environmental & societal benefits

But wait, there's more! We do, as they say, live in a society. Thankfully, the potential benefits of remote work for the environment—and society in general—are just as abundant.

Let’s examine a few. Remote work might help to:

• Decrease the risks stemming from human congestion
• Decrease wear and tear on a city’s transportation infrastructure
• Increase productivity among even non-remote workers by cutting down their travel times (and shortening their commutes)
• Reduce travel, even more, thanks to the widespread use of virtual-based tech
• Encourage a fuller, more robust employment for the disabled who can work from home
• Increase the standard of living in rural and economically disadvantaged areas
• Revitalize cities by reducing congestion and traffic and all the problems that come from them—such as dissuading visitors and tourists
• Make a bigger dent in the housing crisis by repurposing unneeded office spaces into residential buildings

We rest our case

The case is clear: let's make the option of remote work available to any and all remote-compatible jobs out there. All of the associated myths and concerns people had with the prospect of an increase of remote work has proven to be typical hysteria about nothing.

The bottom line is this: we can improve the lives of employees while benefiting employers. This is an actual thing that can happen and IS happening already. Oh, and don’t forget, both the environment and society benefit too. No big deal.

This is not hard. Everyone wins with remote work. Literally, everyone.

And with that, we rest our case.

Download: New Ways Of Working Guide

Unlock our in-depth guide spotlighting trends, tools, and best practices from over 150 pioneering organizations.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Download: Free Guide

Unlock our in-depth guide on trends, tools, and best practices from over 150 pioneering organizations.

Subscribe below and receive it directly in your inbox.

We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at any time.

Americans are embracing flexible work—and they want more of it

Get the latest.

July 10, 2024

In the time since we first published this article, McKinsey has continued to explore the topic. Read on for a summary of our latest insights.

“How often do you go into the office?” Today, this question typifies the postpandemic era, just as the phrases “social distancing” and “PCR test” did in 2020. The answer? Probably more than you did during those early days of reentry after the pandemic’s peak, but probably less than you did in 2019.

Our research shows that hybrid work is here to stay . Office attendance remains roughly 30 percent lower than it was before the pandemic. Attendance is especially low in metropolitan areas like London, New York, and San Francisco with large shares of knowledge-economy workers and expensive housing. In these markets, when employees do go into the office, the primary reason is to connect with their teams.

But can remote work be productive work? That depends on whom you ask. Eighty-three percent of employees we surveyed cite the ability to work more efficiently and productively as a primary benefit of working remotely. Our research indicates that even fully remote companies   with the right operating models can outperform their in-person peers  on organizational health. But many companies see this quite differently : only half of HR leaders say employee productivity is a primary benefit of working remotely.

According to Nicholas Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, there is a productivity benefit from what he calls “ well-organized hybrid ” work environments. In this scenario, everybody comes into the office on the same days, allowing employees to maximize their time together. When you factor in the time saved from not having to commute, as well as the benefit of working in a quieter and more controlled home environment, the result, says Bloom, is a productivity improvement of up to 5 percent . (Of course, some homes are quieter and more controlled than others.)

Who values workplace flexibility the most? The majority of employees say that the opportunity to work remotely is a top company benefit. Both women and men cite less fatigue and burnout as a benefit of hybrid and remote work. But women, particularly those with childcare duties, continue to prize it more. In fact, 38 percent  of mothers with young children say that without workplace flexibility they would have had to reduce their work hours or leave their companies.

Many organizations are still trying to find the right balance as they attempt to create true hybrid work models. This may be because they are hesitant to expend the financial and leadership resources necessary to create magnetic and inclusive work environments. But the potential upsides—including real estate savings, a more diverse and inclusive workforce, and improved employee satisfaction and performance—may be well worth the effort .

Articles referenced include:

• Women in the Workplace 2023 , October 2023
• How hybrid work has changed the way people work, live, and shop , July 2023
• Is your workplace ready for flexible work? A survey offers clues , June 2023
• Forward Thinking on how to get remote working right with Nicholas Bloom , February 2023

When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered workplaces nationwide, society was plunged into an unplanned experiment in work from home. Nearly two-and-a-half years on, organizations worldwide have created new working norms  that acknowledge that flexible work is no longer a temporary pandemic response but an enduring feature of the modern working world.

About the survey

This article is based on a 25-minute, online-only Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of McKinsey between March 15 and April 18, 2022. A sample of 25,062 adults aged 18 and older from the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii was interviewed online in English and Spanish. To better reflect the population of the United States as a whole, post hoc weights were made to the population characteristics on gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, region, and metropolitan status. Given the limitations of online surveys, 1 “Internet surveys,” Pew Research Center. it is possible that biases were introduced because of undercoverage or nonresponse. People with lower incomes, less education, people living in rural areas, or people aged 65 and older are underrepresented among internet users and those with high-speed internet access.

The third edition of McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey  provides us with data on how flexible work fits into the lives of a representative cross section of workers in the United States. McKinsey worked alongside the market-research firm Ipsos to query 25,000 Americans in spring 2022 (see sidebar, “About the survey”).

The most striking figure to emerge from this research is 58 percent. That’s the number of Americans who reported having the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week. 1 Many of the survey questions asked respondents about their ability or desire to “work from home.” “Work from home” is sometimes called “remote work,” while arrangements that allow for both remote and in-office work are often interchangeably labeled “hybrid” or “flexible” arrangements. We prefer the term flexible, which acknowledges that home is only one of the places where work can be accomplished and because it encompasses a variety of arrangements, whereas hybrid implies an even split between office and remote work. Thirty-five percent of respondents report having the option to work from home five days a week. What makes these numbers particularly notable is that respondents work in all kinds of jobs, in every part of the country and sector of the economy, including traditionally labeled “blue collar” jobs that might be expected to demand on-site labor as well as “white collar” professions.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by André Dua , Kweilin Ellingrud , Phil Kirschner , Adrian Kwok, Ryan Luby, Rob Palter , and Sarah Pemberton as part of ongoing McKinsey research to understand the perceptions of and barriers to economic opportunity in America. The following represents the perspectives of McKinsey’s Real Estate and People & Organizational Performance Practices.

Another of the survey’s revelations: when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it. This dynamic is widespread across demographics, occupations, and geographies. The flexible working world was born of a frenzied reaction to a sudden crisis but has remained as a desirable job feature for millions. This represents a tectonic shift in where, when, and how Americans want to work and are working.

The following six charts examine the following:

• the number of people offered flexible working arrangements either part- or full-time
• how many days a week employed people are offered and do work from home
• the gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and income of people working or desiring to work flexibly
• which occupations have the greatest number of remote workers and how many days a week they work remotely
• how highly employees rank flexible working arrangements as a reason to seek a new job
• impediments to working effectively for people who work remotely all the time, part of the time, or not at all

Flexible work’s implications for employees and employers—as well as for real estate, transit, and technology, to name a few sectors—are vast and nuanced and demand contemplation.

1. Thirty-five percent of job holders can work from home full-time, and 23 percent can do so part-time

A remarkable 58 percent of employed respondents—which, extrapolated from the representative sample, is equivalent to 92 million people from a cross section of jobs and employment types—report having the option to work from home for all or part of the week. After more than two years of observing remote work and predicting that flexible working would endure  after the acute phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, we view these data as a confirmation that there has been a major shift in the working world and in society itself.

We did not ask about flexible work in our American Opportunity Survey in past years, but an array of other studies indicate that flexible working has grown by anywhere from a third to tenfold since 2019. 1 Rachel Minkin et al., “How the coronavirus outbreak has—and hasn’t—changed the way Americans work,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2020; “Telework during the COVID-19 pandemic: Estimates using the 2021 Business Response Survey,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, March 2022.

Thirty-five percent of respondents say they can work from home full-time. Another 23 percent can work from home from one to four days a week. A mere 13 percent of employed respondents say they could work remotely at least some of the time but opt not to.

Forty-one percent of employed respondents don’t have the choice. This may be because not all work can be done remotely  or because employers simply demand on-site work. Given workers’ desire for flexibility, employers may have to explore ways to offer the flexibility employees want  to compete for talent effectively.

2. When offered, almost everyone takes the opportunity to work flexibly

The results of the survey showed that not only is flexible work popular, with 80 million Americans engaging in it (when the survey results are extrapolated to the wider population), but many want to work remotely for much of the week when given the choice.

Eighty-seven percent of workers offered at least some remote work embrace the opportunity and spend an average of three days a week working from home. People offered full-time flexible work spent a bit more time working remotely, on average, at 3.3 days a week. Interestingly, 12 percent of respondents whose employers only offer part-time or occasional remote work say that even they worked from home for five days a week. This contradiction appears indicative of a tension between how much flexibility employers offer and what employees demand .

3. Most employees want flexibility, but the averages hide the critical differences

There’s remarkable consistency among people of different genders, ethnicities, ages, and educational and income levels: the vast majority of those who can work from home do so. In fact, they just want more flexibility: although 58 percent of employed respondents say they can work from home at least part of the time, 65 percent of employed respondents say they would be willing to do so all the time.

However, the opportunity is not uniform: there was a large difference in the number of employed men who say they were offered remote-working opportunities (61 percent) and women (52 percent). At every income level, younger workers were more likely than older workers to report having work-from-home opportunities.

People who could but don’t work flexibly tend to be older (19 percent of 55- to 64-year-olds offered remote work didn’t take it, compared with 12 to 13 percent of younger workers) or have lower incomes (17 percent of those earning $25,000 to $74,999 per year who were offered remote work didn’t take it, compared with 10 percent of those earning over $75,000 a year). While some workers may choose to work on-site because they prefer the environment, others may feel compelled to because their home environments are not suitable, because they lack the skills and tools to work remotely productively, or because they believe there is an advantage to being on-site. Employers should be aware that different groups perceive and experience remote work differently and consider how flexible working fits with their diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies .

4. Most industries support some flexibility, but digital innovators demand it

The opportunity to work flexibly differs by industry and role within industries and has implications for companies competing for talent. For example, the vast majority of employed people in computer and mathematical occupations report having remote-work options, and 77 percent report being willing to work fully remotely. Because of rapid digital transformations across industries , even those with lower overall work-from-home patterns may find that the technologists they employ demand it.

A surprisingly broad array of professions offer remote-work arrangements. Half of respondents working in educational instruction and library occupations and 45 percent of healthcare practitioners and workers in technical occupations say they do some remote work, perhaps reflecting the rise of online education and telemedicine. Even food preparation and transportation professionals said they do some work from home.

5. Job seekers highly value having autonomy over where and when they work

The survey asked people if they had hunted for a job recently or were planning to hunt for one. Unsurprisingly, the most common rationale for a job hunt was a desire for greater pay or more hours, followed by a search for better career opportunities. The third-most-popular reason was looking for a flexible working arrangement.

Prior McKinsey research has shown that for those that left the workforce during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, workplace flexibility was a top reason that they accepted new jobs . Employers should be aware that when a candidate is deciding between job offers with similar compensation, the opportunity to work flexibly can become the deciding factor.

6. Employees working flexibly report obstacles to peak performance

The survey asked respondents to identify what made it hard to perform their jobs effectively. Those working in a flexible model were most likely to report multiple obstacles, followed by those working fully remotely, and then by those working in the office. Our research doesn’t illuminate the cause and effect here: it could be that people who face barriers are more likely to spend some time working from home. It could also be that workers who experience both on-site and at-home work are exposed to the challenges of each and the costs of regularly switching contexts.

Some obstacles were reported at much higher rates by specific groups: for example, about 55 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds offered the option to work fully remotely say mental-health issues  impacted their ability to perform effectively, though only 17 percent of people aged 55 to 64 said the same. Workers with children at home  who were offered full-time remote-work options were far more likely than their peers without children to report that problems with physical health or a hostile work environment had a moderate or major impact on their job.

The results of the American Opportunity Survey reflect sweeping changes in the US workforce, including the equivalent of 92 million workers offered flexible work, 80 million workers engaged in flexible work, and a large number of respondents citing a search for flexible work as a major motivator to find a new job.

Competition for top performers and digital innovators demands that employers understand how much flexibility their talent pool is accustomed to and expects. Employers are wise to invest in technology, adapt policies, and train employees to create workplaces that integrate people working remotely and on-site (without overcompensating by requiring that workers spend too much time in video meetings ). The survey results identify obstacles to optimal performance that underscore a need for employers to support workers with issues that interfere with effective work. Companies will want to be thoughtful about which roles can be done partly or fully remotely—and be open to the idea that there could be more of these than is immediately apparent. Employers can define the right metrics and track them to make sure the new flexible model is working.

At a more macro level, a world in which millions of people no longer routinely commute has meaningful implications for the commercial core in big urban centers and for commercial real estate overall. Likewise, such a world implies a different calculus for where Americans will live and what types of homes they will occupy. As technology emerges that eliminates the residual barriers to more distributed and asynchronous work, it could become possible to move more types of jobs overseas, with potentially significant consequences.

In time, the full impact of flexible working will be revealed. Meanwhile, these data give us early insight into how the working world is evolving.

For more on the imperative for flexible work and how organizations can respond, please see McKinsey.com/featured-insights/ Future-of-the-workplace .

André Dua is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Miami office;  Kweilin Ellingrud is a senior partner in the Minneapolis office;  Phil Kirschner is a senior expert in the New York office, where Adrian Kwok is an associate partner and Ryan Luby is a senior expert; Rob Palter is a senior partner in the Toronto office; and Sarah Pemberton is a manager in the Hong Kong office.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

Hybrid work: Making it fit with your diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy

Workplace real estate in the COVID-19 era: From cost center to competitive advantage

This website uses cookies to ensure the best user experience. Privacy & Cookies Notice Accept Cookies

Manage My Cookies

Manage Cookie Preferences

Confirm My Selections

• Monetary Policy
• Health Care
• Climate Change
• Artificial Intelligence
• All Chicago Booth Review Topics

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.

More from Chicago Booth Review

Raghuram rajan: your doctor could be in india.

Chicago Booth’s Raghuram G. Rajan describes a path forward for India’s economy.

• CBR Podcast

How High Interest Rates Harm Innovation

Monetary policy decisions can have meaningful long-term effects.

• CBR - Monetary Policy

College Bests Benefits for Injured Workers

In Denmark, those who picked education benefits over disability payments got back to work within seven years, and with a 25 percent raise.

Related Topics

• CBR - Fall 2021
• CBR - Remote Work
• Coronavirus
• CBR - Coronavirus

More from Chicago Booth

Your Privacy We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice , which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Remote work

• Business management
• Work environments
• Hybrid work
• Office politics
• Workplace health and safety

Revitalizing Culture in the World of Hybrid Work

• Harvard Business Review
• From the November–December 2022 Issue

How to Become a Digital Nomad

• Rowena Hennigan
• February 08, 2023

GitLab's CEO on Building One of the World's Largest All-Remote Companies

• Sid Sijbrandij
• From the March–April 2023 Issue

How to Think Strategically About a Career Transition

• Herminia Ibarra
• Adi Ignatius
• September 08, 2023

Want to Move to a New State But Keep Your Job?

• Marlo Lyons
• October 21, 2021

Fostering a Culture of Belonging in the Hybrid Workplace

• Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic PhD.
• Katarina Berg
• August 03, 2021

Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson on Company Culture in a Distributed Office

• Paul Hudson
• November 12, 2021

Balancing Autonomy and Structure for Remote Employees

• Holger Reisinger
• Paul Sephton
• Dane Fetterer
• May 13, 2022

A Study of 1,100 Employees Found That Remote Workers Feel Shunned and Left Out

• Joseph Grenny
• David Maxfield
• November 02, 2017

Our Work-from-Anywhere Future

• Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury
• From the November–December 2020 Issue

How to Build Digital Dexterity Into Your Workforce

• Brian Kropp
• Alison Smith
• October 04, 2021

The Potential of Remote Health Monitoring at Work

• Patrick J. Skerrett
• December 09, 2009

In a Hybrid World, Your Tech Defines Employee Experience

• Brad Anderson
• Seth Patton
• February 18, 2022

Research: People Still Want to Work. They Just Want Control Over Their Time.

• Stephanie Tepper
• Neil Lewis Jr.
• July 18, 2024

Research: The Growing Inequality of Who Gets to Work from Home

• Peter John Lambert
• Nicholas Bloom
• Steven Davis
• Stephen Hansen
• Yabra Muvdi
• Raffaella Sadun
• Bledi Taska
• December 19, 2023

Run Meetings That Are Fair to Introverts, Women, and Remote Workers

• Renee Cullinan
• April 29, 2016

How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce

• Scott Berkun
• March 15, 2013

How to Vet a Remote Workplace

• Robert Glazer
• March 21, 2022

Yes, Virtual Presenting Is Weird

• Sarah Gershman
• November 04, 2020

Making Friends at Work: Our Favorite Reads

• Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar
• November 18, 2021

Working Remotely: Doing Your Best Work in a Virtual World

• May 15, 2020

Can You Hear Me?: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World

• Nick Morgan
• October 30, 2018

HBR's 10 Must Reads 2023 (Paperback + Ebook)

• Adam M. Grant
• Francesca Gino
• Fred Reichheld
• Linda A. Hill
• October 18, 2022

Hybrid Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

• Amy C. Edmondson
• Joan C. Williams
• Liane Davey
• March 15, 2022

X-Teams, Revised and Updated: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed

• Deborah Ancona
• Henrik Bresman
• August 08, 2023

Italtel: An LBO Solution? (B)

• Robert Crawford
• Oliver Gottschalg
• Maurizio Zollo
• January 01, 2004

Work from Anywhere: The HBR Guides Collection (5 Books)

• June 13, 2023

5 Years of Must Reads from HBR: 2023 Edition (5 Books)

• May 30, 2023

People Skills for a Virtual World Collection (6 Books) (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

• Daniel Goleman
• Annie McKee
• Heidi Grant
• November 16, 2022

TCS: From Physical Offices to Borderless Work

• Prithwiraj Choudhury
• January 07, 2021

Psychological Safety (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

• Daisy Auger Dominguez
• Erica Keswin
• Ron Carucci
• September 03, 2024

Hybrid Workplace: Tools for Preparing Your Team for the Future

• March 18, 2022

Italtel: Searching for a Future (A)

The Future of Work: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

• Deborah Grayson Riegel
• Ranjay Gulati
• Joseph B. Fuller
• August 17, 2021

FunctionFox: Was Working Remotely the Best Choice?

• Betty Jane Punnett
• June 26, 2022

Italtel: Partnering with Cisco Systems (C)

The Year in Tech, 2024: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

• David De Cremer
• Richard Florida
• Ethan Mollick
• Nita A. Farahany
• October 24, 2023

HBR's 10 Must Reads 2023: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review (with bonus article "Persuading the Unpersuadable" By Adam Grant)

HBR's 10 Must Reads 2024 (Paperback + Ebook)

• Marco Iansiti
• Satya Nadella
• Lynda Gratton
• Ella F Washington
• October 10, 2023

Italtel: Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (D)

Popular topics, partner center.