Working remotely does not make you more productive, a major new study has found.
Working from home (commonly referred to as WFH), or hybrid working (with work split between home and office days) has persisted since the Covid pandemic forced millions of Britons to steer clear of the office.
Many workers prefer it, and say it allows them to juggle household tasks and childcare commitments while cutting down on the cost of commuting.
But a study published in Nature this month has measured the results of the practice and found that while white-collar workers who are permitted to work from home for part of the week tended to enjoy their jobs more – they didn’t seem to be any more efficient.
The research involved around 1,600 graduate workers in the Airfare and IT divisions of Trip.com, a large Chinese travel technology multinational between August 2021 and January 2022.
Participants were split randomly into two groups, with one cohort required to be in the office throughout the working week (who were the control group) while the other group was allowed to do hybrid working, operating remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays.
The two groups were compared after six months and researchers found no evidence that workers were more productive by working from home.
But the authors also found that those following a hybrid schedule generally had increased job satisfaction, with the group seeing reduced resignation rates.
Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, who co-led the research, believes the results will surprise both critics and proponents of flexible working.
Speaking to The Times said the views of the former, who “hate working from home and expected the productivity impacts to be really negative”, have often had their views “formed by bad experiences in lockdown.”
“But it turns out the experience of fully-remote working [where people are forced to spend all their time at home] is not that useful for evaluating hybrid working,” he said.
He said fans of WFHing “love working from home and expect large productivity gains”. Their claim would be that all the time saved travelling and the quiet at home would lead to a productivity surge for remote work.”
But the lack of evidence for a boost in productivity may indicate that the conveniences of working from home are offset by other factors, such as fewer opportunities for in-person mentoring and face-to-face interactions.
More work is needed to examine if similar results are replicated between countries, work cultures and industries.
But Ruobing Han of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, another co-leader of the research, said the study will fill a large gap in the evidence currently available on the subject.
“Hybrid is now the dominant working pattern for over 100 million employees across North America and Europe, so it is an important topic in social science,” he told the outlet.
Bloom said it is the first piece of research to look at university graduates in white-collar professions.
“If you look across the UK, Europe and the US you see in 2024 about half of all university graduates are working on a hybrid schedule, typically three days in the office and two at home, so evaluating the impact of this is critical,” he argued.
Both researchers told the outlet the revelation that hybrid working resulted in fewer employees leaving the firm was striking.
“Personally, I am most surprised by the huge magnitude of attrition [quitting] reduction,” Han noted. “I did not expect 33 per cent. I was thinking 10 to 15 per cent at most.”
