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• Published: 12 June 2024

Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance

• Nicholas Bloom   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1600-7819 1   na1 ,
• Ruobing Han   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9126-5503 2   na1 &
• James Liang 3 , 4  

Nature volume  630 ,  pages 920–925 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Working from home has become standard for employees with a university degree. The most common scheme, which has been adopted by around 100 million employees in Europe and North America, is a hybrid schedule, in which individuals spend a mix of days at home and at work each week 1 , 2 . However, the effects of hybrid working on employees and firms have been debated, and some executives argue that it damages productivity, innovation and career development 3 , 4 , 5 . Here we ran a six-month randomized control trial investigating the effects of hybrid working from home on 1,612 employees in a Chinese technology company in 2021–2022. We found that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by one-third. The reduction in quit rates was significant for non-managers, female employees and those with long commutes. Null equivalence tests showed that hybrid working did not affect performance grades over the next two years of reviews. We found no evidence for a difference in promotions over the next two years overall, or for any major employee subgroup. Finally, null equivalence tests showed that hybrid working had no effect on the lines of code written by computer-engineer employees. We also found that the 395 managers in the experiment revised their surveyed views about the effect of hybrid working on productivity, from a perceived negative effect (−2.6% on average) before the experiment to a perceived positive one (+1.0%) after the experiment. These results indicate that a hybrid schedule with two days a week working from home does not damage performance.

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Working from home (WFH) surged after the COVID-19 pandemic, with university-graduate employees typically WFH for one to two days a week during 2023 (refs. 2 , 6 ). Previous causal research on WFH has focused on employees who are fully remote, usually working on independent tasks in call-centre, data-entry and helpdesk roles. This literature has found that the effects of fully remote working on productivity are often negative, which has resulted in calls to curtail WFH 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 . However, there are two challenges when it comes to interpreting this literature. First, more than 70% of employees WFH globally are on a hybrid schedule. This group comprises more than 100 million individuals, with the most common working pattern being three days a week in the office and two days a week at home 2 , 8 , 9 . Second, most employees who are regularly WFH are university graduates in creative team jobs that are important in science, law, finance, information technology (IT) and other industries, rather than performing repetitive data-entry or call processing tasks 10 , 11 .

This paper addresses the gap in previous studies in two key ways. First, it uses a randomized control trial to examine the causal effect of a hybrid schedule in which employees are allowed to WFH two days per week. Second, it focuses on university-graduate employees in software engineering, marketing, accounting and finance, whose activities are mainly creative team tasks.

Our study describes a randomized control trial from August 2021 to January 2022, which involved 1,612 graduate employees in the Airfare and IT divisions of a large Chinese travel technology multinational called Trip.com. Employees were randomized by even or odd birthdays into the option to WFH on Wednesday and Friday and come into the office on the other three days, or to come into the office on all five days.

We found that in the hybrid WFH (‘treatment’) group, attrition rates dropped by one-third (mean control  = 7.20, mean treat  = 4.80, t (1610) = 2.02, P  = 0.043) and work satisfaction scores improved (mean control  = 7.84, mean treat  = 8.19, t (1343) = 4.17, P  < 0.001). Employees reported that WFH saved on commuting time and costs and afforded them the flexibility to attend to occasional personal tasks during the day (and catch up in the evenings or weekends). These effects on reduced attrition were significant for non-managerial employees (mean control  = 8.59, mean treat  = 5.33, t (1215) = 2.23, P  = 0.026), female employees (mean control  = 9.19, mean treat  = 4.18, t (568) = 2.40, P  = 0.017) and those with long (above-median) commutes (mean control  = 6.00, mean treat  = 2.89, t (609) = 1.87, P  = 0.062).

At the same time, we found no evidence of a significant effect on employees’ performance reviews, on the basis of null equivalence tests, and no evidence of a difference in promotion rates over periods of up to two years (‘Null results’ section of the Methods ). We did find significant differences in pre-experiment beliefs about the effects of WFH on productivity between non-managers and managers. Before the experiment, managers tended to have more negative views, reporting that hybrid WFH would be likely to affect productivity by −2.6%, whereas non-managers had more positive views (+0.7%) ( t (1313) = −4.56, P  < 0.001). After the experiment, the views of managers increased to +1.0%, converging towards non-managers’ views (mean non-manager  = 1.62, mean manager  = 1.05, t (1343) = −0.945, P  = 0.345). This highlights how the experience of hybrid working leads to a more positive assessment of its effect on productivity—consistent with the overall experience in Asia, the Americas and Europe throughout the pandemic, where perceptions of WFH improved considerably 13 .

The experiment

The experiment took place at Trip.com, the third-largest global travel agent by sales in 2019. Trip.com was established in 1999, was quoted on NASDAQ in 2003 and was worth about US$20 billion at the time of the experiment. It is headquartered in Shanghai, with offices across China and internationally, and has roughly 35,000 employees.

In the summer of 2021, Trip.com decided to evaluate the effects of hybrid WFH on the 1,612 engineering, marketing and finance employees in the Airfare and IT divisions, spanning 395 managers and 1,217 non-managers. All experimental participants were surveyed at baseline, with questions on expectations, background and their interest in volunteering for early participation in the experiment. The firm randomized employees with an odd-number birthday (born on the first, third, fifth and so on day of the month) into the treatment group.

Figure 1 shows two pictures of employees working in the office to highlight three points. First, in the second half of 2021, COVID incidence rates in Shanghai were so low that employees were neither masked nor socially distanced at the office. Although the COVID pandemic had led to lockdowns in early 2020 and during 2022, during the second half of 2021, Shanghai employees were free to come to work, and typically were unmasked in the office. Second, employees worked in modern open-plan offices in desk groupings of four or six colleagues from the same team, reflecting the importance of collaboration. Third, the office is a large modern building, similar to many large Asian, European and North American offices.

Pictures of Trip.com employees in the office during the experiment. The people in the experimental sample are typically in their mid-30s, and 65% are male. All of them have a university undergraduate degree and 32% have a postgraduate degree, usually in computer science, accounting or finance, at the master’s or PhD level. They have 6.4 years tenure on average and 48% of employees have children (Extended Data Table 1 ).

Effects on employee retention

One key motivation for Trip.com in running the experiment was to evaluate how hybrid WFH affected employee attrition and job satisfaction. The net effect was to reduce attrition over the experiment by 2.4%, which against the control-group base of 7.2% was a one-third (33%) reduction in attrition (mean control  = 7.20, mean treat  = 4.80, t (1610) = 2.02, P  = 0.043). Consistent with this reduction in quit rates, employees in the treatment group also registered more positive responses to job-satisfaction surveys (mean control  = 7.84, mean treat  = 8.19, t (1343) = 4.17, P  < 0.001). Employees were anonymously surveyed on 21 January 2022, and employees in the treatment group showed significantly higher scores on a scale from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest) in ‘work–life balance’, ‘work satisfaction’, ‘life satisfaction’ and ‘recommendation to friends’, and significantly lower scores in ‘intention to quit’ (Extended Data Table 2 ).

One possible explanation for the lower quit rates in the treatment group is that quit rates in the control group increased because the individuals in this group were annoyed about being randomized out of the experiment. However, quit rates in the same Airfare and IT divisions were 9.8% in the six months before the experiment—higher than the rate for the control group during the experimental period. Quit rates over the experimental period in the two other Trip.com divisions for which we have data (Business Trips and Marketing) were 10.5% and 9.8%—again higher than that for the control group during the experimental period. This suggests that, if anything, the control-group quit rates were reduced rather than increased by the experiment, possibly because some of them guessed (correctly) that the policy would be rolled out to all employees once the experiment ended.

Figure 2 shows the change in attrition rates by three splits of the data. First, we examined the effect on attrition for the 1,217 non-managers and 395 managers separately. We saw a significant drop in attrition of 3.3 percentage points for the non-managers, which against a control-group base of 8.6% is a 40% reduction (mean control  = 8.59, mean treat  = 5.33, t (1215) = 2.23, P  = 0.026). By contrast, there was an insignificant increase in attrition for managers (mean control  = 2.96, mean treat  = 3.13, t (393) = −0.098, P  = 0.922). We also found that non-managers were more enthusiastic before the experiment, with a volunteering rate of 35% (versus 22% for managers), matching the media sentiment that although non-managerial employees are enthusiastic about WFH, many managers are not ( t (1610) = 4.86, P  < 0.001).

Data on 1,612 employees’ attrition until 23 January 2022. Top left, all employees. Only 1,259 employees filled out the baseline survey question on commuting length, so the commute-length (two ways) sample is for 1,259 employees. Sample sizes are 820 and 792 for control and treatment; 1,217 and 395 for non-managers and managers; 570 and 1,042 for women and men; and 648 and 611 for short and long commuters, respectively. Two-tailed t -tests for the attrition difference within each group between the control and treatment groups are (difference = 2.40, s.e. = 1.18, confidence interval (CI) = [0.0748, 4.72], P  = 0.043) for all employees; (difference = 3.26, s.e. = 1.46, CI = [0.392, 6.12], P  = 0.026) for non-managers; (difference = −0.169, s.e. = 1.73, CI = [−3.57, 3.23], P  = 0.922) for managers; (difference = 5.01, s.e. = 2.08, CI = [0.915, 9.10], P  = 0.017) for women; (difference = 0.997, s.e. = 1.43, CI = [−1.82, 3.81], P  = 0.487) for men; (difference = 2.61, s.e. = 1.93, CI = [−1.19, 6.41], P  = 0.178) for employees with median (90 min, two-way) or shorter commutes; and (difference = 3.11, s.e. = 1.66, CI = [−0.156, 6.37], P  = 0.062) for above-median (90 min, two-way) commuters.

Second, we examined the effect on attrition by total commute length, splitting the sample into people with shorter and longer total commutes on the basis of the median commute duration (two-way commutes of 1.5 h or less versus those exceeding 1.5 h, with 648 and 611 employees, respectively). We found that there was a larger reduction in quit rates (52%) for those with a long commute (mean control  = 6.00, mean treat  = 2.89, t (609) = 1.87, P  = 0.062). The reduction in quit rates was similarly large for employees with a long commute if we instead defined a long commute as a two-way commute time exceeding 2 h (mean control  = 7.33, mean treat  = 1.89, t (307) = 2.31, P  = 0.021). Employees who volunteered to take part in the experiment had longer one-way commute durations (Extended Data Table 3 ; mean non-volunteer  = 0.80, mean volunteer  = 0.89, t (1257) = −3.68, P  < 0.001). This is not surprising given that the most frequently cited benefit of WFH is no commute 1 .

Third, we examined the effect on attrition by gender, examining the 570 female and 1,042 male employees separately. We found that there was a 54% reduction in quit rates for female employees (mean control  = 9.2, mean treat  = 4.2, t (568) = 2.40, P  = 0.017). For male employees, there was an insignificant 16% reduction in quit rates (mean control  = 6.15, mean treat  = 5.15, t (1040) = 0.70, P  = 0.487). This greater reduction in quit rates among female individuals echoes the findings of previous studies 6 , 14 , 15 , 16 , which suggest that women place greater value on remote work than men do. Notably, although the treatment effect of WFH was significantly larger for female employees, volunteers were less likely to be female (mean non-volunteer  = 0.37, mean volunteer  = 0.32, t (1610) = −2.02, P  = 0.043); this might suggest that women have greater concerns about negative career signalling by volunteering to WFH.

Employee performance and promotions

Another key question for Trip.com was the effect of hybrid WFH on employee performance. To assess that, we examined four measures of performance: six-monthly performance reviews and promotion outcomes for up to two years after the start of the experiment, detailed performance evaluations, and the lines of code written by the computer engineers. We also collected self-assessed productivity effects of hybrid working from experimental participants before and after the experiment to evaluate employee perceptions.

Performance reviews are important within Trip.com as they determine employees’ pay and career progression, so are carefully conducted. The review process for each employee is built on formal assessments provided by their managers, co-workers, direct reports and, if appropriate, customers. They are reviewed by employees, collated by managers and by the human resources team, and then discussed between the manager and the employee. This lengthy process takes several weeks, providing a well-grounded measure of employee performance. Although these reviews are not perfect, given their tight link to pay and career development, both managers and employees put a large amount of effort into making these informative measures of performance.

Figure 3 reports the distribution of performance grades for treatment and control employees for the four half-year periods: July to December 2021, January to June 2022, July to December 2022 and January to June 2023. These four performance reviews span a two-year period from the start of the experimental period. Across all review periods, we found no difference in reviews between the treatment and control groups (Extended Data Table 4 and ‘Null results’ section of the Methods ).

Results from performance reviews of 1,507 employees in July–December 2021, 1,355 employees in January–June 2022, 1,301 employees in July–December 2022 and 1,254 employees in January–June 2023. Samples are lower over time owing to employee attrition from the original experimental sample. Two-tailed t -tests for the performance difference within each period between the control and treatment groups, after assigning each letter grade a numeric value from 1 (D) to 5 (A), are (difference = 0.056, s.e. = 0.043, CI = [−0.029, 0.14], P  = 0.198) for July–December 2021; (difference = 0.034, s.e. = 0.044, CI = [−0.0529, 0.122], P  = 0.440) for January–June 2022; (difference = −0.019, s.e. = 0.046, CI = [−0.11, 0.072], P  = 0.677) for July to December 2022; and (difference = 0.046, s.e. = 0.051, CI = [−0.054, 0.146], P  = 0.369) for January–June 2023. The null equivalence tests are included in the ‘Null results’ section of the Methods .

Figure 4 reports the distribution of promotion outcomes for the treatment and control employees for the same periods. We see no evidence of a difference in promotion rates across treatment and control employees. This is an important result given the evidence that fully remote working can damage employee development and promotions 14 , 17 , 18 .

Promotion outcomes for 1,522 employees in July–December 2021, 1,378 employees in January–June 2022, 1,314 employees in July–December 2022 and 1,283 employees in January–June 2023. Samples are lower over time owing to employee attrition from the original experimental sample. Two-tailed t -tests for the promotion difference within each period between the control and treatment groups are (difference = −0.86, s.e. = 1.34, CI = [−3.51, 1.74], P  = 0.509) for July–December 2021 promotions; (difference = 0.12, s.e. = 0.85, CI = [−1.54, 1.78], P  = 0.892) for January–June 2022 promotions; (difference = −0.51, s.e. = 1.12, CI = [−2.72, 1.70], P  = 0.651) for July–December 2022 promotions; and (difference = −0.99, s.e. = 1.02, CI = [−2.99, 1.00], P  = 0.328) for January–June 2023 promotions. The null equivalence tests are included in the ‘Null results’ section of the Methods .

We also analysed the effects of treatment on performance grades and promotions for a variety of subgroups, including managers, employees with a manager in the treatment group, longer-tenured employees, longer-commuting employees, women, employees with children, computer engineers and those living further away, as well as looking at whether internet speed had any effect. We found no evidence of a difference in response to treatment across these groups (Extended Data Table 5 ).

The experiment also analysed two other measures of employee performance. First, the performance reviews at Trip.com have subcomponents for individual activities such as ‘innovation’, ‘leadership’, ‘development’ and ‘execution’ (nine categories in all) when these are important for an individual employee’s role. We collected these data and analysed these scores for the four six-month performance review periods. We found no evidence of a difference across these nine major categories over the four performance review periods (Extended Data Table 6 ). This indicates that for categories that involve softer skills or more team-focused activities—such as development and innovation—there is no evidence for a material effect of being randomized into the hybrid WFH treatment. Second, for the 653 computer engineers, we obtained data on the lines of code uploaded by each engineer each day. For this ‘lines of code submitted’ measure, we found no difference between employees in the control and treatment groups (Extended Data Fig. 1 and ‘Null results’ section of the Methods ).

Self-assessed productivity

All experiment participants were polled before the experiment in a baseline survey on 29 and 30 July 2021, which included a two-part question on their beliefs about the effects of hybrid WFH on productivity. Employees were asked ‘What is your expectation for the impact of hybrid WFH on your productivity?’, with three options of ‘positive’, ‘about the same’ or ‘negative’. Individuals who chose the answer ‘positive’ were then offered a set of options asking how positive they felt, ranging from [5% to 15%] up to [35% or more], and similarly so for negative choices. For aggregate impacts we took the mid-points of each bin, and 42.5% for >35% and –42.5% for <−35%. Employees were resurveyed with the same question after the end of the experiment on 21 January 2022.

The left panel of Fig. 5 shows that employees’ pre-experimental beliefs about WFH and productivity were extremely varied. The baseline mean was –0.1%, but with widespread variation (standard deviation of 11%). This spread should be unsurprising to anyone who has been following the active debate about the effects of remote work on productivity. At the end-line survey conducted on 21 January 2022, the mean of these beliefs had significantly increased to 1.5%, revealing that the experience of hybrid working led to a small improvement in average employee beliefs about the productivity impact of hybrid working (mean baseline  = −0.06%, mean endline  = 1.48%, t (2658) = −3.84, P  < 0.001). This could be because hybrid WFH saves employees commuting time and is less physically tiring, and, with intermittent breaks between group time and quiet individual time, can improve performance 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 .

Sample from 1,315 employees (314 managers, 1,001 non-managers) at the baseline and 1,345 employees (324 managers, 1,021 non-managers) at the end line. Two-tailed t -tests for the difference in productivity expectations between baseline and end line, after assigning a numeric value corresponding to the midpoint of the bucket, are (baseline mean = −0.058, end-line mean = 1.48, difference = −1.54, s.e. = 0.40, CI = [−2.33, −0.753], P  < 0.001). Two-tailed t -tests for the baseline difference between the productivity expectations of managers and non-managers are (difference = −3.28, s.e. = 0.72, CI = [−4.69, −1.86], P  < 0.001), and the t -tests for the end-line difference are (difference = −0.571, s.e. = 0.604, CI = [−1.76, 0.615], P  = 0.345).

The right panel of Fig. 5 shows that in the baseline survey, managers were negative about the perceived effect of hybrid work on their productivity, with a mean effect of −2.6%. Non-managers, by contrast, were significantly more positive, at +0.7% in the baseline survey (mean non-manager  = 0.7%, mean manager  = −2.6%, t (1313) = −4.56, P  < 0.001). At the end of the experiment, the views of managers improved to 1.0%, with no evidence of a difference from the non-managers’ mean value of 1.6% (mean non-manager  = 1.62%, mean manager  = 1.05%, t (1343) = −0.95, P  = 0.345). Hence, the experiment led managers to positively update their views about how hybrid WFH affects productivity, and to more closely align with non-managers.

Of note, we saw that employees in the treatment and control groups had similar increases in self-assessed productivity (difference 0.58%, s.d. = 0.59%). Employees from four other divisions in Trip.com were also polled about the productivity impact of hybrid WFH after the end of the experiment in March 2022, with a mean estimate of +2.8% on a sample of 3,461 responses—similar to the 1.5% end line for the experimental sample. This suggests that even close exposure to hybrid WFH is sufficient for employees to change their views, consistent with previous evidence of a positive society-wide shift in perceptions about WFH productivity after the 2020 pandemic 8 .

Once the experiment ended, the Trip.com executive committee examined the data and voted to extend the hybrid WFH policy to all employees in all divisions of the company with immediate effect. Their logic was that each quit cost the company approximately US$20,000 in recruitment and training, so a one-third reduction in attrition for the firm would generate millions of dollars in savings. This was publicly announced on 14 February 2022, with wide coverage in the Chinese media. Since then, other Chinese tech firms have adopted similar hybrid policies 23 .

This highlights how, contrary to the previous causal research focused on fully remote work, which found mostly negative effects on productivity 5 , 6 , 7 , hybrid remote work can leave performance unchanged. This suggests that hybrid working can be profitably adopted by organizations, given its effect on reducing attrition, which is estimated to cost about 50% of an individual’s annual salary for graduate employees 24 . Hybrid working also offers large gains for society by providing a valuable amenity (perk) to employees, reducing commuting and easing child-care 6 , 25 , 26 .

The experiment was conducted in a Chinese technology firm based in Shanghai. Although it might not be possible to replicate these results perfectly in other situations, Trip.com is a large multinational firm with global suppliers, customers and investors. Its offices are modern buildings that look similar to those in many American, Asian and European cities. Trip employees worked 8.6 h per day on average, close to the 8 h per day that is usual for US graduate employees 27 . The business had a large drop in revenue in 2020 (see Extended Data Fig. 4 ), followed by roughly flat revenues through the 2021 experiment period into 2022, so this was not a period of exceptionally fast or slow growth. As such, we believe that these results— that is, the finding that allowing employees to WFH two days per week reduces quit rates and has a limited effect on performance—would probably extend to other organizations. Also, this experiment analysed the effects of working three days per week in the office and two days per week from home. So, our findings might not replicate to all other hybrid work arrangements, but we believe that they could extend to other hybrid settings with a similar number of days in the office, such as two or four days a week. We are not sure whether the results would extend to more remote settings such as one day a week (or less) in the office, owing to potential challenges around training, innovating and culture in fully remote settings.

Finally, we should point out two implications of the experimental design. First, full enrolment into hybrid schemes is important because of concerns that volunteering might be seen as a negative signal about career ambitions. The low volunteer rate among female employees, despite their high implied value (from the large reductions in quit rates observed), is particularly notable in this regard. Second, there is value in experimentation. Before the experiment, managers were net-negative in their views on the productivity impact of hybrid working, but after the experiment, their views became net-positive. This highlights the benefits of experimentation for firms to evaluate new working practices and technologies.

Location and set-up

Our experiment took place at Trip.com in Shanghai, China. In July 2021, Trip.com decided to evaluate hybrid WFH after seeing its popularity amongst US tech firms. The first step took place on 27 July 2021, when the firm surveyed 1,612 eligible engineers, marketing and finance employees in the Airfare and IT divisions about the option of hybrid WFH. They excluded interns and rookies who were in probation periods because on-site learning and mentoring are particularly important for those individuals. Trip.com chose these two divisions as representative of the firm, with a mix of employee types to assess any potentially heterogeneous impacts. About half of the employees in these divisions are technical employees, writing software code for the website, and front-end or back-end operating systems. The remainder work in business development, with tasks such as talking to airlines, travel agents or vendors to develop new services and products; in market planning and executing advertising and marketing campaigns; and in business services, dealing with a range of financial, regulatory and strategy issues. Across these groups, 395 individuals were managers and 1,217 non-managers, providing a large enough sample of both groups to evaluate their response to hybrid WFH.

Randomization

The employees were sent an email outlining how the six-month experiment offered them the option (but not the obligation) to WFH on Wednesday and Friday. After the initial email and two follow-up reminders, a group of 518 employees volunteered. The firm randomized employees with odd birthdays—those born on the first, third, fifth and so on of the month—into eligibility for the hybrid WFH scheme starting on the week of 9 August. Those with even birthdays—born on the second, fourth, sixth and so on of the month—were not eligible, so formed the control group.

The top management at the firm was surprised at the low volunteer rate for the optional hybrid WFH scheme. They suspected that many employees were hesitating because of concerns that volunteering would be seen as a negative signal of ambition and productivity. This is not unreasonable. For example, a previous study 28 found in the US firm they evaluated that WFH employees were negatively selected on productivity. So, on 6 September, all of the remaining 1,094 non-volunteer employees were told that they were also included in the program. The odd-birthday employees were again randomized into the hybrid WFH treatment and began the experiment on the week of 13 September. In this paper we analyse the two groups together, but examining the volunteer and non-volunteer groups individually yields similar findings of reduced quit rates and no impact on performance.

Employee characteristics and balancing tests

Figure 1 shows some pictures of employees working in the office (left side). Employees all worked in modern open-plan offices in desk groupings of four or six colleagues from the same team. By contrast, when WFH, they usually worked alone in their apartments, typically in the living room or kitchen (see Extended Data Fig. 2 ).

The individuals in the experimental sample are typically in their mid-30s. About two-thirds are male, all of them have a university undergraduate degree and almost one-third have a graduate degree (typically a master’s degree). In addition, nearly half of the employees have children (details in Extended Data Table 1 ).

In Extended Data Table 7 we confirm that this sample is also balanced across the treatment and control groups, by conducting a two-sample t -test. The exceptions are from random variation given that the sampling was by even or odd day-of-month birthday—the control sample is 0.5 years older ( P  = 0.06), and this is presumably linked to why those in this group have 0.06% more children ( P  = 0.02) and 0.4 years more tenure ( P  = 0.09).

In Extended Data Table 3 , we examine the decision to volunteer for the WFH experiment. We see that volunteers were significantly less likely to be managers (mean non-volunteer  = 0.28, mean volunteer  = 0.17, t (1610) = −4.85, P  < 0.001) and had longer commute times (hours) (mean non-volunteer  = 0.80, mean volunteer  = 0.89, t (1257) = 3.68, P  < 0.001). Notably, we don’t find evidence of a relationship between volunteering and previous performance scores (mean non-volunteer  = 3.81, mean volunteer  = 3.81, t (1580) = −0.02, P  = 0.985), highlighting, at least in this case, the lack of evidence for any negative (or positive) selection effects around WFH.

Extended Data Fig. 3 plots the take-up rates of WFH on Wednesday and Friday by volunteer and non-volunteer groups. We see a few notable facts. First, take-up overall was about 55% for volunteers and 40% for non-volunteers, indicating that both groups tended to WFH only one day, typically Friday, each week. At Trip.com, large meetings and product launches often happen mid-week, so Fridays are seen as a better day to WFH. Second, the take-up rate even for non-volunteers was 40%, indicating that Trip.com’s suspicion that many employees did not volunteer out of fear of negative signalling was well-founded, and highlighting that amenities like WFH, holiday, maternity or paternity leave might need to be mandatory to ensure reasonable take-up rates. Third, take-up surged on Fridays before major holidays. Many employees returned to their home towns, using their WFH day to travel home on the quieter Thursday evening or Friday morning. Finally, take-up rates jumped for both treatment-group and control-group employees in late January 2022 after a case of COVID in the Shanghai headquarters. Trip.com allowed all employees at that point to WFH, so the experiment effectively ended early on Friday 21 January. The measure of an employee’s daily WFH take-up excludes leave, sick leave or occasions when they cannot come to the office owing to extreme bad weather (typhoon) or to the COVID outbreak in the company.

Null results

To interpret the main null results, we conduct null equivalence tests using the two one-sided tests (TOST) procedure in R (refs. 29 , 30 ). This test required us to specify the smallest effect size of interest (SESOI). For the results pertaining to performance review measures, we use 0.5 as the SESOI. This corresponds to half of a consecutive letter grade increase or decrease, because we had assigned numeric values to performance letter grades in increments of 1, with the lowest letter grade D being 1, and the highest letter grade A being 5. We performed equivalence tests for a two-sample Welch’s t -test using equivalence bounds of ±0.5. The TOST procedure yielded significant results using the default alpha of 0.05 for the tests against both the upper and the lower equivalence bounds for the performance measures for July–December 2021 ( t (1504) = −10.20, P  < 0.001)), January–June 2022 ( t (1353) = −10.57, P  < 0.001)), July–December 2022 ( t (1299) = 10.34, P  < 0.001)) and January–June 2023 ( t (1248) = −8.80, P  < 0.001)). The equivalence test is therefore significant, which means we can reject the hypothesis that the true effect of the treatment on performance is larger than 0.5 or smaller than −0.5. So, we interpret the performance effects of the treatment to be actually null on the basis of the SESOI we used, as opposed to no evidence of a difference in performance.

We conducted null equivalence results for the effect of the treatment on promotions using 2 as the SESOI, corresponding to ±2 percentage points (pp) difference in promotion rates. Although we can reject the null hypothesis that the true effect of treatment on promotion is larger than 2 pp or smaller than −2 pp in January–June 2022 ( t (1376) = −2.22, P  = 0.013) and July–December 2022 ( t (1306) = 1.33, P  = 0.092), we fail to reject the null equivalence hypothesis in July–December 2021 ( t (1513) = 0.83, P  = 0.203) and January–June 2023 ( t (1250) = 0.98, P  = 0.163). Thus, we interpret the results on promotion as no evidence of a difference between promotion rates across treatment and control employees.

We also conducted the equivalence test for lines of code using 29 lines of code per day as the SESOI, which corresponds to 10% of the mean number of lines of code for the control group. We arrive at this SESOI on the basis of rounding down the productivity effects of previous findings 8 , 10 . We can reject the equivalence null hypothesis for lines of code ( t (92362) = −2.74, P  = 0.003)) so we interpret the effect of the treatment as a null effect.

Volunteer versus non-volunteer groups

In the main paper we pool the volunteer and non-volunteer groups. In Extended Data Table 5 we examine the impacts on performance and promotions and we see no evidence of a difference in performance and promotion treatment effects for volunteer versus non-volunteer groups (column 9).

Performance subcategories

The company has a rigorous performance-reviewing process every six months that determines employees’ pay and promotion, so is carefully conducted. The review process for each employee is built on formal reviews provided by their managers, project leaders and sometimes co-workers (peer review). Managers are more like an employee’s direct managers for organizational purposes, but for a particular project, the project leader could be another higher-level employee. In such a case, the manager of the employee would ask that project leader for an opinion on the employee’s contribution to the project. An individual’s overall score is a weighted sum of scores from various subcategories that managers have broad flexibility over defining, because tasks differ across employees, and managers would give a score for each task. For example, an employee running a team themselves will have subcategories around developing their direct reports (leadership and communication), whereas an employee running a server network will have subcategories around efficiency and execution. The performance subcategory data come from the text of the performance review. We first used the most popular Chinese word segmentation package in Python, named Jieba, to identify the most frequent Chinese words from task titles across four performance reviews. We also removed meaningless words and incorporated common expressions such as key performance indicators (‘KPI’), objectives and key results (‘OKR’), ‘rate’ and ‘%’. This process resulted in a total of 236 unique words and expressions. We then manually categorized those most frequent keywords into nine major subcategories (see below) by meanings and relevance. Finally, on the basis of the presence of keywords in the task title, tasks were grouped into the following subcategories:

Communication tasks are those that involve communication, collaboration, cooperation, coordination, participation, suggestion, assistance, organization, sharing and relationships.

Development tasks are those that involve coding or codes, data or datasets, systems, techniques and skills.

Efficiency tasks are those that involve cost reduction, ratios, return on investment (ROI), rate, %, improvement, growth, lifting, adding, optimizing, profit, receiving, gross merchandise value (GMV), OKR, KPI, work and goal.

Execution tasks are those that involve execution, conducting, maintenance, delivery, output, quality, contribution and workload.

Innovation tasks are those that involve development, R&D and innovation.

Leadership tasks are those that involve leadership, managing or management, approval, internal, strategy, coordination and planning.

Learning tasks are those that involve learning, growing, maturing, talent, ability, value competitiveness and personal improvement.

Project tasks are those that involve project, supply, product, business line, cooperation and clients.

Risk tasks are those that involve risk, compliance, supervision, recording and monitoring, safety, rules and privacy.

Data sources

Data were provided by a combination of Trip.com sources, including human resources records, performance reviews and two surveys. All data were anonymized and coded using a scrambled individual ID code, so no personally identifiable information was shared with the Stanford team. The data were drawn directly from the Trip.com administrative data systems on a monthly basis. Gender is collected by Trip.com from employees when they join the company.

The full sample has 1,612 experiment participants, but we have 1,507, 1,355, 1,301 and 1,254 employees, respectively, in the subsamples for the four performance reviews from July–December 2021, January–June 2022, July–December 2022 and January–June 2023. These smaller samples are due to attrition. In addition, for the first performance review in July–December 2021, 105 employees did not have sufficient pre-experiment tenure to support a performance review (they had joined the firm less than three months before the experimental draw). The review text data covers 1,507,1,339,1,290 and 1,246 people, as some employees do have an overall score and review text but do not have additional and task-specific scores. The reason is that these employees do not have the full range of all tasks, so their managers did not write the full review script. For the two surveys, Trip.com used Starbucks vouchers to incentivize response and collected responses from 1,315 employees (314 managers, 1,001 non-managers) at the baseline on the left, and that of 1,345 employees (324 managers, 1,021 non-managers) at the end line.

All tests used two-sided Student t -tests unless otherwise stated. Analysis was run on Stata v17 and v18, R version 4.2.2. Unless stated otherwise, no additional covariates are included in the tests. The null hypothesis for all of the tests excluding null equivalence tests is a coefficient of zero (for example, zero difference between treatment and control).

Inclusion and ethics statement

The design and execution of the experiment was run by Trip.com. No participants were forced to WFH owing to the experiment (the entire firm was, however, forced to WFH during the pandemic lockdown). The treatment sample had the option but not the obligation to WFH on Wednesday or Friday. The experiment was designed, initiated and run by Trip.com. N.B. and R.H. were invited to analyse the data from the experiment, with consent for data collection coming from Trip.com internally. The experiment was exempt under institutional review board (IRB) approval guidelines because it was designed and initiated by Trip.com, before N.B. and R.H. were invited to analyse the data. Only anonymous data were shared with the Stanford team. Trip.com based the experimental design and execution on their previous experience with WFH randomized control trials 17 .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The data necessary to reproduce the primary results of this study can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6X4ZZL . These data have been anonymized and split into individual files to ensure that no individual is identifiable. All figures and tables can be replicated using this data.

Code availability

The code necessary to reproduce the primary results of this study can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6X4ZZL .

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Smith Richardson Foundation for funding; J. Cao, T. Zhang, S. Ye, F. Chen, X. Zhang, Y. He, J. Li, B. Ye and M. Akan for data, advice and logistical support; D. Yilin for research assistance; S. Ayan, S. Buckman, S. Gurung, M. Jackson and P. Lambert for draft feedback; and J. Sun for project leadership.

Author information

These authors contributed equally: Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han

Authors and Affiliations

Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Nicholas Bloom

Shenzhen Finance lnstitute, School of Management and Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

Ruobing Han

National School of Development, Peking University, Beijing, China

James Liang

Trip.com, Shanghai, China

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Contributions

N.B. oversaw the analysis, presented the results and wrote the main drafts of the paper. He was the principal investigator on the research grant supporting the research. R.H. supervised data collection and analysed the data, presented the results and helped to draft the paper. J.L. initiated and designed the study, discussed the results and analysis and facilitated the Trip.com engagement. N.B. and R.H. are co-first authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Nicholas Bloom , Ruobing Han or James Liang .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

No funding was received from Trip.com. J.L. is the co-founder, former CEO and current chairman of Trip.com, with equity holdings in Trip.com. No other co-author has any financial relationship with Trip.com. Neither the results nor the paper was pre-screened by anyone. The experiment was registered with the American Economic Association on 16 August 2021 after the experiment had begun but before N.B. and R.H. had received any data. Only anonymous data were shared with the Stanford team.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 wfh had no effect on lines of code written..

The data coves the experimental period starting on 9 August 2021 for the first wave and 13 September for the second wave, running to 23 January 2022, for both waves. Lines of code submitted per day is available for 653 employees whose primary role was writing code, spanning a total of 95,494 days. Lines are those uploaded to trip.com on a daily basis. Data plotted on a log-2 scale for readability. Reported P value is calculated using a two-sided t -test on the number of code lines and the difference is for control minus treatment. When using log 2 (code lines) the difference has a P value of 0.750 (noting the sample is 27,605 days because of dropping 0 values). When using log 2 (1 + code lines) the difference has a P value of 0.0103, with treatment having the higher average values. The null equivalence tests are included in the ‘Null results’ section of the Methods .

Extended Data Fig. 2 Home (October 2021).

Employees set up basic working environments in their living rooms, studies, or kitchens, and bring back company laptops if necessary.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Take-up rate for WFH treatment and control by volunteer status.

Data for 1,612 employees from 9 August 2021 (volunteers) and 13 September (non-volunteers) to 23 January 2022. Public holidays, personal holidays and excused absence (for example, sick leave) are excluded. Take-up rate is percentage of Wednesday and Friday each week they WFH.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Trip.com revenues.

Trip.com revenues from 2000 to 2023.

Supplementary information

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Bloom, N., Han, R. & Liang, J. Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature 630 , 920–925 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2

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About a third of U.S. workers who can work from home now do so all the time

Roughly three years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended U.S. workplaces, about a third (35%) of workers with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home all of the time, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. This is down from 43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020 – but up from only 7% before the pandemic.

While the share working from home all the time has fallen off somewhat as the pandemic has gone on, many workers have settled into hybrid work. The new survey finds that 41% of those with jobs that can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule – that is, working from home some days and from the office, workplace or job site other days. This is up from 35% in January 2022.

Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, most (63%) say their employer requires them to work in person a certain number of days per week or month. About six-in-ten hybrid workers (59%) say they work from home three or more days in a typical week, while 41% say they do so two days or fewer.

Related: How Americans View Their Jobs

Many hybrid workers would prefer to spend more time working from home than they currently do. About a third (34%) of those who are currently working from home most of the time say, if they had the choice, they’d like to work from home all the time. And among those who are working from home some of the time, half say they’d like to do so all (18%) or most (32%) of the time.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to study how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the workplace and specifically how workers with jobs that can be done from home have adapted their work schedules. To do this, we surveyed 5,775 U.S. adults who are working part time or full time and who have only one job or who have more than one job but consider one of them to be their primary job. All the workers who took part are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Address-based sampling ensures that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the survey’s methodology .

The majority of U.S. workers overall (61%) do not have jobs that can be done from home. Workers with lower incomes and those without a four-year college degree are more likely to fall into this category. Among those who do have teleworkable jobs, Hispanic adults and those without a college degree are among the most likely to say they rarely or never work from home.

When looking at all employed adults ages 18 and older in the United States, Pew Research Center estimates that about 14% – or roughly 22 million people – are currently working from home all the time.

The advantages and disadvantages of working from home

Workers who are not self-employed and who are teleworking at least some of the time see one clear advantage – and relatively few downsides – to working from home. By far the biggest perceived upside to working from home is the balance it provides: 71% of those who work from home all, most or some of the time say doing so helps them balance their work and personal lives. That includes 52% who say it helps them a lot with this.

About one-in-ten (12%) of those who are at least occasionally working from home say it hurts their ability to strike the right work-life balance, and 17% say it neither helps nor hurts. There is no significant gender difference in these views. However, parents with children younger than 18 are somewhat more likely than workers without children in that age range to say working from home is helpful in this regard (76% vs. 69%).

A majority of those who are working from home at least some of the time (56%) say this arrangement helps them get their work done and meet deadlines. Only 7% say working from home hurts their ability to do these things, and 37% say it neither helps nor hurts.

There are other aspects of work – some of them related to career advancement – where the impact of working from home seems minimal:

• When asked how working from home affects whether they are given important assignments, 77% of those who are at least sometimes working from home say it neither helps nor hurts, while 14% say it helps and 9% say it hurts.
• When it comes to their chances of getting ahead at work, 63% of teleworkers say working from home neither helps or hurts, while 18% say it helps and 19% say it hurts.
• A narrow majority of teleworkers (54%) say working from home neither helps nor hurts with opportunities to be mentored at work. Among those who do see an impact, it’s perceived to be more negative than positive: 36% say working from home hurts opportunities to be mentored and 10% say it helps.

One aspect of work that many remote workers say working from home makes more challenging is connecting with co-workers: 53% of those who work from home at least some of the time say working from home hurts their ability to feel connected with co-workers, while 37% say it neither helps nor hurts. Only 10% say it helps them feel connected.

In spite of this, those who work from home all the time or occasionally are no less satisfied with their relationship with co-workers than those who never work from home. Roughly two-thirds of workers – whether they are working exclusively from home, follow a hybrid schedule or don’t work from home at all – say they are extremely or very satisfied with these relationships. In addition, among those with teleworkable jobs, employed adults who work from home all the time are about as likely as hybrid workers to say they have at least one close friend at work.

Feeling connected with co-workers is one area where many workers who rarely or never work from home see an advantage in their setup. About four-in-ten of these workers (41%) say the fact that they rarely or never work from home helps in how connected they feel to their co-workers. A similar share (42%) say it neither helps nor hurts, and 17% say it hurts.

At the same time, those who rarely or never work from home are less likely than teleworkers to say their current arrangement helps them achieve work-life balance. A third of these workers say the fact that they rarely or never work from home hurts their ability to balance their work and personal lives, while 40% say it neither helps nor hurts and 27% say it helps.

When it comes to other aspects of work, many of those who rarely or never work from home say their arrangement is neither helpful nor hurtful. This is true when it comes to opportunities to be mentored (53% say this), their ability to get work done and meet deadlines (57%), their chances of getting ahead in their job (68%) and whether they are given important assignments (74%).

Most adults with teleworkable jobs who work from home at least some of the time (71%) say their manager or supervisor trusts them a great deal to get their work done when they’re doing so. Those who work from home all the time are the most likely to feel trusted: 79% of these workers say their manager trusts them a great deal, compared with 64% of hybrid workers.

Hybrid workers feel about as trusted when they’re not working from home: 68% say their manager or supervisor trusts them a great deal to get their work done when they’re not teleworking.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the survey’s methodology .

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Well-Being at Work: US Research Report 2024

Human capital development lab, well-being at work us research report released (2024).

JHU researchers share new insights related to employee well-being in US Organizations. The study highlights the decline in the climate of workplace well-being since the COVID-19 pandemic through a comprehensive analysis of more than 1.5 survey respondents each year. The climate of Well-Being report outlines organizational factors that may affect employee well-being in the workplace. The research shows that successful organizations create a climate of well-being not by providing perks or benefits, rather they create a culture where people feel acknowledged, supported and connected.  The new insights highlight the impact of flexible work arrangements, stress levels, industry practices, and persistent disparities among groups of people in the workplace.  

Well-Being at Work

Fostering a Healthy Work Climate for All

The research shows that successful organizations create a climate of well-being not by providing perks or benefits, rather they create a culture where people feel acknowledged, supported and connected. The new insights highlight the impact of flexible work arrangements, stress levels, industry practices, and persistent disparities among groups of people in the workplace.

Employees report a post-pandemic decline in the climate of workplace well-being 

Washington, D.C.  — August 28, 2024 — How do employees experience the climate of their workplace when it comes to well-being? As it turns out, this varies by industry, demographic group, and organization, according to new research led by Johns Hopkins Carey Business School’s Human Capital Development Lab. 

The link between employee well-being and performance has prompted leaders with motivation to explore how maximizing these once-overlooked factors may be central to increasing organizational success. However, achieving high levels of employee well-being is a feat that’s easier said than done. 

The Well-Being at Work report uncovers the latest insights on organizational and individual factors that may influence employee well-being in the U.S. The study showcases the rise and decline of the climate of employee well-being across industries over the past five years, while considering influences like tenure, management level, confidence, and work arrangements, along with demographic differences based on race, gender, and age.

“Improving employee well-being can be complex – our research highlights a need for leaders to address organizational culture factors coupled with a more nuanced management approach to create a climate of well-being for all,” said Professor Rick Smith, faculty director at the Human Capital Development Lab and co-author of the study. 

The overall findings show what many employees experienced in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: organizational leaders addressing the impact of this crisis by taking extra care to meet employee needs. The report shows that employees experienced a spike in the positive climate of well-being at the early periods of the pandemic. However, as workplaces transitioned back to pre-pandemic norms and more employees return to physical office spaces, the overall climate of well-being often regressed to the pre-pandemic level.

Associate Professor Michelle Barton, co-author of the study, adds, “The Covid pandemic heightened employers’ awareness of the importance of well-being, and many of the best organizations worked to create a positive work climate. The challenge now, will be to integrate those practices into everyday work life, rather than simply as a crisis response.” 

The data from the report confirms that there is a link between remote work opportunities and a climate of well-being, suggesting a need for employers to address work-life balance challenges for the workforce. However, since managers typically encounter lower stress levels than their junior employees, some managers may not fully appreciate these needs. This research also highlights some important differences by gender and ethnic groups, showing that well-being in the workplace is still consistently lower for women and African Americans. 

Interestingly enough, researchers also completed a comparison analysis of the climate of well-being between the top 100 companies listed in the Fortune 100 Best Companies, as recognized by Great Place To Work® , and non-ranked companies in 2023. They found that ranked firms have significantly higher employee well-being scores, further strengthening the potential link between employee well-being and organizations recognized as great places to work. 

This research leverages data from Great Place To Work® , the world’s leader in identifying best workplaces. The flagship data was gathered using a proprietary employee survey, known as The Trust Index™ survey, which is administered to over 5000 organizations and over 4.5 million survey respondents each year around the world. To quantify a climate of well-being, researchers measured several key dimensions such as: mental and emotional support, sense of purpose, personal support, financial health, and meaningful connections. 

Authors of the study include Rick Smith, a professor of practice and faculty director of the Human Capital Development Lab at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School; Michelle Barton, an associate professor of practice and academic program director of the Flex MBA Program at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School; Christopher Myers, an associate professor of management and organization and faculty director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School; and Marcus Erb, vice president of data science and innovation for Great Place To Work. 

About Great Place To Work As the global authority on workplace culture, Great Place To Work brings 30 years of groundbreaking research and data to help every place become a great place to work for all. Its proprietary platform and For All™ Model help companies evaluate the experience of every employee, with exemplary workplaces becoming Great Place To Work Certified™ or receiving recognition on a coveted Best Workplaces™ list.

Follow Great Place To Work on  LinkedIn ,  X , and  Instagram  or visit  greatplacetowork.com  and  sign up for the newsletter  to learn more.

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

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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.

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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

Measuring remote work across space and time, using job ads.

This page contains selected figures , as well as a portal for researchers to access the data used in our research paper: “Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space” ( Hansen , Lambert , Bloom , Davis , Sadun & Taska , 2023) . Also watch Steven Davis discuss some implications of this work for the WFH-divide .

The below figures are interactive and data are available to download

Note: This figure shows the percent of vacancy postings that say the job allows one or more remote workdays per week. We compute these monthly, country-level shares as the weighted mean of the own-country occupation-level shares, with weights given by the U.S. vacancy distribution in 2019. Our occupation-level granularity is roughly equivalent to six-digit SOC codes. Figures depicts the 3-month moving average. Access data .

Note: This figure shows the percent of new vacancy postings from April 2022 to August 2023 across selected US Counties that say the job allows one or more remote workdays per week. We omit any county with fewer than 1,000 observations. Tip: Double-click area to enlarge! Access data .

Note: This figure shows the monthly percent of new vacancy postings across selected US cities that say the job allows one or more remote workdays per week. Access data .

Note: This figure shows the percent of new vacancy postings across NAICS industry sectors that say the job allows one or more remote workdays per week. Access data .

How we measure advertised remote work…

Our  team of researchers  joined forces with  Lightcast  to develop a large language model (LLM) that “reads” job ads and determines whether it offers the ability to work remotely at least one day a week.

Our data span the near-universe of new online job vacancy postings , and currently contains over 250 million documents .

Our approach to measurement has a number of distinct benefits (and some drawbacks). For example:

• Our dataset is huge, covering five countries, thousands of cities and employers, and all industries and occupation groups
• New vacancies are posted daily, allowing us to measure advertised remote work in near-realtime. We plan to update the data regularly.
• The LLM we developed achieves a 99% accuracy at identifying remote work job ads
• We measure explicit offers of remote work in new job ads, not the number of employees who work-from-home (for this, see survey measures available at wfhresearch.com )

These data may be used by researchers and other interested parties . For any specific data requests, media comments, or technical issues, please contact us .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below are seven takeaways from Bloom’s discussion:

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

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

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

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

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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.

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“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.”

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The right to disconnect has started, giving Australians legal cover to stop responding to emails and calls after hours

Topic: Work

Lachy is a shift worker who says the right to disconnect will allow him to "get some of my life back". ( Supplied )

The right to disconnect means you can reasonably refuse to be contacted outside of work hours.

For people tied to the "digital leash" of phones and email this marks a substantial boost in their right to break free.

What's next?

Employees of smaller businesses will be able to disconnect after work on August 22, 2025.

Millions of Australians will now be able to clock off from their work shifts without having to be available after hours.

Under right to disconnect laws, employees from Monday will have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours — including calls and emails — unless that refusal is unreasonable.

"Oh, it'll be a weight off my shoulders, for sure," said shift worker Lachy.

He is looking forward to living his life outside of work hours, without worrying if the phone will ring with news about his job.

"It'll give me some of my life back. Even going out to walk the dogs, going out with the mates," he said.

"If I receive a phone call, there is some expectation that I do pick up."

Performing extra unpaid hours of work is common in Australia and many jobs come with an expectation of being contactable beyond paid or rostered hours.

But the right to disconnect is aiming to create limits around this work culture and the so-called 'digital leash' of phones, laptops and easily accessible email.

While it may be welcome news to employees, it doesn't mean the boss can't call you.

What it does mean is you might not have to answer.

What do the new laws mean for you?

The distinction is important. Brent Ferguson, head of national workplace relations policy for employer body Ai Group, explained the new laws won't bring an end to late-night calls.

"This isn't a prohibition on an employer contacting or attempting to contact an employee," he said.

"It's a new right for an employee to refuse that contact, to refuse to monitor their emails, or to refuse to take a telephone call from their employer, if it's outside of their working hours."

While the details are still being worked out, one thing is clear: today workers at businesses with more than 15 employees get the right to disconnect.

The legislation is thin, but it states that if there is a dispute, it has to be first dealt with "at the workplace level by discussions" between workers and bosses.

"It is subject to that important caveat that [employees] can only refuse if their refusal is 'not unreasonable'," Mr Ferguson said.

"Now, what's reasonable or unreasonable is going to depend on the individual circumstances.

"And that uncertainty is part of the difficulty that industry is really grappling with at the moment."

How the pandemic blurred our working and personal lives

Academic Gabrielle Golding said the COVID-19 pandemic and enforced "work from home" periods promoted growth in what she calls "availability creep".

"During that time when we were, by and large, forced to work from home, we were kind of training ourselves to be constantly available within our homes and elsewhere outside of the workplace," she said.

Dr Gabrielle Golding is a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide Law School, focussed on labour law and workers rights. ( Supplied: Gabrielle Golding )

Even as restrictions rolled back, cheap and easy access to digital connectivity meant being available became a default setting for employees.

Many employers took advantage of it, but the new laws should give workers the option to reset.

"If we have some sort of a 'guard rail' in place like this, it will change the patterns in the way in which people are conducting work," Dr Golding said.

"And hopefully give them an opportunity to take some of their private life back."

Just like doctors who work on call and shift workers who get penalties for starting early in the morning, it could be that disconnect laws prompt people who are expected to be available to win compensation for that time in future.

The legislation has a requirement that disputes are dealt with at a workplace level first.

Sally McManus, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), said "workers have got a brand new right", which is "really awesome".

Sally McManus says the right to disconnect means if your employer contacts you, "it has got to be reasonable". ( ABC News: Ian Cutmore )

"What that basically means is your employer can't harass you after work," she said.

"So emails, calls … if they contact you, it's got to be reasonable, and you've got a right not to respond."

Ms McManus said "if you work, you should get paid" and the right to disconnect will enable workers to put in place boundaries between their work and personal life.

"Not all employers, but some employers have completely blurred or just crossed over those boundaries and are expecting people to be connected and answer their emails and look at their phones, 24/7," she said.

"And that's just not on."

It may mean employees don't have to check their phone every few minutes

Lachy works at Melbourne Airport, a role that requires him to work shifts at odd times.

"If you go to check in for a flight, I'll be there. You go to board a flight, I'll be there," he said.

Like many who work difficult and unsociable hours, he struggles to rest and sometimes wakes up to missed calls and texts.

Lachy works shifts at the airport and has welcomed the idea of not having to answer work calls after hours. ( ABC News: Billy Draper )

"There'll be days where I'm not rostered to work but I wake up to a call from work thinking: 'Hang on, what day is it? When am I scheduled to work?'

"It's reminiscent of when you would be waking up like for a school day and thinking: 'Oh crap, I'm late.'

"I suppose it's a form of anxiety. You feel the phone ring, and I don't think 'Oh it's one of my friends or family'. I think: 'It's work.'"

Lachy loves his job, taking a call from his employer while the ABC is interviewing him at his house, but he is looking forward to being protected when he reasonably refuses contact from them.

"Just the expectation to be taken off my shoulders that I don't have to check my phone every few minutes to see if there's been any changes to my roster," he said.

"[Or] if they've sent out any emails that are changing how we're working. It'll be a weight off my shoulders, for sure."

How will disconnecting actually work?

More than 20 countries have put in place similar laws, and research has found improved wellbeing and work satisfaction in companies with right-to-disconnect policies.

In Australia, Telstra has set boundaries around employees being contacted — or feeling like they should be available — for years.

Despite being in the business of selling communications, and the need for constant monitoring and maintenance of vital networks, the company has built in boundaries so staff are not "always on".

Telstra human resources executive Kathryn van rer Merwe said there will "always be a requirement to contact certain people for certain types of situations". ( ABC News: Matthew Holmes )

"A lot of it comes down to behaviours and work practises," said Kathryn van der Merwe, the human resources executive in charge of Telstra's 31,000 employees.

"It's reminding our people of the importance of having a conversation within your team, with a leader and a team agreeing a set of 'team norms' and work practises.

"And reminding people that we also have tools that actually help to respect those boundaries and personal time."

Dr van der Merwe suggested tools such as the "delay send" function on emails, or stating a person's normal working days and hours in their email signature.

There will always be a need for certain people and roles to have a reasonable expectation of being contactable, she said, and many are compensated specifically for that.

For everyone else, Dr van der Merwe sees the start of the right to disconnect as a reminder to work in ways that respect an employee's personal time.

"We all, I think, have felt that blurring between work and personal life, particularly as we spend more time working from home."

"This gives us a chance to have a renewed conversation [about] some of our ways of working and to reset some norms to help firm up those boundaries."

Will there be guidelines around the 'right to disconnect'?

The legislation requires the Fair Work Commission (FWC) to provide guidelines around the new entitlement. But it has so far declined to do so.

Instead, FWC found it would be better off issuing guidelines after it has dealt with a few disputes around the new entitlement.

Employees from today will have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable. ( Pixabay )

So expect to see "test cases" that tease out the difficult legal and practical nature of the word 'reasonable' and what it means in a world where mobile phones are ubiquitous and employees want flexibility in how and where they can work.

"The new entitlement is cast in very broad terms," Mr Ferguson said.

"We're going to have to see how it operates in practice over time to understand exactly what the parameters of the new right are."

Ms McManus believes the new right could take us back to a time when the life/work balance of Australians was in better shape.

"We have lost that over a period of time," she said, noting that Australians' long working hours harm mental health.

"If you're constantly connected, if you're not able to switch off, if you're not able to refresh and recuperate … obviously you're going to be a worse worker."

The right to disconnect could end what she calls "unreasonable pressure" on workers.

"So this is actually good for employers, as well as for workers," Ms McManus said.

"A more productive workforce where people actually are rested enough and they're not constantly driven by the beeping and the notifications on their phone."

No one can agree on whether remote work is making employees more productive

• A report from Goldman Sachs shows studies on remote work have had different conclusions.
• Some research indicated a positive impact on productivity, but that wasn't true for all studies.
• Goldman Sachs said this was probably partly because productivity wasn't measured the same way.

While lots of people are going back to the office, plenty are still taking virtual meetings from home and finishing their work remotely — or looking for jobs where they can be remote . But are people successfully getting their work done from home?

Results from different research studies don't seem to agree on what remote working means for productivity, a recent report from Goldman Sachs shows.

The studies Goldman Sachs looked at had different ways of evaluating work-from-home productivity gains or losses, such as measuring the performance gain of call-center workers who were randomly chosen to work from home or comparing the productivity of people randomly chosen to work from home with that of office peers.

As seen in the chart, some research indicated that the impact on productivity was positive — but that wasn't the result for all studies. In the report, Goldman Sachs said this was probably because of the variation in how productivity was measured, the type of industries examined, as well as the kinds of tasks looked at.

The different research cited in the report had different study designs. And one paper cited was from 2013, way before lots of employees had to work from home because of office closures during the pandemic.

"Earlier work that used survey data with a self-assessed measure of productivity or experimental evidence in an industry that involved routine tasks (e.g. call centers) tended to find positive impacts of remote work," the report said. "More recent studies that measure productivity through complex performance metrics and draw evidence from industries involving high-cognitive tasks (e.g. IT services) reveal more negative effects." 

Related stories

As studies examine the productivity gains — or losses — of remote work, people have been asked to make the trip back to the office. While some companies are in favor of a hybrid model through which people can still attend many meetings from home and enjoy the perks of working outside of the office sometimes, other employers want people in the office five days a week . Even though hybrid work seems to be common right now, one recent paper from Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis suggested that the hybrid work structure appeared "to have small positive impacts on productivity."

While some companies may think being in the office is the answer, not all workers think the same.

"This belief of a certain cohort of people, and they are represented across all sectors, that presentee-ism is productivity, for them it's perfectly rational that if somebody doesn't want to come into the office then that basically means they're not somebody who wants to add value to the firm," Grace Lordan, an associate professor in behavioral science at the London School of Economics, previously told Insider .

Some people who prefer a fully remote or a hybrid model over going to the office every day are open to changing jobs or industries so they wouldn't have to be working in person all the time, according to a Bankrate survey .

"I know how to do my job. I don't need to be in an office to do my work," one person who quit a job instead of heading to the office five days a week told Insider . "I just knew I didn't want to go back to what it felt like before."

Are you feeling more productive working from home or in an office? Have you been called to work in an office again after working remotely? Reach out to this reporter to share your story at [email protected] .

Watch: Microsoft's chief brand officer, Kathleen Hall, says the company's employees are its best product testers

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Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An accelerated debate

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

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

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

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

The productivity paradigm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No commute, and fewer hours worked

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more >>

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

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

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

Remote-work technology goes mainstream

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

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

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

How remote work could change city centers

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

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

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

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

Lost ideas, longer hours?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attracting top talent

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

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

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

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

Does remote work promote equity?

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

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

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

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

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

More data to come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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George Shields receives grant to extend chemistry research started with students

Furman University’s George Shields, professor of chemistry, has received a 2024 SEED Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement . The $60,000 grant will advance his research in prebiotic atmospheric chemistry to study how life-giving proteins emanated from a lifeless Earth.

The award stems from Shields’ work with undergraduates over the last several years that advances a novel hypothesis that tests how peptides – chains of amino acids that make up proteins – formed on primordial Earth with just a handful of water molecules in the prebiotic, oxygen-starved atmosphere.

“How life began is an unsolved mystery in science,” Shields said. “Which came first: DNA, RNA or proteins? No one knows. Our project is looking at the idea that perhaps small peptides were synthesized in the atmosphere. As amino acids floated in the air, water molecules catalyzed the formation of small peptides, which eventually would descend to Earth, seeding the planet with essential building blocks for life.”

Like the peptide chains at the center of Shields’ investigations, research in his lab is built block by block, in semester- and summer-long chunks by young student scientists who bring their unique perspectives and ideas to the work.

Shields first explored origins-of-life science in 2018 with Ariel Gale ’20, a Goldwater Scholar , Beckman Scholar and recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant. Gale, who is working toward her doctorate in theoretical chemistry at Emory University, was one of only a few students working on the project crafted by Shields. At the time, the research was unfunded, but it led to two papers with Gale as lead author.

Two more Furman biochemistry enthusiasts picked up where Gale left off. Shannon Harold ’22 M ’23 and Sky Warf ’24 pushed the work to a point where it could be funded and again published . Harold is now pursuing a medical degree; Warf, a doctoral degree.

Recently, Shields received NSF-MRI funding to support the MERCURY consortium and high-performance computing. He is principal investigator for a $465,000 grant from NSF-REU that bolsters research and STEM representation in the Southeast. This latest grant from RCSA funds Shields’ own research project and enables him to dedicate two to three students to it each year over the next two years. And the cycle continues.

“If we make good progress on this grant and learn new things about prebiotic atmospheric chemistry, I’ll submit a grant to NASA in the future for more funding,” he said.

Shields is one of 11 scientists to receive the RSCA SEED grant this year. He is grateful to the foundation and the people at Furman who helped him submit a winning proposal, including Bri Pochard , associate director for grants and research administration, and Greg Springsteen , professor of chemistry and NASA- and NSF-funded scientist who also studies prebiotic chemistry.

Shields is equally indebted to the undergraduates who have collaborated in his lab. “Furman punches way above its weight” in terms of research excellence, he said. “These students work hard, they’re super smart, and they deserve all the recognition they get. It’s a privilege to work with them.”

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Open Access

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Research Article

Working from home and subsequent work outcomes: Pre-pandemic evidence

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, Department of Environmental Health, Sustainability and Health Initiative (SHINE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America, Faculty of Philosophy, Centre for Evaluation and Analysis of Public Policies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

Affiliation Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Affiliations Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, Department of Environmental Health, Sustainability and Health Initiative (SHINE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America, Department of Economics, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Environmental Health, Sustainability and Health Initiative (SHINE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America

* E-mail: [email protected]

• Ying Chen, 
• Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska, 
• Matthew T. Lee, 
• Piotr Bialowolski, 
• Richard G. Cowden, 
• Eileen McNeely, 
• Tyler J. VanderWeele

• Published: April 4, 2023
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788
• Reader Comments

Frequent working from home (WFH) may stay as a new work norm after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior observational studies on WFH and work outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances are mostly cross-sectional and often studied employees who worked from home in limited capacity. To provide additional insights that might inform post-pandemic work policies, using longitudinal data collected before the COVID-19 pandemic (June 2018 to July 2019), this study aims to examine the associations between WFH and multiple subsequent work-related outcomes, as well as potential modifiers of these associations, in a sample of employees among whom frequent or even full-time WFH was common ( N = 1,123, Mean age = 43.37 years). In linear regression models, each subsequent work outcome (standardized score was used) was regressed on frequencies of WFH, adjusting for baseline values of the outcome variables and other covariates. The results suggested that WFH for 5 days/week versus never WFH was associated with subsequently less work distraction (ß = -0.24, 95% CI = -0.38, -0.11), greater perceived productivity/engagement (ß = 0.23, 95% CI = 0.11, 0.36), and greater job satisfaction (ß = 0.15, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.27), and was associated with subsequent work-family conflicts to a lesser extent (ß = -0.13, 95% CI = -0.26, 0.004). There was also evidence suggesting that long work hours, caregiving responsibilities, and a greater sense of meaningful work can all potentially attenuate the benefits of WFH. As we move towards the post-pandemic era, further research will be needed to understand the impacts of WFH and resources for supporting employees who work from home.

Citation: Chen Y, Weziak-Bialowolska D, Lee MT, Bialowolski P, Cowden RG, McNeely E, et al. (2023) Working from home and subsequent work outcomes: Pre-pandemic evidence. PLoS ONE 18(4): e0283788. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788

Editor: Daphne Nicolitsas, University of Crete, GREECE

Received: December 8, 2022; Accepted: March 20, 2023; Published: April 4, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The dataset and the SAS codes used in this study are deposited in the Dataverse repository ( https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FRUZLW ).

Funding: The study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation under the grant No. 74275 “Building a Culture of Health: A Business Leadership Imperative”, by the John Templeton Foundation under the grant No. 61075 “Religion and human flourishing – new empirical approaches”, and by Aetna Inc. under the grant No. A33796 “Well-Being Research Program”. Work of Dr. Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska was supported by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 (UMO-2020/37/K/HS6/02772). The research findings represent the perspective of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of any organization.

Competing interests: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Dr. McNeely and Dr. VanderWeele report receiving grants and personal fees from Aetna Inc. Dr. McNeely reports receiving grants from the Levi Strauss Foundation, and she also reports serving as Executive Director of SHINE at Harvard (Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise); Support is made possible through SHINE from multiple companies. Dr. VanderWeele reports receiving grants from the John Templeton Foundation. Other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented challenges to people’s social and work lives. To comply with the social distancing measures, 71% of the US workforce whose job could be mostly done from home worked remotely all or most of the time during the pandemic, whereas only 20% of them did so prior to the pandemic [ 1 ]. This wide-spread transition to working from home (WFH) may become a lasting consequence of the pandemic [ 2 ]. Some companies, such as Meta Platforms, have announced their long-term flexible remote work policy [ 3 ], and 54% of U.S. workers who could work from home indicated that they would want to continue WFH after the pandemic [ 1 ]. As we move toward the post-pandemic recovery era, it is important to understand how WFH impacts work outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances.

WFH (also referred to as telework, telecommuting, or remote work) is largely defined as “a work arrangement in which the work is done from places other than a traditional office space using information and communication technologies” [ 4 ]. WFH has become increasingly common over the past decade, but it generally has not been adopted as widely as possible prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, around 56% of the full-time employees in the U.S. are remote-capable employees whose work can be done remotely from home, but as of 2019 only 42% of the U.S. workforce had ever worked from home [ 2 , 5 ]. WFH may have a broad range of implications for employees’ work and life. According to the Conservation of Resource Theory [ 6 ] and the Job Demands-Resources Model [ 7 , 8 ], WFH provides employees with resources for reducing work life conflicts (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), which may lead to greater work life balance, job satisfaction, and possibly higher productivity [ 9 , 10 ]. WFH may also help eliminate commute times which have been associated with various adverse health and well-being outcomes including poor mental health, poor diet, back pain, and cardiovascular disease [ 11 , 12 ]. Importantly, some studies have shown that the adverse health effects of commuting may be greater for women than men [ 13 ]. Not all studies demonstrate a negative impact of commuting on health, however. Recent data during the pandemic suggest some potential benefits of commuting, or venturing out versus staying home, related to ritualistic downtime, chance social encounters, and greater sense of purpose [ 14 ]. On the other hand, WFH has led to some unintended consequences for employees such as increased sense of isolation, distraction by family obligations, work intensification, longer work hours, reduced supervisor support and mentoring, and concerns about opportunities for promotion, all adding complexity to the impacts of WFH [ 4 , 9 , 15 ].

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential benefits of working in the office have also had to be weighed against pandemic-specific needs, such as reducing the risk of disease or being at home to manage uncertain events (e.g., school cancelations). Therefore, it is challenging to study the effects of “voluntary” WFH in the context of the pandemic. An emerging literature has sought to understand the impacts of “enforced WHF” during the pandemic [ 16 , 17 ]. However, the context of “enforced” (such as during the pandemic) and “voluntary” (such as prior to the pandemic) WFH may differ in many ways, such as employees’ motivations behind the choice of work arrangement, level of preparation for WFH, family arrangements, and sources of social interaction outside work [ 18 ]. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that WFH may shape work outcomes differently during the COVID-19 pandemic than under normal circumstances.

Empirical studies on WFH prior to the pandemic are mostly cross-sectional observational studies, with the strongest evidence coming from only a handful of experimental or longitudinal observational studies. For instance, an experiment conducted in a sample of 249 employees at a call center at Ctrip (a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency) in which participants were randomized to WFH or working in an office suggested that WFH was related to a 13% increase in productivity, substantially greater work satisfaction, and a reduced turnover rate by 50% over the 9-month study period [ 19 ]. Likewise, a natural experiment study among workers of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office [ 20 ] and three large-scale longitudinal panel studies in Europe [ 21 – 23 ] also found that WFH was related to higher productivity, greater job satisfaction, and reduced turnover intention. Further, a number of review studies and meta-analyses (though primarily based on cross-sectional evidence) also suggested that WFH generally has a positive impact on work outcomes, job attitudes, and work-family balance [ 16 , 24 , 25 ]. For instance, a meta-analysis by Gajendran et al. [ 24 ] based on 46 (mostly cross-sectional) studies involving 12,883 employees indicated that WFH was related to greater employee job satisfaction (r = 0.09), better supervisor-rated work performance (r = 0.18), and lower work-family conflicts (r = -.16), though the effect sizes were relatively small. In addition, there was evidence suggesting that the frequency of WFH matters. For instance, some studies have found that the association between WFH and job satisfaction follows an inverted U-shape, with the inflection point occurring when WFH exceeds 2 or 3 days per week [ 24 , 26 ]. Based on these findings, it was hypothesized that when telecommuting is extensive, there might be an increased likelihood of social isolation and sense of frustration that offset the benefits of increased autonomy [ 24 , 26 ].

While prior studies have substantially advanced our understanding of WFH, several knowledge gaps remain. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped WFH practices in multiple aspects. Thus, WFH may follow new trends and adopt different patterns after the pandemic [ 2 , 27 ]. It is expected that as more companies allow WFH, workers may increasingly be WFH on a regular basis [ 1 , 28 ]. Prior work on pre-pandemic WFH has, however, often focused on workers who worked from home in limited capacity. It is, therefore, helpful to understand WFH in companies with a tradition of flexible work arrangements and among workers who have worked from home on a more continual basis. Moreover, heterogeneity in the association of WFH with work outcomes remains understudied. Such information would be helpful for identifying resources, informing training programs, and refining policies for supporting employees who are WFH. In addition, prior observational studies on “voluntary” WFH and work outcomes have mostly relied on cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to address concerns about reverse causality. Although it may be unlikely that work outcomes would affect workers’ preferences to WFH, it is possible that managers may be more willing to provide WFH opportunities to high-preforming employees [ 24 ]. Longitudinal evidence would, therefore, be needed to help establish temporality.

To address some of these issues, the present study uses pre-pandemic longitudinal data from a sample of employees with a high rate of frequent “voluntary” WFH to examine the associations between a full spectrum of WFH frequencies and multiple work-related outcomes including work distraction, perceived productivity/work engagement, work-family conflict, and job satisfaction. These outcomes are commonly-used markers of employee work performance, work-family balance, and job attitudes, and together they represent the major aspects of employees’ work and life that may be impacted by WFH [ 16 , 25 ]. Based on prior evidence suggesting an inverted U-shaped association between WFH and some work outcomes [ 24 , 26 ], we hypothesized that moderate frequencies of WFH would be associated with better work performance and greater work-related wellbeing, as compared to lower or higher frequencies of WFH. Some prior evidence suggests that certain worker characteristics (e.g., family caregiving responsibilities, health status, purpose in life) and workplace resource factors (e.g., workload, coworker support, sense of meaningful work) may affect employees’ work outcomes [ 24 , 29 – 32 ], but their roles in the context of WFH remain unclear. To understand potential heterogeneity in the impacts of WFH on work outcomes, as a secondary analysis this study also explored a number of worker characteristics and workplace resources as potential modifiers of the associations.

Study participants

This study used data from a sample of employees at a large U.S. national self-insured service organization. At study baseline (June 2018), an invitation to participate was sent to a randomly selected sample of 15,000 employees in this organization through the work email system. A total of 2,364 employees returned the completed questionnaire (as an incentive for participation, 52 of them were randomly selected to win a cash prize ranging from $100 to $1000). In July 2019, participants who completed the initial survey and remained employed in the organization were asked to complete a follow-up survey, and 1,411 of them responded. The analytic sample for the present study was drawn from those who participated at both waves of data collection (N = 1,411). Those with missing data on WFH (n = 17), any of the work outcome variables (n = 177) or any covariates (n = 94) were excluded, yielding an analytic sample of 1,123 participants. As compared to those who were excluded, participants included in the sample were younger, worked from home less frequently, had shorter work hours, had greater self-rated physical health, reported lower coworker support, and perceived lower productivity/work engagement at baseline ( S1 Table ). However, participants in this sample were comparable to the total employee population in this organization on major sociodemographic characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, and education level [ 33 ]. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Assessment of the independent variable

Frequency of working from home (wfh)..

Participants reported their frequency of WFH in response to the question at baseline: “How many days per week do you regularly work from home?”. Response categories ranged from 0 (0 days/week) to 5 (5 days/week). Because a majority of the participants in this sample reported either full-time WFH (5 days/week) or not WFH at all (0 day/week), to reduce data sparsity the responses were collapsed into three categories including 0 day/week, 1–4 days/week, and 5 days/week. In a sensitivity analysis, we also considered a more nuanced categorization scheme of 0 day/week, 1 day/week, 2 days/week, 3 to 4 days/week, and 5 days/week.

Assessment of the dependent variables

Work distraction..

Participants reported their assessment of distraction at work in response to the question: “Thinking about your last week of work, what percent of the time did you feel distracted or not as productive as you would like?” [ 34 ]. The response categories included 0% of time, 5–10% of time, 10–25% of time, 25–50% of time, and 50–100% of time. Following the approach in prior work [ 34 ], we took the mid-point of the categories as the response value (i.e., 0%, 7.5%, 17.5%, 37.5%, 75%), and considered them as a continuous score.

Perceived productivity/work engagement.

The participants reported the extent to which they agreed with the following statement on work productivity/engagement: “The employees are productive and engaged” [ 35 ]. Response options ranged from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree). The response was considered as a continuous score.

Work-family conflict.

Work-family conflict was measured with an item from the previously-validated Work-Family Conflict Scale [ 36 , 37 ]: “Demands of my job interfere with my home life”. Response options ranged from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree). The response was considered as a continuous score.

Job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction was measured with a previously validated item: “How satisfied are you with your job?” [ 38 – 40 ]. The response ranged from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree), and was used as a continuous score.

Assessment of candidate modifiers and other covariates

Prior evidence has suggested that employee characteristics (e.g., sociodemographic factors, household responsibilities, psychosocial wellbeing, health status) and workplace resources (e.g., manageable workload, meaningful work, work/life integration, coworker support) may shape employees’ work outcomes in the traditional circumstances of working in an office [ 29 – 32 ]. However, their roles in the context of WFH are less clear. To understand potential heterogeneity in the impacts of WFH, we explored a number of such factors (as described in detail below) assessed at baseline as potential modifiers of the associations between WFH and subsequent work outcomes.

Worker characteristics

Family responsibilities may interfere with one’s work, and women generally take more household responsibilities than men [ 41 ]. Therefore, we examined gender (male, female) and several indicators of family caring responsibilities, including caregiving to children (the number of children under the age of 18 that the participant took care at home, used as a continuous score), to elder persons (the number of elder parents or relatives that the participant took care at home, used as a continuous score), and to pets (pet ownership, yes or no), as modifiers. In addition, because psychological states may drive one’s work outcomes [ 29 ], we also examined sense of purpose in life (assessed with “My life has a clear sense of purpose” [ 42 ] on a scale from 0 [strongly disagree] to 10 [strongly agree]) as a modifier.

Workplace resources

Prior studies have identified a number of workplace resources as drivers of employee performance and wellbeing, such as manageable workload, meaningful work, work recognition, and coworker support [ 31 , 32 , 35 , 43 – 45 ]. Therefore, this study explored these factors as candidate modifiers of the outcomes. First, work hours were examined as an indicator of workload with the question: “During a typical work week, about how many hours per day do you usually work?”. Response categories included “<8 hours”, “8 hours”, “9–10 hours”, and “>10 hours”. Second, participants used an 11-point response scale (0 = strongly disagree; 10 = strongly agree) to rate the extent to which they agreed with statements about meaningful work (i.e., “I find my work meaningful”) [ 46 ], work recognition (i.e., “I feel recognized for my work”) [ 47 ], and coworker support (i.e., “I feel part of a team at work”) [ 48 ].

Other covariates

In addition to the abovementioned candidate modifiers, a number of other covariates were considered. These included sociodemographic characteristics including participants’ age (≤30 years, 31–50 years, >50 years), race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, other races/ethnicities), marital status (married or in partnership, unmarried), educational attainment (high school diploma or equivalent, some college, college degree, graduate school), and house ownership (yes, no). Because mental and physical health status may affect individual’s work outcomes and work-related wellbeing [ 49 – 51 ], we also adjusted for participants’ depressive symptoms (on a scale from 0 [not at all depressed] to 10 [very depressed]) and self-rated physical health (on a scale from 0 [poor] to 10 [excellent]) assessed at baseline. To reduce potential reverse causation, baseline values of all outcome variables (i.e., work distraction, productivity/ engagement, work-family conflict, job satisfaction) were additionally controlled for.

Statistical analyses

Statistical analyses were performed in SAS 9.4 (SAS Institute Inc). Tests of statistical significance were two-sided. Analysis of variance and Chi-square tests were performed to examine participants’ baseline characteristics across frequencies of WFH.

Linear regression models were used in the primary analyses to regress each of the 4 work outcome variables (one at a time) at follow-up on frequencies of WFH at baseline, adjusting for baseline values of all the dependent variables simultaneously in addition to other covariates. The normality assumption of the linear regression models was tested, and there was no evidence suggesting violation of the assumption. For easier interpretation, the dependent variables were standardized (mean = 0, standard deviation = 1), such that the effect estimates were reported in terms of standard deviations in the dependent variables. As a sensitivity analysis, the primary sets of models were reanalyzed with a more nuanced categorization of the frequencies of WFH.

The secondary analyses explored candidate modifiers of the associations between WFH and work outcomes. Specifically, the primary sets of regression models were reanalyzed with an interaction term added between each of the candidate modifiers (examined one at a time) and the independent variable of WFH for each dependent variable.

To account for multiple testing, Bonferroni correction was applied. However, the practices for multiple testing vary in the literature and it is an evolving area of research [ 52 , 53 ]. Therefore, we do not use Bonferroni correction as the primary lens for interpreting the results. However, to acknowledge the different practices and types of cutoffs that can be used for interpreting the results, we reported our results both with and without Bonferroni correction and with multiple p-value cutoffs marked.

Participant characteristics

The participants had a mean age of 43.37 (SD = 10.48) years, and were predominantly female (84.15%), non-Hispanic White (74.62%), married or in partnership (70.61%), had a college degree or higher (69.19%), owned a house (71.95%), and had caring responsibilities (to children, older persons, or pets) at home. A majority of the participants worked exclusively from home for 5 days/week (42.56%), and the remaining worked from home for 1 to 4 days/week (26.80%) or did not work from home at all (30.63%) ( S1 Table ). At the follow-up wave, the participants generally reported low levels of work distraction (over 75% of the participants reported being distracted for less than 10% of their time at work) and work family conflicts (mean = 3.20 out of a range of 0 to 10, SD = 2.94), as well as moderate levels of perceived productivity/work engagement (mean = 7.49 out of a range of 0 to 10, SD = 1.96) and job satisfaction (mean = 7.25 out of a range of 0 to 10, SD = 2.10).

As compared to those who did not work from home, participants who worked from home at least 1 day/week were more likely to be older, female, non-Hispanic White, married or in partnership, highly educated, and house-owners. They also tended to report fewer depressive symptoms, better self-rated physical health, greater purpose in life, a greater sense of meaningful work, shorter work hours, and greater job satisfaction at baseline ( Table 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.t001

Work from home and subsequent work outcomes

There was a monotonic inverse association between WFH and work distraction. As compared to no WFH, WFH for 1–4 days/week (ß = -0.20, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.34, -0.06) and for 5 days/week (ß = -0.24, 95% CI = -0.38, -0.11) were both associated with subsequently less work distraction, adjusting for baseline levels of work distraction and other covariates. These associations remained p < .05 after Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). Sensitivity analysis using a more nuanced categorization of WFH frequencies yielded similar results ( S2 Table ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.t002

As compared to never WFH, WFH for 5 days/week was associated with subsequently greater perceived productivity/work engagement (ß = 0.23, 95% CI = 0.11, 0.36), and the association remained p < .05 after Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). However, less frequent WFH for 1–4 days/week did not differ from never WFH in perceived productivity/engagement. Results were similar when a more nuanced categorization of WFH frequencies was used ( S2 Table ).

The participants who worked exclusively from home reported subsequently greater job satisfaction (ß = 0.15, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.27), though the associations did not remain p < .05 after Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). There was no difference between job satisfaction of participants with 1–4 days/week WFH and 0 day/week WFH. The sensitivity analysis with a more nuanced measure of WFH frequencies again yielded similar results ( S2 Table ).

The association of WFH with subsequent work-family conflicts was slightly weaker compared to the other outcomes, and did not meet the conventional p < .05 threshold before Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). Sensitivity analysis with a more nuanced measure of WFH frequencies yielded similar results ( S2 Table ).

Modifiers for the associations between WFH and work outcomes

There was generally little evidence that the candidate modifiers altered the associations. There were, however, a few exceptions ( Table 3 ). Specifically, the inverse association of WFH with less work distraction was weaker among participants with caring responsibilities at home (specifically, caregiving to older persons or pets, but not to children). For instance, the inverse association between WFH (5 days/week vs. 0 day/week) and work distraction was substantially weaker among those who did versus did not have caregiving responsibilities to older people at home. Likewise, the inverse association with work distraction was weaker among participants with long work hours. However, the interaction terms of WFH with both caregiving responsibilities and work hours only passed the conventional, but not the Bonferroni-corrected p < .05 thresholds. Interestingly, the association with greater perceived productivity/engagement was weaker among those with a higher vs. lower sense of meaning of work, though the interaction term again only passed the conventional but not the Bonferroni-corrected p < .05 thresholds. There was, however, no substantial evidence that any of the candidate modifiers modified the associations of WFH with subsequent work-family conflicts or job satisfaction ( Table 3 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.t003

Over recent years, there have been calls for creating a caring climate at the workplace that makes employees feel being treated with care, trust, fairness and respect [ 35 ]. A regenerative workplace may help improve employee’s motivation at work and enhance their flourishing in life, which in turn may also boost organizational business outcomes [ 45 , 54 ]. Allowing employees to work from home may be one of the workplace resources that contribute to creating a caring organizational climate.

Congruent with the majority of prior studies on pre-pandemic WFH, the present study adds to the evidence that WFH is positively associated with multiple work-related outcomes [ 25 , 55 , 56 ], and extends the literature with longitudinal data from a unique sample with a high rate of frequent or even full-time WFH under non-pandemic circumstances. For instance, a prior meta-analysis (of mostly cross-sectional studies on pre-pandemic WFH) suggested that WFH was positively associated with objectively measured work performance ( r = 0.18, 95% CI = 0.08, 0.26) and with job satisfaction ( r = 0.09, 95% CI = 0.07, 0.11). Likewise, prior studies on “enforced WFH” during the pandemic indicated that switching to WFH was linked with increased or at least unchanged productivity [ 57 , 58 ], despite a decline in the average productivity per hour which was partly due to increased work hours among remote workers [ 59 ]. In comparison, empirical evidence on the impacts of WFH on work-family conflicts has been less clear. For instance, while some early meta-analyses [ 24 , 60 ] suggested a modest cross-sectional association between WFH and lower work interference with family, the present study was more consistent with recent work using large-scale panel data that suggested little medium-term effects of WFH on employee work-life balance [ 61 ]. Considering frequencies of WFH, somewhat contrary to our original hypothesis and to some prior literature which has suggested an inverted U-shaped association between frequencies of WFH and work outcomes [ 24 , 26 ], in our sample full-time remote work was associated with the best performance and highest job satisfaction. This may be attributable to the characteristics of this sample. Specifically, all our participants were employees of an organization with a long-standing flexible work tradition, where management, technical, and infrastructure support for WFH was available, and there might be less stigma associated with frequent WFH. Working exclusively from home might also help establish a consistent routine that reduces the need to organize one’s schedule and helps enhance one’s sense of coherence and meaning [ 62 ]. In comparison, prior studies seldom included participants who regularly worked from home for more than 3 days/week. Therefore, this sample provided an unique opportunity to understand a fuller spectrum of the frequencies of WHF. Taken together, the findings of this study provide some evidence supporting the Conservation of Resource Theory [ 6 ], the Job Demands-Resources Model [ 7 , 8 ], and the Caring Climate Workplace Framework [ 35 ], and suggest that work life integration should be treated as a workplace resource that could potentially contribute to improved work performance and worker wellbeing.

Heterogeneity in the associations between WFH and employee work outcomes remained understudied in the literature. The exploratory analysis in this study suggested that some worker characteristics and workplace resources might modify the WFH—work performance association. For instance, it was previously hypothesized that WFH carried the risk of blurring the boundaries between work and family, which might compromise employee productivity [ 25 ]. Consistent with this hypothesis, in this sample the inverse association between WFH and work distraction was weaker among participants with caring responsibilities at home (particularly to older persons and to pets). There was, however, little evidence that having children was a strong modifier, which may be attributed to the availability of childcare and education services under normal circumstances. Evidence on WFH during the pandemic when childcare and education services were interrupted indeed suggested stronger evidence that having young children at home can negatively impact WFH productivity [ 63 ]. Although women generally have greater household responsibilities than men [ 64 , 65 ], previous research indicated that women tend to have similar, if not higher, productivity in the office relative to men [ 66 ]. Considering WFH, while evidence pointed to greater vulnerabilities to disruption at work among women than men during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns [ 66 ], this study’s findings are consistent with pre-pandemic evidence that has found little gender gaps in perceived productivity. This trend might be related to a greater likelihood of sacrifice of leisure time for work among women versus men and again to the availability of childcare services [ 67 ]. This study also suggested novel evidence that the inverse association between WFH and work distraction might be weaker among participants with long working hours. This might be related to the fatigue and burnout of maintaining boundaries between work roles and household responsibilities while WFH [ 68 ]. Interestingly, there was also some evidence that the positive association of WFH with perceived productivity/engagement was weaker among those with a stronger sense of meaningful work. One possible explanation for this finding is that WFH may affect the depth and/or breadth of knowledge an employee has about the inner workings of the organization (e.g., daily activities of its employees), which could be especially impactful among those who find their work to be more meaningful because they typically have a better understanding of the organization and how they fit within it [ 69 ]. Therefore, employees engaged in meaningful work but are WFH might not have sufficient opportunities to acquire the kind of detailed organizational knowledge they may need in order to rate the productivity/engagement of the workforce more positively. There was, however, little evidence that any of the candidate modifiers modified the association with work-family conflicts or job satisfaction in this sample. It is possible that WFH may improve job satisfaction more unanimously, whereas the association with work-family conflicts may vary by factors not examined in this study due to a lack of data (e.g., self-efficacy, characteristics of the workspace at home).

This study has certain limitations. First, the participants were primarily female and non-Hispanic White, and most were client service workers. The results, therefore, may not be applicable to other populations or to other job types. Second, the dependent variables and candidate modifiers in the study were mostly assessed with self-reported single-item questions. However, these items are all face valid and some of them were taken from previously validated scales. There was also prior evidence supporting the validity of single-item measures of worker wellbeing [ 38 – 40 , 70 ] and the validity of self-reported work performance [ 71 ]. In a prior meta-analysis (of mostly cross-sectional studies), WFH had an even stronger association with objectively-measured work performance outcomes compared to self-assessed performance [ 24 ]. Next, due to a lack of data, this study was not able to examine some potentially critical modifiers for the outcomes of WFH such as self-efficacy, or availability of a dedicated workspace at home [ 72 , 73 ]. Further, this study had only 1-year follow-up and was not able to examine the long-term impacts of WFH. These limitations are, however, balanced by important strengths of this study, such as its use of longitudinal data from a sample with a high rate of frequent and even full-time “voluntary WFH”, which provides a unique opportunity to understand the implications of frequent WFH under non-pandemic circumstances.

Taken together, this study adds to the evidence that WFH is positively associated with subsequent work-related outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances, and also suggests several workplace resources and worker characteristics as potential modifiers of the associations. The shift towards WFH induced by the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to stay as a new work norm long after the public health crisis wanes [ 58 ]. Although the pandemic has led to reduced stigma against WFH and a surge in investments enabling WFH, there are many challenges to and opportunities for improving the efficiency and sustainability of WFH [ 58 , 74 ]. Further research on the impacts of WFH on work and wellbeing under normal circumstances and potential resources for supporting WFH would be important for informing effective training programs and workplace innovations, which could help to cultivate and maintain a happy, healthy, and engaged workforce.

Supporting information

S1 table. comparison of baseline characteristics between the participants included in the analyses and those excluded from the analyses (n = 1,411)..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.s001

S2 Table. Sensitivity analysis on the associations between work from home and subsequent work outcomes (N = 1,123).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.s002

Acknowledgments

We thank all participants for their participation in this study.

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