Of home work, hybrid or traditional office hours, the last is the worst of all worlds. Here’s why | Opinion
Boeing and UPS, among other organizations, recently demanded that their staff return to the office for the full Monday-Friday, 9-to-5 schedule. Yet such top-down, full-time in the office mandates come in the face of definitive proof that the traditional office presence is the worst of all worlds. It’s based on a meta-analysis paper by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Chicago and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México on productivity in hybrid, remote and in-office settings.
Research has consistently found that hybrid workers exhibit an increase in productivity of 5% to 13% and report greater job satisfaction. A randomized control trial demonstrated that productivity in these settings is improved by approximately 4%. Self-assessments by hybrid workers corroborate these findings, with 3% to 5% increases in productivity. The international findings are similar, with positive reports from around the world.
The picture for fully remote work is more complex. Using traditional, office-centric approaches to remote work introduces significant hurdles that can undermine efficiency. In such cases, communication difficulties and a lack of immediate feedback can slow down project progress, reduce collaboration and diminish the quality of outputs.
For example, consider a study by economists that observed two groups made up of 235 data-entry workers — one working from home, the other in the office — in Chennai, India. They hired these workers for eight weeks and compared the productivity of both groups. Their finding? Low-skilled contract workers hired for a two-month gig working from home proved 18% less productive, based on net typing speed, than those working from the office.
By contrast, an earlier study by scholars at Stanford looked at 250 call center employees of a sizable multinational corporation, split into two groups: those working remotely and those commuting to an office. The researchers uncovered a startling 13% surge in productivity among remote workers. The differences might stem from the fact that the latter study focused on permanent staff invested in their careers at the multinational company, compared to the short-term contract workers evaluated in the other study.
The evidence does show that fully remote work undermines collaboration and learning, unless you adopt best practices for remote work management. One study looked at software engineers at a Fortune 500 company with a main campus split across two buildings. Engineers stationed in the same building as their entire team benefitted from receiving 22% more online feedback compared to those with teammates in different buildings. The researchers concluded that the lack of such feedback indicates that working remotely undermines collaboration and learning.
However, remote work indisputably offers much better cost savings. Remote employees require no office space and can be hired at lower wages. Specifically, consider FlexJobs’ 2024 Work-From-Anywhere survey of over 4,000 U.S. professionals. The findings revealed a significant willingness among workers to trade financial gain for geographic flexibility: In order to secure the ability to work from anywhere, 26% of respondents would accept a 5% reduction in salary, while 24% indicated they would agree to a pay decrease ranging from 10% to 15%.
In any case, the debate is clearly between a flexible hybrid model or a fully remote model — the traditional office-centric model is toast. Hybrid work definitely offers higher productivity than office-centric work. Productivity in remote work is more nuanced and context-dependent, with negative implications for learning and collaboration, unless organizations adopt best practices. At the same time, fully remote work offers major cost savings. Either hybrid or fully remote work is better than office-centric work, and there’s never a reason to adopt a Monday-Friday, 9-to-5 modality.
Gleb Tsipursky serves as the CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and is the author of several books including “Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.” He lives in Columbus, Ohio.