Nicholas Bloom is the William Eberle
Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on working
from home, management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK
Treasury and McKinsey & Company and the IFS. He has a BA from Cambridge, an
MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London.
Website: https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2
Abstract:
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. 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. 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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