Do you still have office staff working from home, fallout from the pandemic? Trying to coax them into coming back to work in the office?
Well, a new study shows that a hybrid work arrangement – just spending one or two days per week in the office – may be best. The report by the Harvard Business School says hybrid work gives employees the flexibility they want without being isolated by working completely remotely.
The study was conducted in the summer of 2020 and involved 130 administrative workers who were assigned randomly to one of three groups for nine weeks. Some worked less than 25% of their days in the office, and some were in the office more than 40% of their days. The third group was in the middle, working in the office one or two days per week. This third group produced more original work than the other two groups, and the authors of the study report said, “This difference was significant.”
“Intermediate hybrid work is plausibly the sweet spot, where workers enjoy flexibility and yet are not as isolated compared to peers who are predominantly working from home,” said the paper, co-authored by Harvard associate professor Prithwiraj Choudhury. “Intermediate hybrid might offer the best of both worlds.”
The study was differentiated from others in that it looked at actual worker outcomes rather than their preferences.
Companies – including big ones like Apple, Bank of America, and Google – are nudging employees back to the office, but they don’t have a clear picture of the best balance between working on-site and remotely. Other research co-authored by Stanford University professor Nick Bloom found that employers expect going forward that nearly one-fourth of working days will be spent at home, but there is a “sizable gap” between what employers and workers want when it comes to the number of days required for employees to be on-site in the office.
There are other factors at play in hybrid work arrangements, as underscored by a survey of 200 senior executives. They said that employees who work primarily remotely have fewer opportunities compared to employees who work mostly on-site in the office. The same survey also found that executives do not trust the ability of most staffers to work remotely. At the same time, almost half of the executives said they were remiss in failing to give remote workers the tools to be as engaged as employees who work on-site.
The research by Choudhury probably frustrates managers who have coaxed workers to come back to the office and work on-site most of the time, arguing that their company culture and collaboration suffer when people work remotely.
His study analyzed more than 30,000 emails sent by the administrative workers, using textual analysis to gauge the novelty of their output. It found that the hybrid group of workers performed better, and got better ratings from managers, than those who were primarily at home or mainly in the office.
The researchers also analyzed polling data from the start of the pandemic and concluded that employees who come into the office just a few days a week don’t feel they’re missing out on things like mentorship, as fully-remote workers sometimes do.
“Work from home arrangements allow workers to capture the benefits of a productive and enjoyable workplace almost as much as those workers who are always in the office,” the report said. “Our results consistently suggest that intermediate levels of work from home may result in both enhanced novelty of work products and greater work-related communication.”
There is a caveat, though. The key to hybrid work arrangements is to organize them in such a way that teams are in the office together on the same days. You don’t want people coming back into the office on certain days and spending half their day on Zoom calls with colleagues who are working remotely.
“You want people to try and come in together, so office time is together time,” said Bloom. “Well-organized hybrid does seem to be the sweet spot.”
