Since the pandemic forced one of history’s most dramatic workplace experiments — the sudden transition of millions of employees to remote or hybrid work — debate has raged over the pros and cons of working from home. Until recently, data on how remote work affects employee performance has been incomplete and inconsistent. But now, a large, well-controlled study published in the journal Nature provides the most compelling evidence to date that hybrid work improves employee retention without affecting performance.
Working remotely at least one day per week is now the norm for most employees with a university degree. However, some employers are still arguing for a complete return to the office, citing studies that indicate reduced productivity for fully remote work. Until now, most studies on productivity have focused on fully remote workers in call center, data entry, and helpdesk roles. Yet, most employees who work remotely have a hybrid schedule — the most popular model being three days per week in the office and two days at home — and have creative team jobs that require a university degree.
To fill the data gap, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and his collaborators in China conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to investigate the effects of hybrid work on 1,612 university graduate employees of Trip.com, a Chinese travel technology company. In RCTs — considered the gold standard for cause-and-effect research — scientists randomly assign participants to one of two groups and then observe the outcomes of an intervention. In this case, half of the employees were allowed to work from home two days per week for six months, whereas the other employees worked in the company’s office all five days. The researchers compared job satisfaction, employee retention, and performance between the two groups.
For the hybrid work group, job satisfaction scores improved and attrition (or quit rate) dropped by one-third compared with the fully in-office group. The reduction in quit rate was particularly strong for non-managers, women, and those with long commutes. The researchers found no significant differences between the two groups in performance reviews, promotion rates, or lines of code written by computer engineers — all measures of productivity and performance.
The experiment was such a success that Trip.com decided to extend the hybrid work policy to all employees in all divisions. Executives reasoned that each quit cost the company about $20,000 in recruitment and training; therefore, reducing the quit rate by one-third would save them millions of dollars. NLI has advocated a hybrid work model we call the Patchwork Principle, which aims to maximize a low overall dosage of mandatory in-office time while giving everyone a sense of control and feeling of fairness.
