Two days of homeworking will keep you just as efficient and valuable

Sep
2024

Steen Uno

Office employees working from home two days a week are just as efficient, productive and are likely to get promoted compared to colleagues working full-time in the office, according to the largest study to date.

Sep
2024

Steen Uno

A recent survey of more than 1,600 employees at one of the world's largest online travel agencies, Trip.com, shows that employees working from home two days a week are just as productive and eligible for promotions as their colleagues who work full-time from the office.

The study, which is the most extensive to date, was published by American work-from-home expert Nicolas Bloom in June in the reputed science weekly Nature.

"The results speak for themselves: Hybrid workflow is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance and job retention," professor of economics at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences," Bloom states.

"Our new study provides strong evidence for why 80% of American companies today offer their employees some form of remote work, and why the remaining 20% that do not are most likely paying a price."

Big savings

Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic altered global work patterns, approximately 100 million employees worldwide now split their workweek between home and the office.

Today, many hybrid office workers hold professions such as lawyers, accountants, marketers, software engineers, and others with a college degree or higher.

The new study points out that employees working from home two days a week are
just as productive and precisely as relevant for promotions as their colleagues who
work full-time from their physical office. Photos: iStock

"The study also documents that resignations at Trip.com fell by as much as 33% among employees who switched from working full-time in the office to a hybrid schedule," Nicolas Bloom adds.

Women, non-managers and employees with long commutes were the least likely to quit their jobs when their office transport decreased to three days a week. Trip.com estimates that reduced staff turnover has saved the company millions of dollars.

Skepticism reversed

For example, employees' homework days did not affect the grades they received for performances, promotions and the number of coding lines that programmers produced.

Regardless of the current metrics, Trip.com's hybrid and home-working test persons scored just as well as colleagues who worked full-time in the company's physical offices.

Regardless of the metrics, employees working from home at Trip.com achieved as
high scores as their colleagues working full-time in the company's physical offices.

Before the test course, many managers believed that homeworking would hurt productivity due to distractions from personal tasks at home like laundry or a general lack of work discipline.

At the end of the study, 395 managers changed their initial negative perceptions of productivity to very positive views - reversals consistent with other research findings emphasizing how employees can maintain productivity while working from home.

A win-win

The positive and constructive results of the test course subsequently led Trip.com to extend the trial periods with hybrid workflows and home working days.

No matter how you face it, reduced resignation rates will help companies reduce the costs for recruiting, introducing and training new employees.

Proper management of employees' two or three days of remote work per week can
help the company maintain its level of mentoring, culture-building, and innovation.

"To sceptical business leaders, our study underlines that their concerns that hybrid working does more harm than good are quite exaggerated," Nicolas Bloom concludes.

"If you manage two or three weekly home working days appropriately, the company can maintain its level of mentoring, culture-building and innovation. From an economic-political point of view, hybrid work only creates a win-win."

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