Highlights
• Harvard study says split work increases output and creativity.
• A separate survey of bosses reveals a lack of trust in remote workers.
According to a new study, spending just one or two days in the office is the optimal configuration for hybrid work. Since it gives workers the flexibility they want without the isolation of entirely remote work. Harvard researchers revealed the findings of a 2020 study involving 130 administrative employees in a paper published last month.
The findings, published in a paper by Harvard Business School, were based on a summer 2020 experiment in which 130 administrative workers were randomly assigned to one of three groups for nine weeks. Some worked less than 25% of the time, while others worked more than 40% of the time, with a third “intermediate” cohort falling somewhere in the middle, averaging a day or two per week. The authors wrote that this subset produced more original work than the other groups, and “this difference was significant.”
Intermediate hybrid work is likely the sweet spot, where workers enjoy flexibility while remaining less isolated than peers who predominantly work from home,” according to the paper, co-authored by Harvard associate professor Prithwiraj Choudhury. “An intermediate hybrid could provide the best of both worlds.”
The study, which is unique in that it examines actual hybrid worker outcomes rather than just their preferences, comes at a time when companies such as Apple Inc., Bank of America Corp., and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are nudging workers back into the office without a clear sense of the ideal balance between remote and in-person schedules.
According to research co-authored by Stanford University professor Nick Bloom, employers expect nearly a quarter of working days to be spent at home in the future, but there is a “significant gap” between what employers and employees desire when it comes to the days required to be in the office.
The key to hybrid arrangements, however, is to organize things so that teams are in the office on the same days, avoiding the issue of workers commuting in only to spend half their day on Zoom calls with remote colleagues.
“You want people to try to come in together so that office time is together time,” Bloom explained via email. “A well-organized hybrid appears to be the sweet spot.”
