Across organizations, work was most effective when employees were home 1-2 days a week, found research by Humu, a tech company run by Google's former chief of human resources
Employees at Box in Los Altos, Calif., April 16, 2015. The company designed it, complete with couches and a slide, to make people want to come to work. Now it will let them work from home part of the time permanently. (Matt Edge/The New York Times)
(The Upshot)
Most American office workers are in no hurry to return to the office full time, even after the coronavirus is under control. But that does not mean they want to work from home forever. The future for them, a variety of new data shows, is likely to be workweeks split between office and home.
Recent surveys show that both employees and employers support this arrangement. And research suggests that a couple of days a week at each location is the magic number to cancel out the negatives of each arrangement while reaping the benefits of both.
“You should never be thinking about full time or zero time,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University whose research has identified causal links between remote work and employee performance. “I’m a firm believer in post-COVID half time in the office.”
According to a new survey by Morning Consult, 47% of those working remotely say that once it is safe to return to work, their ideal arrangement would be to continue working from home 1-4 days a week. Forty percent would work from home every day, and just 14% would return to the office every day.
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