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- There might be an answer to the great RTO debate, and it's a hybrid solution.
- Two days in the office might lead to happier and more productive workers.
- That's according to the latest research on hybrid work and working patterns.
It turns out that there might just be a perfect balance when it comes to where and how we work: Spending two days in the office could be the "sweet spot" that workers and bosses alike have been chasing.
Since the onset of remote work in 2020, workers and bosses have been in a push and pull over how and where they work. But new research suggests that a two days in, three days at home schedule might be the right shape for a labor market that's finally settling into its own version of a new normal.
A new forthcoming paper from researchers Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos Makridis, and Kyle Schirmann in The Review of Economics and Statistics looks at performance and sentiment among a sample of 148 employees at BRAC, the world's largest NGO in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Before 2020 and the pandemic, those BRAC employees were in the office five days a week. Employees in the experiment carried out from July 5 to September 3, 2020 were randomly selected to come into the office over a period of nine weeks, around 35 workdays. At the end of the experiment, the researchers split the employees up into three different buckets of work-from-home based on how many days they were randomly assigned to come into the office during that nine-week period. "High" work-from-home meant that they spent zero to eight days in the office over the nine weeks, averaging 0-1 days in the office a week, "intermediate" meant nine to 14 days in office, an average of about 2 days in office a week, and "low" meant 15 or more days in the office.
And for those "intermediate" workers, things looked good. They were more satisfied at work, and said they had greater work-life balance — and felt less isolated. Their managers were also more likely to rate them better than workers in the other two buckets of WFH, with intermediate workers seeing their creativity and productivity scores get a slight boost.
"Intermediate WFH is plausibly the sweet spot, where employees report greater satisfaction and lower isolation, and yet receive no penalties in performance ratings compared to peers who work more or fewer days in the office," the authors write.
That research comes as hybrid work is slowly emerging as the winner of the post-pandemic RTO push. Workers have said they prefer a remote or flexible model to being in the office all the time, and many have the capability to do so; a 2022 McKinsey survey of 25,000 Americans found that 58% of workers reported they could work from home at least one day per week. Similarly, Gallup found that, as of May 2023, 52% of Americans are in jobs that can be remote capable.
However, not everyone has access to hybrid work. Demographically, hybrid workers are more likely to be millennial men making six figures who have earned a few degrees. And they're less common in some professions than others.
And one important wrinkle in the great RTO/WFH debate are the shifts workers made in their own lives in the wake of the pandemic. That includes moving further away from work, or rethinking the fabric of their lives completely. For instance, millennials' particular shifts — like buying homes amidst low interest rates, or having younger children — have made them into one cohort keeping remote work robust. And a larger rethink of work has led more workers to draw lines in the sand on how and where they want to work.
For some workers, staying at home is worth taking a pay cut; for others, especially the latest entrants to the workforce, in-office work means more social opportunities — and staying at home might mean more anxiety.