Does working from home (and hybrid working) improve productivity or the opposite? Two recent reports have come to slightly different conclusions, and I suspect this is not surprising because the answer almost certainly is ‘it depends’. Clearly if you are a waiter or a bus driver, a night-club bouncer or a hairdresser, the question really doesn’t arise. You have to be at the appropriate place of work to carry out those roles and no amount of negotiation with management will change that. The jobs that lend themselves to hybrid/fully wfh are the ones available to those with higher levels of education, but certainly not all. If you are a researcher carefully tending a cell line, bacteria or some GM mice, you may well need frequent attendance, perhaps even at anti-social hours. If you are the researcher looking at the fluorescent images taken from these same organisms, you are quite likely to be able to do that from home. So, that different research gives different answers may not be surprising, since like should only be compared with like.
The study in Nature published in June looked at behaviours in a specific Chinese technology firm. It concluded – as its title says – that hybrid working improved retention without damaging performance. In other words, workers felt happier when they were allowed to stay away from the company site on agreed days, and there was an accompanying reduction of a third in workers who quit. That would definitely look like a winning formula. However, the wider-ranging US study covering many different kinds of employer, came to more nuanced conclusions. Firstly, whether working from home made workers more or less productive depended on who you asked: the workers thought their productivity had gone up, but the managers disagreed and thought it had fallen. The Stanford researchers meta-analysis showed that the managers were right, and productivity did fall by 10-20%.
However, it does depend on what you think you are measuring. If you are a worker who no longer has to commute every day, you may well believe your productivity has gone up because the total time you spend to complete your work has decreased for apparently the same output. But, because the manager doesn’t factor in that travel time, all they may note is the output has dipped because the worker spends more time surfing the web, making additional cups of coffee or playing with the dog. In this context, the outcomes of a pilot experiment in my local (South Cambridgeshire) council is interesting, because they found that nearly all measures (22/24 measures) showed improvement when the working week was cut to four days – this was not about working from home, just about working at all. This didn’t stop the last government trying to forbid the four-day week as ‘not value for money’, even if there was no evidence of this, just an assumption that five days work had to be better than four. Once again, recruitment and retention were found to improve.
How does improved retention factor into productivity? The loss of a worker has significant implications for a firm, the more skilled the worker is the greater the cost, some of which is real financial cost, some is more indirect due to knock-on effects on other workers. The CIPD lists four types of effect, and firms should consider these when contemplating whether a slight loss in daily productivity of a worker on a hybrid pattern of working is more than offset by the less obvious costs associated with losing the worker. These four are related to the administration of resignations, costs associated with recruitment and selection, sorting out and paying for cover during the vacancy and induction and training for the new employee when recruited. This last factor also means there may be an extended period of training when the new employee simply isn’t able to contribute fully to the required work. Loss in productivity due to the high churn of employees through job dissatisfaction, may therefore be helpfully offset by facilitating a hybrid form of working to increase the happiness and well-being of employees. The Nature study of the Chinese technology company explicitly calculates savings due to the reduction in employee loss, based on the figure of US$20,000 cost per employee lost.
However, if considering fully remote working, working from home for five days a week, there are some other factors that need to be considered. Induction is obviously one. How does a new employee learn about their role and who the key individuals they need to interact with are? This was a lesson many people had to face up to during the pandemic and it won’t have been easy. How do you mentor someone you’ve never met if you’re their manager? How do you build new relationships or find a common interest with someone if you’re not bumping into them in the tearoom? As scientists, those chance and perhaps interdisciplinary interactions can be incredibly fruitful (not to mention the challenges of dealing with committee dynamics over Zoom, as I wrote about previously at the height of the pandemic). Fully working from home may be particularly attractive for those with caring responsibilities or disabilities, so there is a real danger that these people will end up more marginalised and disadvantaged when it comes to progression due to the lack of face-to-face contact. A very recently published study from the University of Durham also highlighted that gender stereotypes in the home are alive and well, and women working from home are far more likely to struggle to separate work from their family needs than men, with all the obvious downsides.
All this goes to show that there is no single answer to is working from home good or bad for productivity? It depends on so many factors from the individual to the sector, from the type of work to the pattern of working from home. Employers need to factor in the cost of losing employees against any possible loss of productivity. Researchers in the academic sector probably have more choice than most. Presenteeism is enforced by only a sub-section of professors – although undoubtedly there are some who judge the worth of a student by how long they are prepared to spend at the bench – and for the professors themselves there is likely to be a lot of flexibility. It is hard to think that hybrid working isn’t here to stay, but we should make sure we optimise how that plays out and recognize the costs and benefits for different sections of the workforce.
I’m in the fortunate position of working from home seven days per week – I’m retired. But when I was working I was a manager, and over the years had a number of people reporting to me that were either quite “bad” employees – i.e., lazy, or looking to avoid responsibility – or quite weak.
Each type needed daily supervision. Some of those who were weak deserved extra attention, because often they really did want to d better; some did not realize they were weak, and so would go off on their own tangents and made others distrust or under-value our group.
For diligent and strong performers, ways should be found to give them a bit of extra space with, e.g., a three or four day week.
But for others, don’t just assume that removing them from daily and direct supervision will have no negative consequences. My stress level as a manager would have risen dramatically.