In the debate over the future of work, the argument for hybrid home-office work arrangements just received another case exhibit.
After a Shanghai-based travel booking website tested what would happen when it allowed a sliver of employees to work from home on two days, attrition rates dropped and job satisfaction climbed.
Meanwhile, job performance did not suffer and self-assessed worker productivity edged up — leading management at Trip.com to extend the hybrid work approach to all its staffers after the six-month experiment ended earlier this year.
In a randomized trial among 1,612 software engineers, marketing and finance professionals, the data showed that attrition — or churn — rates were 35% lower for those allowed to work from home versus a control group.
The experiment showed a shift in time management for the hybrid workers, who worked around 80 minutes less on home days, but increased their overall weekly workload by about 30 minutes, sometimes because they worked on weekends. When these employees were in the office for face-to-face work, they still tended to use messaging and group video calls.
Hybrid work didn’t impact job-performance reviews or promotions, the study found, but the hybrid staffers produced 8% more lines of code and their self-assessed productivity edged up 1.8%.
“One argument against hybrid arrangements is that it keeps workers away from the spark of ideas that can come with face-to-face conference room meetings or random encounters at the water cooler.”
Others say hybrid work is a fallacy. Given a taste of greater freedom, one might easily conclude that office work had changed, or that it was sure to do so. But if you’d been chained to the office before the pandemic, you’re no less captive to it now—even though, in certain comfy moments, you could let yourself forget it. You were at home, but still, you were in the office. For you are an office worker, and the office is your home.
One argument against remote work and hybrid arrangements is that it keeps workers away from the spark of ideas that can come with face-to-face conference room meetings or random encounters at the water cooler.
Ian Bogost, director of the program in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, had this to say in The Atlantic: “Given a taste of greater freedom, one might easily conclude that office work had changed, or that it was sure to do so.”
“But if you’d been chained to the office before the pandemic, you’re no less captive to it now — even though, in certain comfy moments, you could let yourself forget it,” he wrote. “You were at home, but still, you were in the office. For you are an office worker, and the office is your home.”
Still, the latest study gives props to hybrid work. While other past academic research on work-from-home consequences have looked at call center staffers, the “employees in this experiment are graduate employees working in teams and creating new products and services. So this small positive result in a large sample of 1,612 employees is notable,” the study said.
The research also comes as recession talk keeps mounting. That may lead people just starting a new job to worry about their job security if companies need to cut costs to withstand a slowdown.
Some career experts say the best way people can safeguard against a layoff is focusing on their own job performance, wherever the setting.
