Stanford Professor | LinkedIn Top Voice In Remote Work | Co-Founder wfhresearch.com | Speaker on work from home
Just out in Harvard Business Review, summary of the Hybrid Experiment results and lessons on how to make hybrid succeed. Experiment: randomize 1600 graduate employees in marketing, finance, accounting and engineering at Trip.com into 5-days a week in office, or 3-days a week in office and 2-days a week WFH. Analyzed 2 years of data. Two key results A) Hybrid and fully-in-office showed no differences in productivity, performance review grade, promotion, learning or innovation. B) Hybrid had a higher satisfaction rate, and 35% lower attrition. Quit-rate reductions were largest for female employees. Four managerial lessons 1) Hybrid needs a strong performance management system so managers don’t need to hover over employees at their desks to check their progress. Trip.com had an extensive performance review process every six months. 2) Coordinate in-office days at the team or company level. Schedule clarity prevents the frustration of coming to an empty office only to participate in Zoom calls. Trip.com coordinated WFH on Wednesday and Friday. 3) Having leadership buy-in is critical (as with most management practices). Trip.com’s CEO and C-suite all support the hybrid policy. 4) A/B test new policies (as well as products) if possible. Often new policies turn out to be unexpectedly profitable. Trip.com made millions of dollars more profits from hybrid by cutting expensive turnover.
Joseph (Joe) Mackie
10mo
My years of experience as a remote/hybrid employee and manager aligns with this data. The remote and hybrid employees I had were more happy and engaged. Turnover from back to office policies is often from the high earner pool. Sure, that can help quickly reduce costs and boost short-term profits, but this turnover also hurts knowledge retention and morale and ultimately that will hurt the bottom line in the long run. I have found in my experience that remote can be even more cost-effective because of the reduced real-estate costs for one. I would love to see a study comparing remote vs. hybrid. Executives should also consider that this should not be a binary decision of a. v. b. Company executives should want to hire the very best talent they can find and afford regardless of where those individual live or the demographic they fill. Limiting your search to only employees within a 50-mile radius of your office is severely limiting. Forcing employees to move to you only succeeds in showing them how much you do not appreciate their individuality. For an employee to bring their best self, they need to feel supported. One aspect of support is understanding that where people live is part of who they are. Excited for this data!
It's so great to see research to back up the experiences we've all lived. I've found the coordination to be critical. And co-location for the cross functional team members. In a hub role like product management, I've found matters it much less whether I am in the office with my PM counterparts than how much face time I get with the engineers and designers on my team. When half the team is in another city or another continent, office time is actually counter-productive. At this point, I won't take another role that requires more than 2 days a week in the office. And if the other team members are located elsewhere, the really seems to be no point to coming into the office more than once or twice a month for general broader company meetings.
Brad Broten
10mo
I wonder about confirmation bias - for example were the participants chosen randomly? If not, a simple follow-up hypothesis might be that those who chose the in-office option might be more aggressive in their careers, and thus were the type to make a move anyway. And corporately it sounds like the company wanted the answer to prefer hybrid. But it does sound like the testing method was very good - i.e., frequent and more-or-less standardized performance reviews. For my own confirmation bias, this reinforces that the main argument for being in-office is innovation. If the primary focus of the role is creating something new or different, then work in-office in an environment that encourages sharing and brainstorming. If the focus is mainly value-add, i.e., taking a product or a process from one step to the next - then it can be done remotely just as effectively as in a tightly controlled environment.
Brien F.
10mo
One thing I try my best to do when talking about remote work is to call it just that, "remote work". I know it's a subtle difference and semantics but the phrase "work from home" might be what tickles that strong opinion by those who oppose it as some sort of "laziness". While many of the tech workers who are remote typically do it from home, I think changing the language around it and reducing the usage of the acronym "WFH", might help with those who oppose it without any reason backed by data for the field of work being performed. I recall an interview in the past year or two on CNBC where Elon was talking about people being on their "high horses" while working remote and how that wasn't fair to the people that do job ABC, XYZ, etc... People work "remote" all the time (business trips, traveling sales, others) and have for decades. It's the type of job you chose to take/do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I really loved being on a boat, I wouldn't go to work at my XYZ job and complain about all the fishermen that get to WFB (work from boat). I'd change careers to get on a boat or stop complaining about how it's not fair or it's not right. If people can do their jobs effectively "remotely", let them.
North Bay Credit Union Higher Growth LLC-Greenbax Marketplace
10moJust my opinion. The benefits of working from home, no commute, personal space, less chance of getting covid or the flu etc. outweigh the loss of the social aspect of being in an office. FT WFH is way more productive for me than being in an office. I realize not all types of businesses benefit from this however my previous job required me to communicate with offshore developers and a remote sales team so when management decided to convert offices to an open floor plan and force us back it was time for me to go. My current company is 100% remote and we all manage to be highly productive and coordinated. Our parent company CEO is old school and would like to see us in an office but their lack of understanding of how things get accomplished is driving this so for now we are FT remote and love it. Also having the ability to work remote greatly increased the talent pool as well. Not everyone is cut out to work remote and we have gone through a few people that didn't work out however once you find the people who can work remote it works great.