Harvard researcher on the ideal balance of remote to office working

For many peo­ple, the past two-plus years have felt like some vast exper­i­ment in which they’ve test­ed new ways of work­ing, social­is­ing and find­ing the right work/life bal­ance. As organ­i­sa­tions adopt vary­ing mod­els while the Covid cri­sis abates, the exper­i­ment is ongo­ing.

Amid all the flux, Prith­wiraj Choud­hury, who stud­ies the future of work as an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion at Har­vard Busi­ness School, is sure of one thing: hybrid work­ing is here to stay. 

“I don’t think any CEO should try to turn back time. Work­ers will demand flex­i­bil­i­ty – and right­ful­ly so,” he says, warn­ing that firms which have oblig­ed staff to return to HQ five days a week will find it hard­er to recruit and retain tal­ent. 

Choud­hury has been a promi­nent advo­cate of remote work­ing, espe­cial­ly the work-from-any­where (WFA) mod­el, since before the pan­dem­ic. His stud­ies have indi­cat­ed that major­i­ty-remote work can result in greater pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and offer improve­ments in work/life bal­ance. 

For instance, a 2019 research report he co-wrote about a WFA scheme that had start­ed in 2012 at the US Patent and Trade­mark Office con­clud­ed that the arrange­ment had boost­ed pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, as mea­sured by the num­ber of patent appli­ca­tions exam­ined each month, by 4.4%. Par­tic­i­pat­ing employ­ees also said that the flex­i­bil­i­ty this had grant­ed them to live any­where in the con­ti­nen­tal US had afford­ed them a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life.

Striking the right balance

The wide­spread Covid-enforced shift to remote work­ing has brought sim­i­lar ben­e­fits to employ­ees around the world, accord­ing to Choud­hury. In par­tic­u­lar, he points to find­ings from a 2020 field exper­i­ment that he and col­leagues from Har­vard and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty ran on hybrid work­ing with 130 mem­bers of admin staff at the Bangladesh Rur­al Advance­ment Com­mit­tee, one of the world’s largest NGOs. 

Over a nine-week peri­od, they found that employ­ees who were spend­ing between 23% and 40% of their work­ing time in the office had found the opti­mum com­bi­na­tion. Accord­ing to the work­ing paper they pub­lished in March, this was the sweet spot where staff “enjoy flex­i­bil­i­ty and yet are not as iso­lat­ed com­pared with peers who are pre­dom­i­nant­ly work­ing from home”. 

Cru­cial­ly, peo­ple in this “inter­me­di­ate” group pro­duced the most orig­i­nal work, as mea­sured by the nov­el­ty of their email com­mu­ni­ca­tions. They also received bet­ter per­for­mance rat­ings than peers who’d adopt­ed dif­fer­ent pat­terns, includ­ing ful­ly office-based work­ing. 

“It’s the first real-world exper­i­ment I’m aware of that’s try­ing to find out how dif­fer­ent lev­els of hybrid work affect work out­comes,” Choud­hury says.

Anoth­er recent study by aca­d­e­mics from Stan­ford and Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty has focused on the abil­i­ty of remote meet­ings to repli­cate the type of cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion asso­ci­at­ed with in-per­son con­fabs. Pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature in April, it indi­cat­ed that video­con­fer­enc­ing inhibits inno­va­tion because it forces the par­tic­i­pants to con­cen­trate too much on their com­put­er screens.

That study found that col­leagues con­nect­ing vir­tu­al­ly gen­er­at­ed few­er ideas com­pared with par­tic­i­pants inter­act­ing face to face, because their nar­rowed focus “con­strains the asso­cia­tive process under­ly­ing idea gen­er­a­tion”. Any­one who’s weary of the sight of Zoom grids on their mon­i­tor might well con­cur. The find­ing indi­cates that any brain­storm­ing ses­sions are best reserved for the occa­sions when peo­ple are gath­ered in the same space.

But Choud­hury believes that asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion may help to fos­ter cre­ativ­i­ty when peo­ple are work­ing remote­ly. Through tools such as Google Docs, a Slack chan­nel or a cor­po­rate intranet, employ­ees can share ideas and trust their col­leagues, per­haps in dif­fer­ent time zones, to read and digest these when they’re ready and respond with more con­sid­ered thoughts of their own.

“I wake up, read your ideas, take the dog for a walk, think about what you’ve writ­ten, come back and add my thoughts,” he sug­gests. “The argu­ment for the asyn­chro­nous-first brain­storm­ing mod­el is that it leads to more deep work.”

Is hybrid working here to stay?

Such fac­tors are part­ly why Choud­hury backs the WFA arrange­ments that have been gain­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty since the pan­dem­ic. Airbnb, for instance, joined busi­ness­es such as Face­book, Twit­ter, Deloitte and PwC in April in allow­ing employ­ees to work per­ma­nent­ly from any loca­tion of their choice. 

This clear­ly offers employ­ees great flex­i­bil­i­ty, so a work­er with age­ing par­ents, say, could choose to move near­er to them to pro­vide bet­ter elder­care. It could also reduce the kind of career con­flict that can occur between cou­ples when one part­ner gets a dream job that requires the oth­er to make sac­ri­fices in their own career. 

“We have been con­strained in our lives by geog­ra­phy for decades. WFA sets us free,” Choud­hury says. 

While a tech start­up may be ide­al­ly suit­ed to WFA, his research sug­gests that large organ­i­sa­tions can adopt the approach suc­cess­ful­ly, too. For instance, Tata Con­sul­tan­cy Ser­vices, the Indi­an IT giant that employs more than 500,000 peo­ple, is shift­ing to a mod­el where its employ­ees will spend a quar­ter of their work­ing hours at HQ. But sched­ules must be coor­di­nat­ed with­in its var­i­ous groups to cap­i­talise on the lim­it­ed time they do spend togeth­er in the office. 

“Every team at the start of the finan­cial year has to put in everyone’s cal­en­dar when those co-loca­tion days will be,” Choud­hury notes. 

WFA isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lim­it­ed to so-called knowl­edge work, either, he adds. A recent case study he has co-writ­ten exam­ines pilot projects by Unilever to digi­tise its man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tions. That ini­tia­tive, start­ed in 2018 at a facil­i­ty in Brazil, has enabled fac­to­ry employ­ees to work remote­ly, with no change to staffing lev­els. The com­pa­ny is look­ing into the fea­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing a glob­al vir­tu­al con­trol room to over­see oper­a­tions at its 200 pro­duc­tion sites world­wide.

“A con­trol engi­neer could now live on a beach in Bar­ba­dos,” he mus­es.

Adapting to the hybrid world

Some employ­ers are serv­ing notice that hav­ing the best of both worlds comes with a catch. Lon­don law firm Stephen­son Har­wood, for instance, recent­ly said it would let staff work remote­ly, but at 20% less than their cur­rent salary. The pay cut reflects the reduced expense of not hav­ing to com­mute into the cap­i­tal. It also makes the choice of whether to work from home a tougher one. 

Such moves reflect how vary­ing poli­cies are like­ly to emerge around remote work beyond the sim­ple mat­ter of whether to allow it or not, says Choud­hury, who notes that Airbnb, in allow­ing staff to work from any­where in the US, will keep them at the same pay. 

“My pre­dic­tion is that com­pa­nies with more flex­i­ble poli­cies – and pay-equi­table poli­cies – will con­tin­ue to inter­act with their teams bet­ter,” he says. 

Flex­i­ble work­ing arrange­ments stem­ming from the pan­dem­ic have also prompt­ed debates about their impact on firms’ choic­es about whom to award pro­mo­tions. Get­ting face time with the boss has long been seen as a key to mov­ing up the career lad­der. So a staffer who spends more time in the office around senior man­agers might have a bet­ter shot at advance­ment than a col­league who works most­ly at home. 

Choud­hury acknowl­edges that this is “a real con­cern”. One way to address the issue is to revamp how per­for­mance is mea­sured, so that eval­u­a­tions are based only on the qual­i­ty and quan­ti­ty of out­put, not how many days some­one comes to the office, he says. 

But that’s sim­ply part of the broad­er restruc­tur­ing that busi­ness lead­ers must tack­le to adapt their organ­i­sa­tions to the new work­ing par­a­digm. Key mea­sures would include enabling asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion, cre­at­ing “inter­nal Wikipedias” of com­pa­ny knowl­edge and align­ing people’s sched­ules to max­imise in-per­son col­lab­o­ra­tion, men­tor­ship and social­is­ing.

“What you real­ly need as a com­pa­ny to sup­port hybrid work­ing and WFA is to install a new set of man­age­ment prac­tices,” Choud­hury stress­es. “This work has to be led from the top – the CEO and the whole C suite must embrace it.”