Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance

All experiment participants were polled before the experiment in a baseline survey on 29 and 30 July 2021, which included a two-part question on their beliefs about the effects of hybrid WFH on productivity. Employees were asked ‘What is your expectation for the impact of hybrid WFH on your productivity?’, with three options of ‘positive’, ‘about the same’ or ‘negative’. Individuals who chose the answer ‘positive’ were then offered a set of options asking how positive they felt, ranging from [5% to 15%] up to [35% or more], and similarly so for negative choices. For aggregate impacts we took the mid-points of each bin, and 42.5% for >35% and –42.5% for <−35%. Employees were resurveyed with the same question after the end of the experiment on 21 January 2022.

The left panel of Fig. 5 shows that employees’ pre-experimental beliefs about WFH and productivity were extremely varied. The baseline mean was –0.1%, but with widespread variation (standard deviation of 11%). This spread should be unsurprising to anyone who has been following the active debate about the effects of remote work on productivity. At the end-line survey conducted on 21 January 2022, the mean of these beliefs had significantly increased to 1.5%, revealing that the experience of hybrid working led to a small improvement in average employee beliefs about the productivity impact of hybrid working (meanbaseline = −0.06%, meanendline = 1.48%, t(2658) = −3.84, P < 0.001). This could be because hybrid WFH saves employees commuting time and is less physically tiring, and, with intermittent breaks between group time and quiet individual time, can improve performance.

The right panel of Fig. 5 shows that in the baseline survey, managers were negative about the perceived effect of hybrid work on their productivity, with a mean effect of −2.6%. Non-managers, by contrast, were significantly more positive, at +0.7% in the baseline survey (meannon-manager = 0.7%, meanmanager = −2.6%, t(1313) = −4.56, P < 0.001). At the end of the experiment, the views of managers improved to 1.0%, with no evidence of a difference from the non-managers’ mean value of 1.6% (meannon-manager = 1.62%, meanmanager = 1.05%, t(1343) = −0.95, P = 0.345). Hence, the experiment led managers to positively update their views about how hybrid WFH affects productivity, and to more closely align with non-managers.

Of note, we saw that employees in the treatment and control groups had similar increases in self-assessed productivity (difference 0.58%, s.d. = 0.59%). Employees from four other divisions in Trip.com were also polled about the productivity impact of hybrid WFH after the end of the experiment in March 2022, with a mean estimate of +2.8% on a sample of 3,461 responses—similar to the 1.5% end line for the experimental sample. This suggests that even close exposure to hybrid WFH is sufficient for employees to change their views, consistent with previous evidence of a positive society-wide shift in perceptions about WFH productivity after the 2020 pandemic.