The open questions of hybrid working

At first the question was how quickly people would get back to the office. Then it was whether they would ever return. Almost three years after reports surfaced of an unusual respiratory illness in Wuhan, the legacy of the covid-19 pandemic on employees in America and Europe is becoming clear. The disease has ushered in a profound change in white-collar working patterns. The office is not dead but many professionals have settled into a hybrid arrangement of some office days and some remote days.

Hybrid working has much to recommend it: flexibility for employees, periods of concentration at home, bursts of co-operation in the office. A new paper from Raj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Kyle Schirmann of Harvard Business School and Christos Makridis of Columbia Business School describes an experiment in which workers at BRAC, a huge non-profit organisation in Bangladesh, were randomly assigned to three groups, each spending different amounts of time working from home. The intermediate group, who spent between 23% and 40% of their time in the office, performed best on various performance measures.