Hybrid Work benefits Companies and Employees, says study by Stanford Economist

Research led by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford Economist, shows that employees who work in a hybrid model are as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers. It is one of the most debated topics in today's workplace, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist and one of the foremost researchers on work-from-home policies, conducted a study and found compelling evidence that hybrid schedules are a boon to both employees and their bosses.

Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He said, “The results are clear: Hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention."

“This study offers powerful evidence for why 80% of U.S. companies now offer some form of remote work and for why the remaining 20% of firms that don’t are likely paying a price," he said.

It is the largest research to date of hybrid work involving university-trained professionals that rely on the gold standard in research, the randomized controlled trial. Other than Bloom, the study’s authors are James Liang, an economics professor at Peking University and co-founder of Trip.com and Ruobing Han, an assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Both earned their Ph.D.s in economics from Stanford.

Stanford study on Hybrid work: More details

Trip.com worked with the researchers in a six-month-long experiment starting in 2021 where 395 managers and 1,217 non-managers with undergraduate degrees – all of whom worked in engineering, marketing, accounting, and finance in the company’s Shanghai office – participated. Employees with birthdays on even numbers were told to come to the office all five days and others were told to work from home two days a week.

The study found that hybrid work not only helps employees but also companies. The researchers relied on various company data and worker surveys, including performance reviews and promotions for up to two years after the experiment. The researchers also compared the quality and amount of code written by the software engineers of Trip.com.

“If managed right, letting employees work from home two or three days a week still gets you the level of mentoring, culture-building, and innovation that you want. From an economic policymaking standpoint, hybrid work is one of the few instances where there aren’t major trade-offs with clear winners and clear losers. There are almost only winners," added Bloom.

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