case study for work from home

Reimagining the postpandemic workforce

As the pandemic begins to ease, many companies are planning a new combination of remote and on-site working, a hybrid virtual model in which some employees are on premises, while others work from home. The new model promises greater access to talent, increased productivity for individuals and small teams , lower costs, more individual flexibility, and improved employee experiences .

While these potential benefits are substantial, history shows that mixing virtual and on-site working might be a lot harder than it looks—despite its success during the pandemic. Consider how Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer ended that company’s remote-working experiment in 2013, observing that the company needed to become “one Yahoo!” again, or how HP Inc. did the same that year. Specific reasons may have varied. But in each case, the downsides of remote working at scale came to outweigh the positives.

These downsides arise from the organizational norms that underpin culture and performance— ways of working , as well as standards of behavior and interaction—that help create a common culture, generate social cohesion, and build shared trust. To lose sight of them during a significant shift to virtual-working arrangements is to risk an erosion over the long term of the very trust, cohesion, and shared culture that often helps remote working and virtual collaboration to be effective in the short term.

It also risks letting two organizational cultures emerge, dominated by the in-person workers and managers who continue to benefit from the positive elements of co-location and in-person collaboration, while culture and social cohesion for the virtual workforce languish. When this occurs, remote workers can soon feel isolated, disenfranchised, and unhappy, the victims of unintentional behavior in an organization that failed to build a coherent model of, and capabilities for, virtual and in-person work. The sense of belonging, common purpose, and shared identity that inspires all of us to do our best work gets lost. Organizational performance deteriorates accordingly.

Now is the time, as you reimagine the postpandemic organization , to pay careful attention to the effect of your choices on organizational norms and culture. Focus on the ties that bind your people together. Pay heed to core aspects of your own leadership and that of your broader group of leaders and managers. Your opportunity is to fashion the hybrid virtual model that best fits your company, and let it give birth to a new shared culture for all your employees that provides stability, social cohesion, identity, and belonging, whether your employees are working remotely, on premises, or in some combination of both.

Avoiding the pitfalls of remote working requires thinking carefully about leadership and management in a hybrid virtual world. Interactions between leaders and teams provide an essential locus for creating the social cohesion and the unified hybrid virtual culture that organizations need in the next normal.

Cutting the ties that bind

If you happen to believe that remote work is no threat to social ties, consider the experience of Skygear.io, a company that provides an open-source platform for app development. Several years ago, Skygear was looking to accommodate several new hires by shifting to a hybrid remote-work model for their 40-plus-person team. The company soon abandoned the idea. Team members who didn’t come to the office missed out on chances to strengthen their social ties through ad hoc team meals and discussions around interesting new tech launches. The wine and coffee tastings that built cohesion and trust had been lost. Similarly, GoNoodle employees found themselves at Zoom happy hour longing for the freshly remodeled offices they had left behind at lockdown. “We had this killer sound system,” one employee, an extrovert who yearns for time with her colleagues, told the New York Times . “You know—we’re drinking coffee, or maybe, ‘Hey, want to take a walk?’ I miss that.” 1 Clive Thompson, “What if working from home goes on … forever?,” New York Times , June 9, 2020, nytimes.com. Successful workplace cultures rely on these kinds of social interactions. That’s something Yahoo!’s Mayer recognized in 2013 when she said, “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together,” having the “interactions and experiences that are only possible” face-to-face, such as “hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” 2 Kara Swisher, “‘Physically together’: Here’s the internal Yahoo no-work-from-home memo for remote workers and maybe more,” All Things Digital, February 22, 2013, allthingsd.com.

Or consider how quickly two cultures emerged recently in one of the business units of a company we know. Within this business unit, one smaller group was widely distributed in Cape Town, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Paris, and other big cities. The larger group was concentrated in Chicago, with a shared office in the downtown area. When a new global leader arrived just prior to the pandemic, the leader based herself in Chicago and quickly bonded with the in-person group that worked alongside her in the office. As the pandemic began, but before everyone was sent home to work remotely, the new leader abruptly centralized operations into a crisis nerve center made up of everyone in the on-site group. The new arrangement persisted as remote working began. Meanwhile, the smaller group, which had already been remote working in other cities, quickly lost visibility into, and participation in, the new workflows and resources that had been centralized among the on-site group, even though that on-site group was now working virtually too. Newly created and highly sought-after assignments (which were part of the business unit’s crisis response) went to members of the formerly on-site group, while those in the distributed group found many of their areas of responsibility reduced or taken away entirely. Within a matter of months, key employees in the smaller, distributed group were unhappy and underperforming.

The new global leader, in her understandable rush to address the crisis, had failed to create a level playing field and instead (perhaps unintentionally) favored one set of employees over the other. For us, it was stunning to observe how quickly, in the right circumstances, everything could go wrong. Avoiding these pitfalls requires thinking carefully about leadership and management in a hybrid virtual world, and about how smaller teams respond to new arrangements for work. Interactions between leaders and teams provide an essential locus for creating the social cohesion and the unified hybrid virtual culture that organizations need in the next normal.

Choose your model

Addressing working norms, and their effect on culture and performance, requires making a basic decision: Which part of the hybrid virtual continuum (exhibit) is right for your organization? The decision rests on the factors for which you’re optimizing. Is it real-estate cost? Employee productivity? Access to talent? The employee experience? All of these are worthy goals, but in practice it can be difficult to optimize one without considering its effect on the others. Ultimately, you’re left with a difficult problem to solve—one with a number of simultaneous factors and that defies simple formulas.

That said, we can make general points that apply across the board. These observations, which keep a careful eye on the organizational norms and ways of working that inform culture and performance, address two primary factors: the type of work your employees tend to do and the physical spaces you need to support that work.

First let’s eliminate the extremes. We’d recommend a fully virtual model to very few companies, and those that choose this model would likely operate in specific industries such as outsourced call centers, customer service, contact telesales, publishing, PR, marketing, research and information services, IT, and software development, and under specific circumstances. Be cautious if you think better access to talent or lower real-estate cost—which the all-virtual model would seem to optimize—outweigh all other considerations. On the other hand, few companies would be better off choosing an entirely on-premises model, given that at least some of their workers need flexibility because of work–life or health constraints. That leaves most companies somewhere in the middle, with a hybrid mix of remote and on-site working.

The physical spaces needed for work—or not

Being in the middle means sorting out the percentage of your employees who are working remotely and how often they are doing so. Let’s say 80 percent of your employees work remotely but do so only one day per week. In the four days they are on premises, they are likely getting all the social interaction and connection needed for collaboration, serendipitous idea generation, innovation, and social cohesiveness. In this case, you might be fine with the partially remote, large headquarters (HQ) model in the exhibit.

If, instead, a third of your employees are working remotely but doing so 90 percent of the time, the challenges to social cohesion are more pronounced. The one-third of your workforce will miss out on social interaction with the two-thirds working on-premises—and the cohesion, coherence, and cultural belonging that comes with it. One solution would be to bring those remote workers into the office more frequently, in which case multiple hubs, or multiple microhubs (as seen in the exhibit), might be the better choice. Not only is it easier to travel to regional hubs than to a central HQ, at least for employees who don’t happen to live near that HQ, but more dispersed hubs make the in-person culture less monolithic. Moreover, microhubs can often be energizing, fun, and innovative places in which to collaborate and connect with colleagues, which further benefits organizational culture.

Productivity and speed

Now let’s begin to factor in other priorities, such as employee productivity. Here the question becomes less straightforward, and the answer will be unique to your circumstances. When tackling the question, be sure to go beyond the impulse to monitor inputs and activity as a proxy for productivity. Metrics focused on inputs or volume of activity have always been a poor substitute for the true productivity that boosts outcomes and results, no matter how soothing it might be to look at the company parking lot to see all the employees who have arrived early in the day, and all those who are leaving late. Applied to a hybrid model, counting inputs might leave you grasping at the number of hours that employees are spending in front of their computers and logged into your servers. Yet the small teams  that are the lifeblood of today’s organizational success thrive with empowering, less-controlling management styles. Better to define the outcomes you expect from your small teams rather than the specific activities or the time spent on them.

Would you like to learn more about our People & Organizational Performance Practice ?

In addition to giving teams clear objectives, and both the accountability and autonomy for delivering them, leaders need to guide, inspire, and enable small teams, helping them overcome bureaucratic challenges that bog them down, such as organizational silos and resource inertia—all while helping to direct teams to the best opportunities, arming them with the right expertise, and giving them the tools they need to move fast. Once teams and individuals understand what they are responsible for delivering, in terms of results, leaders should focus on monitoring the outcome-based measurements. When leaders focus on outcomes and outputs, virtual workers deliver higher-quality work.

In this regard, you can take comfort in Netflix (which at the time of this writing is the 32nd largest company in the world by market capitalization), which thrives without limiting paid time off or specifying how much “face time” workers must spend in the office. Netflix measures productivity by outcomes, not inputs—and you should do the same.

No matter which model you choose for hybrid virtual work, your essential task will be to carefully manage the organizational norms that matter most when adopting any of these models. Let’s dive more deeply into those now.

Managing the transition

Organizations thrive through a sense of belonging and shared purpose that can easily get lost when two cultures emerge. When this happens, our experience—and the experience at HP, IBM, and Yahoo!—is that the in-person culture comes to dominate, disenfranchising those who are working remotely. The difficulty arises through a thousand small occurrences: when teams mishandle conference calls such that remote workers feel overlooked, and when collaborators use on-site white boards rather than online collaboration tools such as Miro. But culture can split apart in bigger ways too, as when the pattern of promotions favors on-site employees or when on-premises workers get the more highly sought-after assignments.

Some things simply become more difficult when you are working remotely. Among them are acculturating new joiners; learning via hands-on coaching and apprenticeship; undertaking ambiguous, complex, and collaborative innovations; and fostering the creative collisions through which new ideas can emerge. Addressing these boils down to leadership and management styles, and how those styles and approaches support small teams. Team experience is a critical driver of hybrid virtual culture—and managers and team leaders have an outsize impact on their teams’ experiences.

Managers and leaders

As a rule, the more geographically dispersed the team, the less effective the leadership becomes. Moreover, leaders who were effective in primarily on-site working arrangements may not necessarily prove so in a hybrid virtual approach. Many leaders will now need to “show up” differently when they are interacting with some employees face-to-face and others virtually. By defining and embracing new behaviors that are observable to all, and by deliberately making space for virtual employees to engage in informal interactions, leaders can facilitate social cohesion and trust-building in their teams.

More inspirational. There’s a reason why military commanders tour the troops rather than send emails from headquarters—hierarchical leadership thrives in person. Tom Peters  used to call the in-person approach “management by walking around”: “Looking someone in the eye, shaking their hand, laughing with them when in their physical presence creates a very different kind of bond than can be achieved [virtually].” 3 See Tom Peters blog , “The heart of MBWA,” blog entry by Shelley Dolley, February 27, 2013, tompeters.com.

But when the workforce is hybrid virtual, leaders need to rely less on hierarchical and more on inspirational forms of leadership . The dispersed employees working remotely require new leadership behaviors to compensate for the reduced socioemotional cues characteristic of digital channels.

Cultivate informal interactions. Have you ever run into a colleague in the hallway and, by doing so, learned something you didn’t know? Informal interactions and unplanned encounters foster the unexpected cross-pollination of ideas—the exchange of tacit knowledge—that are essential to healthy, innovative organizations. Informal interactions provide a starting point for collegial relationships in which people collaborate on areas of shared interest, thereby bridging organizational silos and strengthening social networks and shared trust within your company.

Informal interactions, which occur more naturally among co-located employees, don’t come about as easily in a virtual environment. Leaders need new approaches to creating them as people work both remotely and on-site. One approach is to leave a part of the meeting agenda free, as a time for employees to discuss any topic. Leaders can also establish an open-door policy and hold virtual “fireside chats,” without any structured content at all, to create a forum for less formal interactions. The goal is for employees, those working remotely and in-person, to feel like they have access to leaders and to the kind of informal interactions that happen on the way to the company cafeteria.

Many leaders will now need to “show up” differently when they are interacting with some employees face-to-face and others virtually. By defining and embracing new behaviors that are observable to all, and by deliberately making space for virtual employees to engage in informal interactions—leaders can facilitate social cohesion and trust-building in their teams.

Further approaches include virtual coffee rooms and social events, as well as virtual conferences in which group and private chat rooms and sessions complement plenary presentations. In between time, make sure you and all your team members are sending text messages to one another and that you are texting your team regularly for informal check-ins. These norms cultivate the habit of connecting informally.

Role model the right stance. It might seem obvious, but research shows that leaders consistently fail to recognize how their actions affect and will be interpreted by others. 4 Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, “How to work for a boss who lacks self-awareness,” Harvard Business Review , April 3, 2018, hbr.org. Consider the location from which you choose to work. If you want to signal that you tolerate virtual work, come into the office every day and join meetings in-person with those who happen to be in the building. This will result in a cultural belief that the HQ or physical offices are the real centers of gravity, and that face time is what’s important.

Come into the office every day, though, and your remote-working employees may soon feel that their choice to work virtually leaves them fewer career opportunities, and that their capabilities and contributions are secondary. By working from home (or a non-office location) a couple days a week, leaders signal that people don’t need to be in the office to be productive or to get ahead. In a hybrid virtual world, seemingly trivial leadership decisions can have outsize effect on the rest of the organization.

Don’t rely solely on virtual interactions. By the same token, despite big technological advancements over the years, nothing can entirely replace face-to-face interactions. Why? In part because so much of communication is nonverbal (even if it’s not the 93 percent that some would assert), but also because so much communication involves equivocal, potentially contentious, or difficult-to-convey subject matter. Face-to-face interactions create significantly more opportunities for rich, informal interactions, emotional connection, and emergent “creative collision” that can be the lifeblood of trust, collaboration, innovation, and culture.

Media richness theory helps us understand the need to match the “richness” of the message with the capabilities of the medium. You wouldn’t let your nephew know of the death of his father by fax, for instance—you would do it in person, if at all possible, and, failing that, by the next richest medium, probably video call. Some communication simply proceeds better face-to-face, and it is up to the leader to match the mode of communication to the equivocality of the message they are delivering.

Reimagining the post-pandemic organization

In other cases, asynchronous communication—such as email and text—are sufficient, and even better, because it allows time for individuals to process information and compose responses after some reflection and thought. However, when developing trust (especially early on in a relationship) or discussing sensitive work-related issues, such as promotions, pay, and performance, face-to-face is preferred, followed by videoconferencing, which, compared with audio, improves the ability for participants to show understanding, anticipate responses, provide nonverbal information, enhance verbal descriptions, manage pauses, and express attitudes. However, compared with face-to-face interaction, it can be difficult in video interactions to notice peripheral cues, control the floor, have side conversations, and point to or manipulate real-world objects.

Whatever the exact mix of communication you choose in a given moment, you will want to convene everyone in person at least one or two times a year, even if the work a particular team is doing can technically be done entirely virtually. In person is where trust-based relationships develop and deepen, and where serendipitous conversations and connections can occur.

Track your informal networks. Corporate organizations consist of multiple, overlapping, and intersecting social networks. As these informal networks widen and deepen, they mobilize talent and knowledge across the enterprise, facilitating and informing cultural cohesiveness while helping to support cross-silo collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Because the hybrid virtual model reduces face-to-face interaction and the serendipitous encounters that occur between people with weak ties , social networks can lose their strength. To counter that risk, leaders should map and monitor the informal networks  in their organization with semiannual refreshes of social-network maps. Approaches include identifying the functions or activities where connectivity seems most relevant and then mapping relationships within those priority areas—and then tracking the changes in those relationships over time. Options for obtaining the necessary information include tracking email, observing employees, using existing data (such as time cards and project charge codes), and administering short (five- to 20-minute) questionnaires. It is likely that leaders will need to intervene and create connections between groups that do not naturally interact or that now interact less frequently as a result of the hybrid virtual model.

Hybrid virtual teams

Leadership is crucial, but in the hybrid virtual model, teams (and networks of teams ) also need to adopt new norms and change the way they work if they are to maintain—and improve—productivity, collaboration, and innovation. This means gathering information, devising solutions, putting new approaches into practice, and refining outcomes—and doing it all fast. The difficulty rises when the team is part virtual and part on-site. What follows are specific areas on which to focus.

Create ‘safe’ spaces to learn from mistakes and voice requests

Psychological safety matters in the workplace, obviously, and in a hybrid virtual model it requires more attention. First, because a feeling of safety can be harder to create with some people working on-site and others working remotely. And, second, because it’s often less obvious when safety erodes. Safety arises as organizations purposefully create a culture in which employees feel comfortable making mistakes, speaking up, and generating innovative ideas. Safety also requires helping employees feel supported when they request flexible operating approaches to accommodate personal needs.

Mind the time-zone gaps

The experience of a hybrid virtual team in the same time zone varies significantly from a hybrid virtual team with members in multiple time zones. Among other ills, unmanaged time-zone differences make sequencing workflows more difficult. When people work in different time zones, the default tends toward asynchronous communications (email) and a loss of real-time connectivity. Equally dysfunctional is asking or expecting team members to wake up early or stay up late for team meetings. It can work for a short period of time, but in the medium and longer run it reduces the cohesion that develops through real-time collaboration. (It also forces some team members to work when they’re tired and not at their best.) Moreover, if there is a smaller subgroup on the team in, say, Asia, while the rest are in North America, a two-culture problem can emerge, with the virtual group feeling lesser than. Better to simply build teams with at least four hours of overlap during the traditional workday to ensure time for collaboration.

Keep teams together, when possible, and hone the art of team kickoffs

Established teams, those that have been working together for longer periods of time, are more productive than newer teams that are still forming and storming. The productivity they enjoy arises from clear norms and trust-based relationships—not to mention familiarity with workflows and routines. That said, new blood often energizes a team.

In an entirely on-premises model, chances are you would swap people in and out of your small teams more frequently. The pace at which you do so will likely decline in a hybrid virtual model, in which working norms and team cohesion are more at risk. But don’t take it to an extreme. Teams need members with the appropriate expertise and backgrounds, and the right mix of those tends to evolve over time.

Meanwhile, pay close attention to team kickoffs as you add new people to teams or stand up new ones. Kickoffs should include an opportunity to align the overall goals of the team with those of team members while clarifying personal working preferences.

Keeping track

Once you have your transition to a hybrid virtual model underway, how will you know if it’s working, and whether you maintained or enhanced your organization’s performance culture? Did your access to talent increase, and are you attracting and inspiring top talent? Are you developing and deploying strong leaders? To what extent are all your employees engaged in driving performance and innovation, gathering insights, and sharing knowledge?

The right metrics will depend on your goals, of course. Be wary of trying to achieve across all parameters, though. McKinsey research  shows that winning performance cultures emerge from carefully selecting the right combinations of practices (or “recipes”) that, when applied together, create superior organizational performance. Tracking results against these combinations of practices can help indicate, over time, if you’ve managed to keep your unified performance culture intact in the transition to a new hybrid virtual model.

We’ll close by saying you don’t have to make all the decisions about your hybrid virtual model up front and in advance. See what happens. See where your best talent emerges. If you end up finding, say, 30 (or 300) employees clustered around Jakarta, and other groups in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, ask them what might help them feel a socially supported sense of belonging. To the extent that in-person interactions are important—as we guess they will be—perhaps consider a microhub in one of those cities, if you don’t have one already.

Approached in the right way, the new hybrid model can help you make the most of talent wherever it resides, while lowering costs and making your organization’s performance culture even stronger than before.

Andrea Alexander is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Houston office, where Aaron De Smet is a senior partner and Mihir Mysore is a partner.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

Communications get personal: How leaders can engage employees during a return to work

Reimagining the postpandemic organization

Adapting workplace learning in the time of coronavirus

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

About a third of U.S. workers who can work from home now do so all the time

Roughly three years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended U.S. workplaces, about a third (35%) of workers with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home all of the time, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. This is down from 43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020 – but up from only 7% before the pandemic.

While the share working from home all the time has fallen off somewhat as the pandemic has gone on, many workers have settled into hybrid work. The new survey finds that 41% of those with jobs that can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule – that is, working from home some days and from the office, workplace or job site other days. This is up from 35% in January 2022.

Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, most (63%) say their employer requires them to work in person a certain number of days per week or month. About six-in-ten hybrid workers (59%) say they work from home three or more days in a typical week, while 41% say they do so two days or fewer.

Related: How Americans View Their Jobs

Many hybrid workers would prefer to spend more time working from home than they currently do. About a third (34%) of those who are currently working from home most of the time say, if they had the choice, they’d like to work from home all the time. And among those who are working from home some of the time, half say they’d like to do so all (18%) or most (32%) of the time.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to study how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the workplace and specifically how workers with jobs that can be done from home have adapted their work schedules. To do this, we surveyed 5,775 U.S. adults who are working part time or full time and who have only one job or who have more than one job but consider one of them to be their primary job. All the workers who took part are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Address-based sampling ensures that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the survey’s methodology .

The majority of U.S. workers overall (61%) do not have jobs that can be done from home. Workers with lower incomes and those without a four-year college degree are more likely to fall into this category. Among those who do have teleworkable jobs, Hispanic adults and those without a college degree are among the most likely to say they rarely or never work from home.

When looking at all employed adults ages 18 and older in the United States, Pew Research Center estimates that about 14% – or roughly 22 million people – are currently working from home all the time.

The advantages and disadvantages of working from home

Workers who are not self-employed and who are teleworking at least some of the time see one clear advantage – and relatively few downsides – to working from home. By far the biggest perceived upside to working from home is the balance it provides: 71% of those who work from home all, most or some of the time say doing so helps them balance their work and personal lives. That includes 52% who say it helps them a lot with this.

About one-in-ten (12%) of those who are at least occasionally working from home say it hurts their ability to strike the right work-life balance, and 17% say it neither helps nor hurts. There is no significant gender difference in these views. However, parents with children younger than 18 are somewhat more likely than workers without children in that age range to say working from home is helpful in this regard (76% vs. 69%).

A majority of those who are working from home at least some of the time (56%) say this arrangement helps them get their work done and meet deadlines. Only 7% say working from home hurts their ability to do these things, and 37% say it neither helps nor hurts.

There are other aspects of work – some of them related to career advancement – where the impact of working from home seems minimal:

• When asked how working from home affects whether they are given important assignments, 77% of those who are at least sometimes working from home say it neither helps nor hurts, while 14% say it helps and 9% say it hurts.
• When it comes to their chances of getting ahead at work, 63% of teleworkers say working from home neither helps or hurts, while 18% say it helps and 19% say it hurts.
• A narrow majority of teleworkers (54%) say working from home neither helps nor hurts with opportunities to be mentored at work. Among those who do see an impact, it’s perceived to be more negative than positive: 36% say working from home hurts opportunities to be mentored and 10% say it helps.

One aspect of work that many remote workers say working from home makes more challenging is connecting with co-workers: 53% of those who work from home at least some of the time say working from home hurts their ability to feel connected with co-workers, while 37% say it neither helps nor hurts. Only 10% say it helps them feel connected.

In spite of this, those who work from home all the time or occasionally are no less satisfied with their relationship with co-workers than those who never work from home. Roughly two-thirds of workers – whether they are working exclusively from home, follow a hybrid schedule or don’t work from home at all – say they are extremely or very satisfied with these relationships. In addition, among those with teleworkable jobs, employed adults who work from home all the time are about as likely as hybrid workers to say they have at least one close friend at work.

Feeling connected with co-workers is one area where many workers who rarely or never work from home see an advantage in their setup. About four-in-ten of these workers (41%) say the fact that they rarely or never work from home helps in how connected they feel to their co-workers. A similar share (42%) say it neither helps nor hurts, and 17% say it hurts.

At the same time, those who rarely or never work from home are less likely than teleworkers to say their current arrangement helps them achieve work-life balance. A third of these workers say the fact that they rarely or never work from home hurts their ability to balance their work and personal lives, while 40% say it neither helps nor hurts and 27% say it helps.

When it comes to other aspects of work, many of those who rarely or never work from home say their arrangement is neither helpful nor hurtful. This is true when it comes to opportunities to be mentored (53% say this), their ability to get work done and meet deadlines (57%), their chances of getting ahead in their job (68%) and whether they are given important assignments (74%).

Most adults with teleworkable jobs who work from home at least some of the time (71%) say their manager or supervisor trusts them a great deal to get their work done when they’re doing so. Those who work from home all the time are the most likely to feel trusted: 79% of these workers say their manager trusts them a great deal, compared with 64% of hybrid workers.

Hybrid workers feel about as trusted when they’re not working from home: 68% say their manager or supervisor trusts them a great deal to get their work done when they’re not teleworking.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the survey’s methodology .

• Business & Workplace
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center

A look at small businesses in the U.S.

Majorities of adults see decline of union membership as bad for the u.s. and working people, a look at black-owned businesses in the u.s., from businesses and banks to colleges and churches: americans’ views of u.s. institutions, 2023 saw some of the biggest, hardest-fought labor disputes in recent decades, most popular.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Age & Generations
• Economy & Work
• Family & Relationships
• Gender & LGBTQ
• Immigration & Migration
• International Affairs
• Internet & Technology
• Methodological Research
• News Habits & Media
• Non-U.S. Governments
• Other Topics
• Politics & Policy
• Race & Ethnicity
• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

Terms & Conditions

Privacy Policy

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy

Golf, rent, and commutes: 7 impacts of working from home

The pandemic sharply accelerated trends of people working from home, leaving lasting impacts on how we work going forward. Stanford scholar Nicholas Bloom details how working from home is affecting the office, our homes, and more.

The massive surge in the number of people working from home may be the largest change to the U.S. economy since World War II, says Stanford scholar Nicholas Bloom .

And the shift to working from home, catalyzed by the pandemic, is here to stay, with further growth expected in the long run through improvements in technology.

Looking at data going back to 1965, when less than 1% of people worked from home, the number of people working from home had been rising continuously up to the pandemic, doubling roughly every 15 years, said Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor in Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Before the pandemic, only around 5% of the typical U.S. workforce worked from home; at the pandemic’s onset, it skyrocketed to 61.5%. Currently, about 30% of employees work from home.

“In some ways, one of the biggest lasting legacies of the pandemic will be the shift to work from home,” said Bloom.

Bloom shared his research on working from home at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute ’s “The Future of Work” Winter 2023 Colloquium, which focused on how the ways we work are changing.

DCI Director Richard Saller moderated the event , which featured scholars from Stanford and beyond discussing working arrangements and attitudes, challenges to office real estate, learned lessons about the power of proximity, and more.

Below are seven takeaways from Bloom’s discussion:

• The employees. About 58% of people in the U.S. can’t work from home at all, and they are typically frontline workers with lower pay. Those who work entirely from home are primarily professionals, managers, and in higher-paying fields such as IT support, payroll, and call centers. The highest paid group includes the 30% of people working from home in a hybrid capacity, and these include professionals and managers.
• The move. Almost 1 million people left city centers like New York and San Francisco during the pandemic. Those who used to go to the office five days a week are now willing to commute farther because they are only in the office a couple days a week, and they want larger homes to accommodate needs such as a home office. This has changed property markets substantially with rents and home values in the suburbs surging, Bloom said. Home values in city centers have risen but not by much.
• The commute. Public transit journeys have plummeted and are currently down by a third compared to pre-pandemic levels. This sharp reduction is threatening the survival of mass transit, Bloom said. These are systems that have relatively fixed costs because the hardware and labor, which is largely unionized, are relatively hard to adjust. A lot of the revenues come from ticket sales, and these agencies are losing a lot of money.
• The office. Offices are changing, with cubicles becoming less popular and meeting rooms more desirable. As some companies incorporate an organized hybrid schedule in which everyone comes in on certain days, they are redesigning spaces to support more meetings, presentations, trainings, lunches, and social time.
• The startups. Startup rates are surging, up by 20% from pre-pandemic numbers. The reasons: working from home provides a cheaper way to start a new company by saving a lot on initial capital and rent. Also, people can more easily work on a startup on the side when their regular job offers the option to work from home.
• The downtime. The number of people playing golf mid-week has more than doubled since 2019. People used to go before or after work, or on the weekends, but now the mid-day, mid-week golf game is becoming more common. The same is probably true for things like gyms, tennis courts, retail hairdressers, ski resorts, and anything else that consumers used to pack into the weekends.
• The organization. More and more, firms are outsourcing or offshoring their information technology, human resources, and finance to access talent, save costs, and free up space. There has been a big increase in part-time employees, independent contractors, and outsourcing. “After seeing how well it worked with remote work at the beginning of the pandemic, companies may not see a need to have employees in the country,” Bloom said.

Interested in hearing more about the future of work? Stanford Continuing Studies will feature Bloom as he discusses “The Future of and Impact of Working from Home” on May 1 as part of the Stanford Monday University web seminar series .

Bloom is also co-director of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research .

EARLY BIRD PROMOTION: Register for the Masterclass by May 31 to secure lifetime(!) access. (Only 14 spots remaining)

The Business Case For Remote Work

Global Workplace Analytics published a comprehensive report on the benefits to employers, employees, the environment, and society. The findings are crystal clear: remote work is here to stay.

Learning from the pandemic

The report , titled 'The business case for remote work', draws from a wide range of research papers and surveys and provides an interesting insight into the potential benefits of sustained remote work.

Many like to make the conversation about remote work black or white— either everyone is in the office, or everyone is remote. This is both shortsighted and unwise.

Why? Because as with many things in life, beauty lies in the balance.

Consider this: Roughly 95 percent of U.S. office workers worked from their homes for three or more days a week during the pandemic. Ninety-five freaking percent. That’s basically one big test case that most everyone was forced to participate in, to an extent.

And guess what? 82 percent of the workers surveyed said they’d like to keep working remotely at least once per week after the pandemic is over. On the other hand, a slightly insignificant (and probably robotic) three percent said they’d rather forgo working remotely post-pandemic. Okay.

Anyway, at the same time, less than a fifth (19 percent) say they want to work fully remote. The majority prefer a mix of both. In the U.S., the preference averages out to be 2.5 days a week.

Why? Because they are fearful that a fully remote approach would likely lead to the erosion of the established work culture at that business. This notion seems a bit blah at first, but moving from fully on-premises to fully remote can actually make it more difficult for these companies to onboard new employees, make things harder for parents who have young children running all over the place and screaming at home, and even deprive young employees of the subtle mentorship and guidance that happens when they are physically around more experienced colleagues.

Luckily, remote work shouldn't be a problem for many. The benefits for those with remote-compatible jobs (45 percent) are omnipresent and can be summarized into three categories: those for employees, employers, and environment & society.

Employee benefits

Employees who can work remotely at least a few times a week—and actually want to—can preserve three valuable commodities: time, money, and their health.

1. More time

Aside from being liberated from the need to wear pants, the first thing most people think about when toying with the idea of working from home is the elimination of the daily commute—which is potentially a massive time-saver for many.

Think about it. U.S. workers spend the equivalent of 28 days a year commuting. Imagine spending the entire month of a non-leap year February stuck in a perpetual commute. Working remotely even half the time would shave off 14 of those days, leaving you with just a half of a February spent commuting.

Roughly 20 percent of non-remote workers have it even worse: their one-way commutes exceed an hour a day, equating to 60 days a year. Half-time remote work would lop off a full 30 days of being stuck in traffic, which most would surely take unless they have an inherent affinity for red lights, subways, and bus stops.

What would you do with an extra 14-30 days’ worth of hours each year? Well, you can do whatever you want, obviously, but it definitely won’t be spent in traffic.

2. More money

Yes, reducing the commute also means having more money in the bank.

By working from home half the time, a typical worker can save anywhere from $640 to $6,400 a year by reducing their spending on things like transportation, parking, gas, work clothes (and dry cleaning), food, and serendipity spending on stuff like gifts, impulsive lunchtime shopping, etc. Just whatever you spend by going into work, cut it in half in this scenario; that’s the point.

Oh, and these hypothetical figures account for increased utility bills and food at home, in case you were about to bust out a “well, actually” in response.

Depending on their situations, some workers could further reduce costs by:

• Selling their car
• Negotiating a new auto insurance premium (since they won’t be commuting as much)
• Moving to a different, less expensive area that’s not as close to their physical workplace
• Lowering any daycare, after-school, or eldercare costs

Whatever your work situation is, staying home half the time presents multiple opportunities to save some cash.

3. Better health

More remote work doesn't just bring in more time and money, it also benefits the health of employees.

Not that you need a study to really prove this, but long commutes have been linked to higher levels of stress (surprise), increased anxiety and depression, higher risks of heart issues like hypertension, increased obesity, and really just poor heart health in general. All of this, simply from long commutes.

Here are some stats gleaned from what surveyed remote workers say:

• 77% report having a better work/life balance between
• 69% report an improvement to their well-being—due to factors like more sleep and less stress
• 54% report eating healthier
• 48% report exercising more often

Employer benefits

The fact that employees benefit from policy change is, in most companies, not enough to actually make a change happen. However, when employers benefit from more money, more time, and more productivity, all of a sudden, an interest to change is sparked.

Luckily, for remote work, that's the case. So let’s discuss three of the most important ones.

1. Reduced office costs

Let's start with the three biggest reasons as to why company leaders enact change: money, money, money.

An employer that shells out $7,700 per employee, per year for their hallowed office space would save nearly $2k per half-time remote worker per year. How? By simply reducing their real estate footprint by a measly 25 percent for each half-time remote worker on staff. And as for the most expensive cities in the U.S.? The savings would increase by a factor of nearly five times that amount.

While there's some extra cost involved for giving stipends to purchase home office equipment, better tools, and stuff like that (around $666 per remote worker per year), there's still quite a lot to be saved.

So yes, it’s true that employers may implement remote work as a strategy to cut costs, but many see that the true value of remote work centers on human capital benefits.

You’re clearly intrigued, so let's look at some of those.

2. Increased productivity

Another one of those favorite yardsticks for success: productivity. Even in those terms, remote work gets shit done. Again, let’s turn to those who were surveyed:

• Remote workers said they gained an average of 35 working minutes a day due to fewer interruptions at their home (as opposed to constant interruptions at an office).
• Remote workers also reported voluntarily working an average of 47 percent of the time they would have otherwise spent stuck in their typical commute. That’s an additional seven days per year of good ‘ol productivity.

When considering these two factors, a half-time remote worker increases their productivity by the equivalent of 16 workdays a year.

Productivity, productivity, productivity. Every employer and C-suite type just loves increased productivity. And remote work increases it—which means they should love remote work.

Because productivity.

3. Reduced absenteeism

Here’s a fact: Most workers who call in sick are extremely not sick. Statistics show that nearly 70 percent of unplanned work absences are actually due to personal situations, family issues, stress, or being literally sick of work. Sick of work to the point of calling in sick to work.

That’s an astounding number. Depressing, even.

Fortunately, remote work reduces absenteeism because remote workers:

• Are not as exposed to sick coworkers who still come into work
• Limit their exposure to occupational and environmental risks
• Are still capable of working—even if they don’t feel well enough to physically show up at work
• Can handle personal appointments without the need to take the entire day or half-day off
• Lessen the stresses that come from commuting, interruptions, and all the standard office politics bullshit
• Tend to sleep better (and longer), eat healthier, and exercise more

Plenty of case studies have shown that the option to work remotely can reduce absenteeism anywhere from 26 percent to 88 percent. That’s actually kind of a hilarious window between two figures, but even the bottom number of 26 percent is a vast improvement.

When adding and subtracting some more numbers (details here ), the report concludes as follows:

"[A] typical U.S. employer can save $11,000 a year for each half-time (2 to 3 day a week) remote worker. That’s over $1M for every thousand employees!"

What's not to love?!

Environmental & societal benefits

But wait, there's more! We do, as they say, live in a society. Thankfully, the potential benefits of remote work for the environment—and society in general—are just as abundant.

Let’s examine a few. Remote work might help to:

• Decrease the risks stemming from human congestion
• Decrease wear and tear on a city’s transportation infrastructure
• Increase productivity among even non-remote workers by cutting down their travel times (and shortening their commutes)
• Reduce travel, even more, thanks to the widespread use of virtual-based tech
• Encourage a fuller, more robust employment for the disabled who can work from home
• Increase the standard of living in rural and economically disadvantaged areas
• Revitalize cities by reducing congestion and traffic and all the problems that come from them—such as dissuading visitors and tourists
• Make a bigger dent in the housing crisis by repurposing unneeded office spaces into residential buildings

We rest our case

The case is clear: let's make the option of remote work available to any and all remote-compatible jobs out there. All of the associated myths and concerns people had with the prospect of an increase of remote work has proven to be typical hysteria about nothing.

The bottom line is this: we can improve the lives of employees while benefiting employers. This is an actual thing that can happen and IS happening already. Oh, and don’t forget, both the environment and society benefit too. No big deal.

This is not hard. Everyone wins with remote work. Literally, everyone.

And with that, we rest our case.

Download: New Ways Of Working Guide

Unlock our in-depth guide spotlighting trends, tools, and best practices from over 150 pioneering organizations.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Download: Free Guide

Unlock our in-depth guide on trends, tools, and best practices from over 150 pioneering organizations.

Subscribe below and receive it directly in your inbox.

We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at any time.

How working from home works out

Key takeaways.

• Forty-two percent of U.S. workers are now working from home full time, accounting for more than two-thirds of economic activity.
• Policymakers should ensure that broadband service is expanded so more workers can do their jobs away from a traditional office.
• As companies consider relocating from densely populated urban centers in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, cities may suffer while suburbs and rural areas benefit.
• Working from home is here to stay, but post-pandemic will be optimal at about two days a week.

Working from home (WFH) is dominating our lives. If you haven’t experienced the phenomenon directly, you’ve undoubtedly heard all about it, as U.S. media coverage of working from home jumped 12,000 percent since January 1 .

But the trend toward working from home is nothing new. In 2014 I published  a study  of a Chinese travel company, Ctrip, that looked at the benefits of its WFH policies (Bloom et al. 2014). And in the past several months as the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of workers to set up home offices, I have been advising dozens of firms and analyzing four large surveys covering working from home. 2

The recent work has highlighted several recurring themes, each of which carries policy questions — either for businesses or public officials. But the bottom line is clear: Working from home will be very much a part of our post-COVID economy. So the sooner policymakers and business leaders think of the implications of a home-based workforce, the better our firms and communities will be positioned when the pandemic subsides.

The US economy is now a working-from-home economy

Figure 1 shows the work status of 2,500 Americans my colleagues Jose Barrero (ITAM) and Steve Davis (Chicago) and I surveyed between May 21-25. The responders were between 20 and 64, had worked full time in 2019, and earned more than $20,000. The participants were weighted to represent the U.S. by state, industry, and income.

We find that 42 percent of the U.S. labor force are now working from home full time, while another 33 percent are not working — a testament to the savage impact of the lockdown recession. The remaining 26 percent are working on their business’s premises, primarily as essential service workers. Almost twice as many employees are working from home as at a workplace.

If we weight these employees by their earnings in 2019 as an indicator of their contribution to the country’s GDP, we see that these at-home workers now account for more than two-thirds of economic activity. In a matter of weeks, we have transformed into a working-from-home economy.

Although the pandemic has battered the economy to a point where we likely won’t see a return to trend until 2022 (Baker et al. 2020), things would have been far worse without the ability to work from home. Remote working has allowed us to maintain social distancing in our fight against COVID-19. So, working from home is a not only economically essential, it is a critical weapon in combating the pandemic.

Figure 1: WFH now accounts for over 60% of US economic activity

Source:  Response to the question  “Currently (this week) what is your work status?”  Response options were  “Working on my business premises“ ,  “Working from home” ,  “Still employed and paid, but not working“ ,  “Unemployed, but expect to be recalled to my previous job“ ,  “Unemployed, and do not expect to be recalled to my previous job“ ,  and  “Not working, and not looking for work“

Data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-29, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match current CPS.

Shares shown weighted by earnings and unweighted (share of workers)

The inequality time bomb

But it is important to understand the potential downsides of a WFH economy and take steps to mitigate them.

Figure 2 shows not everyone can work from home. Only 51 percent of our survey reported being able to WFH at an efficiency rate of 80 percent or more. These are mostly managers, professionals, and financial workers who can easily carry out their jobs on their computers by videoconference, phone, and email.

The remaining half of Americans don’t benefit from those technological workarounds — many employees in retail, health care, transportation, and business services cannot do their jobs anywhere other than a traditional workplace. They need to see customers or work with products or equipment. As such they face a nasty choice between enduring greater health risks by going to work or forgoing earnings and experience by staying at home.

Figure 2: Not all jobs can be carried out WFH

Source:  Data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25 2020, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey.

In Figure 3 we see that many Americans also lack the facilities to effectively work from home. Only 49 percent of responders can work privately in a room other than their bedroom. The figure displays another big challenge — online connectivity. Internet connectivity for video calls has to be 90 percent or greater, which only two-thirds of those surveyed reported having. The remaining third have such poor internet service that it prevents them effectively working from home.

Figure 3: WFH under COVID-19 is challenging for many employees

Source:   Pre-COVID data from the BLS ATUS . During COVID data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25 2020, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey.

In Figure 4, we see that more educated, higher-earning employees are far more likely to work from home. These employees continue to earn, develop skills, and advance careers. Those unable to work from home — either because of the nature of their jobs or because they lack suitable space or internet connections — are being left behind. They face bleak prospects if their skills erode during the shutdown.

Taken together, these findings point to a ticking inequality time bomb.

So as we move forward to restart the U.S. economy, investing in broadband expansion should be a major priority. During the last Great Depression, the U.S. government launched one of the great infrastructure projects in American history when it approved the Rural Electrification Act in 1936. Over the following 25 years, access to electricity by rural Americans increased from just 10 percent to nearly 100 percent. The long-term benefits included higher rates of growth in employment, population, income, and property values.

Today, as policymakers consider how to focus stimulus spending to revive growth, a significant increase in broadband spending is crucial to ensuring that all of the United States has a fair chance to bounce back from COVID-19.

Figure 4: WFH is much more common among educated higher-income employees

Source:  Pre-COVID data from the BLS ATUS . During COVID data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25 2020, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey. We code a respondent as working from home pre-COVID if they report working from home one day per week or more.

Trouble for the cities?

Understanding the lasting impacts of working from home in a post-COVID world requires taking a look back at the pre-pandemic work world. Back when people  went  to work, they typically commuted to offices in the center of cities. Our survey showed 58 percent of those who are now working from home had worked in a city before the coronavirus shutdown. And 61 percent of respondents said they worked in an office.

Since these employees also tend to be well paid, I estimate this could remove from city centers up to 50 percent of total daily spending in bars, restaurants, and shops. This is already having a depressing impact on the vitality of the downtowns of our major cities. And, as I argue below, this upsurge in working from home is largely here to stay. So I see a longer-run decline in city centers.

The largest American cities have seen incredible growth since the 1980s as younger, educated Americans have flocked into revitalized downtowns (Glaeser 2011). But it looks like 2020 will reverse that trend, with a flight of economic activity from city centers.

Of course, the upside is this will be a boom for suburbs and rural areas.

Working from home is here to stay

Working from home is a play in three parts, each totally different from the other. The first part is  pre -COVID. This was an era in which working from home was both rare and stigmatized.

A  survey of 10,000  salaried workers conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed only 15 percent of employees ever had a full day working from home. 3

Indeed, only 2 percent of workers ever worked from home full time. From talking to dozens of remote employees for my research projects over the years, I found these are mostly either lower-skilled data entry or tele-sales workers or higher-skilled employees who were able to do their jobs largely online and had often been able to keep a job despite locating to a new area.

Working from home before the pandemic was also hugely stigmatized — often mocked and ridiculed as “shirking from home” or “working remotely, remotely working.”

In a 2017  TEDx Talk , I showed the result from an online image search for the words “working from home” which pulled up hundreds of negative images of cartoons, semi-naked people or parents holding a laptop in one hand and a baby in the other.

Working from home  during the pandemic is very different. It is now extremely common, without the stigma, but under  challenging conditions . Many workers have kids at home with them. There’s a lack of quiet space, a lack of choice over having to work from home, and no option other than to do this full time. Having four kids myself I have definitely experienced this.

COVID has forced many of us to work from home under the worst circumstances.

But working from home  post- COVID should be what we look forward to. Of the dozens of firms I have talked to, the typical plan is that employees will work from home between one and three days a week and come into the office the rest of the time. This is supported by our evidence on about 1,000 firms from the  Survey of Business Uncertainty  I run with the Atlanta Fed and the University of Chicago. 4

Before COVID, 5 percent of working days were spent at home. During the pandemic, this increased eightfold to 40 percent a day. And post-pandemic, the number will likely drop to 20 percent.

But that 20 percent still represents a fourfold increase of the pre-COVID level, highlighting that working from home is here to stay. While few firms are planning to continue full time WFH after the pandemic ends, nearly every firm I have talked to about this has been positively surprised by how well it has worked.

The office will survive but it may look different

“Should we get rid of our office?” I get that question a lot.

The answer is “No. But you might want to move it.”

Although firms plan to reduce the time their employees spend at work, this will not reduce the demand for total office space given the need for social distancing. The firms I talk to are typically thinking about halving the density of offices, which is leading to an increase in the overall demand for office space. That is, the 15 percent drop in working days in the office is more than offset by the 50 percent increase in demand for space per employee.

What is happening, however, is offices are moving from skyscrapers to industrial parks. Another dominant theme of the last 40 years of American cities was the shift of office space into high-rise buildings in city centers. COVID is dramatically reversing this trend as high rises face two massive problems in a post-COVID world.

Just consider mass transit and elevators in a time of mandatory social distancing. How can you get several million workers in and out of major cities like New York, London, or Tokyo every day keeping everyone six feet apart? And think of the last elevator you were in. If we strictly enforce six feet of social distancing, the maximum capacity of elevators could fall by 90 percent 5 , making it impossible for employees working in a skyscraper to expediently reach their desks.

Of course, if social distancing disappears post-COVID, this may not matter. But given all the uncertainty, my prediction is that when a vaccine eventually comes out in a year or so, society will have become accustomed to social distancing. And given recent nearly missed pandemics like SARS, Ebola, MERS, and avian flu, many firms and employees may be preparing for another outbreak and another need for social distancing. So my guess is many firms will be reluctant to return to dense offices.

So what is the solution? Firms may be wise to turn their attention from downtown buildings to industrial park offices, or “campuses,” as hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley like to call them. These have the huge benefits of ample parking for all employees and spacious low-rise buildings that are accessible by stairs.

Two types of policies can be explored to address this challenge. First, towns and cities should be flexible on zoning, allowing struggling shopping malls, cinemas, gyms, and hotels to be converted into offices. These are almost all low-rise structures with ample parking, perfect for office development.

Second, we need to think more like economists by introducing airline-style pricing for mass transit and elevators. The challenges with social distancing arise during peak capacity, so we need to cut peak loads.

For public transportation this means steeply increasing peak-time fares and cutting off-peak fares to encourage riders to spread out through the day.

For elevator rides we need to think more radically. For example, office rents per square foot could be cut by 50 percent, but elevator use could be charged heavily during the morning and evening rush hours. Charging firms, say $10 per elevator ride between 8:45 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. and 5:15 p.m., would encourage firms to stagger their working days. This would move elevator traffic to off-peak periods with excess capacity. We are moving from a world where office space is in short supply to one where elevator space is in short supply, and commercial landlords should consider charging their clients accordingly.

Making a smooth transition

From all my conversations and research, I have three pieces of advice for anyone crafting WFH policies.

First, working from home should be part time.

Full-time working from home is problematic for three reasons: It is hard to be creative at a distance, it is hard to be inspired and motivated at home, and employee loyalty is strained without social interaction.

My experiment at Ctrip in China followed 250 employees working from home for four days a week for nine months and saw the challenges of isolation and loneliness this created.

For the first three months employees were happy — it was the euphoric honeymoon period. But by the time the experiment had run its full length, two-thirds of the employees requested to return to the office. They needed human company.

Currently, we are in a similar honeymoon phase of full-time WFH. But as with any relationship, things can get rocky and I see increasing numbers of firms and employees turning against this practice.

So the best advice is plan to work from home about 1 to 3 days a week. It’ll ease the stress of commuting, allow for employees to use their at-home days for quiet, thoughtful work, and let them use their in-office days for meetings and collaborations.

Second, working from home should be optional.

Figure 5 shows the choice of how many days per week our survey of 2,500 American workers preferred. While the median responder wants to work from home two days a week, there is a striking range of views. A full 20 percent of workers never want to do it while another 25 percent want to do it full time.

The remaining 55 percent all want some mix of office and home time. I saw similarly large variations in views in my China experiment, which often changed over time. Employees would try WFH and then discover after a few months it was too lonely or fell victim to one of the three enemies of the practice — the fridge, the bed, and the television — and would decide to return to the office.

So the simple advice is to let employees choose, within limits. Nobody should be forced to work from home full time, and nobody should be forced to work in the office full time. Choice is key — let employees pick their schedules and let them change as their views evolve. The two exceptions are new hires, for whom maybe one or two years full time in the office makes sense, and under-performers, who are the subject of my final tip.

Third, working from home is a privilege, not an entitlement.

For WFH to succeed, it is essential to have an effective performance review system. If you can evaluate employees based on output — what they accomplish — they can easily work from home. If they are effective and productive, great; if not, warn them, and if they continue to underperform, haul them back to the office.

This of course requires effective performance management. In firms that do not have effective employee appraisal systems management, I would caution against working from home. This was the lesson of  Yahoo in 2013 . When Marissa Mayer took over, she found there was an ineffective employee evaluation system and working from home was hard to manage. So WFH was paused while Mayer revamped Yahoo’s employee performance evaluation.

The COVID pandemic has challenged and changed our relationships with work and how many of us do our jobs. There’s no real going back, and that means policymakers and business leaders need to plan and prepare so workers and firms are not sidelined by otherwise avoidable problems. With a thoughtful approach to a post-pandemic world, working from home can be a change for good.

Figure 5: There is wide variation in employee demand for WFH post-COVID

Source:  Response to the questions: “In 2021+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work days at home?“

Data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. 

Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey. 

1 Newsbank Access World News collection of approximately 2,000 national and local daily U.S. newspapers showing the percentage of articles mentioning “working from home” or “WFH.”

2 These are the  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey ; the  Survey of Business Uncertainty ; the  Bank of England Decision Maker Panel ; and the survey I conducted of 2,500 U.S. employees.

3   U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Flexibilities and Work Schedules News Release. Sept. 24, 2019 .

4   Firms Expect Working from Home to Triple.  May 28, 2020. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta .

5  In a packed elevator each person requires about four square feet. With six-foot spacing we need a circle of radius six-feet around each person, which is over 100 square feet. If an elevator is large enough to fit more than one person, experts have advised riders to stand in your corner, face the walls and carry toothpicks (for pushing the buttons), as explained in this  NPR report .

Baker, S.R., Bloom, N., Davis, S.J., Terry, S.J. (2020). COVID-Induced Economic Uncertainty (No. 26983). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., Zhichun, J.Y. (2014). Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Glaeser, E. (2011). Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. Penguin Books.

Related Topics

• Policy Brief

More Publications

Economic analysis of law, are ideas getting harder to find, do energy rebate programs encourage conservation.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Wolters Kluwer - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Work From Home During the COVID-19 Outbreak

The COVID-19 pandemic made working from home (WFH) the new way of working. This study investigates the impact that family-work conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, job autonomy, and self-leadership have on employees’ productivity, work engagement, and stress experienced when WFH during the pandemic.

This cross-sectional study analyzed data collected through an online questionnaire completed by 209 employees WFH during the pandemic. The assumptions were tested using hierarchical linear regression.

Employees’ family-work conflict and social isolation were negatively related, while self-leadership and autonomy were positively related, to WFH productivity and WFH engagement. Family-work conflict and social isolation were negatively related to WFH stress, which was not affected by autonomy and self-leadership.

Conclusion:

Individual- and work-related aspects both hinder and facilitate WFH during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The COVID-19 outbreak has made working from home (WFH) the new way of working for millions of employees in the EU and around the world. Due to the pandemic, many workers and employers had to switch, quite suddenly, to remote work for the first time and without any preparation. Early estimates from Eurofound 1 suggested that due to the pandemic, approximately 50% of Europeans worked from home (at least partially) as compared with 12% prior to the emergency. Currently, these numbers are approximately the same, with many employees and organizations possibly opting for WFH even after the pandemic. 2

To contain the spread of the virus, Italy quickly adopted home confinement measures which, since the Spring of 2020, were renewed for several months and are still, as in some other European countries, ongoing also during Spring 2021.

As all organizational changes, WFH too has some advantages and disadvantages. 3 Usually, adopting this flexible way of working has been presented as a planned choice that requires a period of design, preparation, and adaptation to allow organizations to effectively support employees’ productivity and ensure them better work-life balance. 4 – 6 However, the COVID-19 outbreak has substantially forced most organizations to adopt this way of working, often without providing employees with the necessary skills required for remote work. 7 – 9 As previously mentioned, studies have reported both advantages and disadvantages related to remote work. 10 Its effects, therefore, have been quite explored. 6 On the other side, the need to examine how WFH, as a “new way of working,” 11 , 12 has affected the well-being and productivity of employees with no prior remote work experience and to identify specific work conditions affecting remote work during the COVID-19 crisis 9 is imperative.

To achieve these goals, the present study considered the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model 13 , 14 as a theoretical framework. The JD-R model is a well-established theoretical model in the field of occupational health psychology, which suggests that work conditions, categorized into job demands and job resources, affect employees’ wellbeing and performance. Job demands refer to the physical, psychological, or socio-organizational aspects of the work whose energy-depleting process induces people to experience energy loss and fatigue, leading to stress, burnout, and health impairment. On the contrary, job resources refer to the physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that reduce job demands while stimulating work motivation, personal growth, and development. 15 In addition, personal resources have been introduced in the JD-R model defining them as “aspects of the self that are generally linked to resilience and refer to individuals’ sense of their ability to control and impact upon their environment successfully,” 16 thus stimulating optimal functioning and lessening stress.

According to the JD-R model, every occupation and work has its own specific job demands and job resources; hence, the present study considered some job demands, one job resource, and one personal resource to investigate how much they affect employees’ work engagement, job-related stress, and job performance.

The model we developed for this study considered some characteristics of remote work as job demands: the difficulty of adequately reconciling private and work commitments, 17 the decrease or lack of the social context that employees normally experience in the workplace and that is related to the perception of being more socially isolated, 18 and the difficulty of arranging a suitable workstation at home for carrying out their work activities. 19 One of the most prominent job resources when WFH is job autonomy. 5 , 20 – 22 Finally, we considered self-leadership, defined as a self-influence process to behave and perform by setting one's own goals and monitoring their fulfilment, 23 as a personal resource that may potentially contribute to efficient remote work.

The present study integrates research on remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic 8 highlighting some job demands and resources that may affect negative (work stress) and positive (work engagement and job productivity) outcomes of employees’ remote work. Furthermore, since the trend toward remote work is expected to increase even after the pandemic, this study may provide useful information on the individual- and work-related consequences of remote work during and after the pandemic.

Analyzing more in detail the above-mentioned variables, the difficulty of reconciling private and work commitments is often described in the literature as family-work conflict, which is a condition when employees’ participation in work duties is complicated by the involvement of family-related activities. 24 Family-work conflict is usually considered a sex-dependent phenomenon 25 because, in most cultures, the primary responsibility for caregiving and housework tasks 26 lies with women, who are more penalized than men in times of crisis. 27 However, COVID-19 has forced millions of people to stay home, breaking down the distinction between private and work life regardless of age or sex. Therefore, we argue that family-work conflict can be an issue that may potentially affect not only women but men alike when WFH. On the contrary, previous studies hypothesized that remote work can simultaneously reduce family-work conflict as well as amplify it, 4 , 6 nullifying the benefits of WFH. 28 Besides, the confinement that was imposed in the early period of the pandemic may also accentuate this conflict, with family commitments interfering with work commitments.

At home, the presence of partners and children (especially if still in their childhood) engaged in work and school activities, the disruption of child-care and education services observed during the pandemic, and having to contribute towards household chores greatly affected remote workers. 19 For example, employees have to regularly prepare meals three times a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for the whole family, assisting children to connect with their online distance teaching in the morning, assisting with their homework in the afternoon, and spending some quality time with them when their homework is completed. As a result, employees have to work with greater family-work conflict, which we believe negatively affects their job productivity and work engagement while impacting on stress related to the remote work pending completion, in line with the previous literature. 4 , 5

Workplace isolation is another important key feature of WFH during the pandemic. 18 Although previous research highlighted that social isolation is one of the main drawbacks of remote work, 29 – 32 its incidence has inevitably increased during this period. The pandemic has exposed people to social confinement and thus higher levels of loneliness, 8 , 33 which may correlate with declining work satisfaction and performance as well as stress enhancement. 4 , 18

Prior to COVID-19, studies found a negative correlation between time spent telecommuting and individual and team performance. 9 Furthermore, the amount of time spent teleworking and the extent of face-to-face interaction were found to moderate, respectively negatively and positively, the relationship between professional isolation and job performance. 34 In line with previous research, 35 the use of digital technologies to communicate may only partially mitigate the isolation experienced by workers in comparison to the social contacts that are usually experienced by individuals in their workplaces as well as in social life, such as attending the gym or meeting friends. Therefore, as the social confinement observed in this study was extended for many weeks, with no in-presence contact with colleagues, we believe that social isolation is a relevant job demand related to WFH in times of COVID-19. Drawing on this statement, we argue that social isolation is significantly and negatively associated with WFH outcomes concerning job productivity and engagement and positively associated with WFH stress-related levels.

Another peculiarity of WFH during the pandemic is that employees have to share their workspace with family members, such as the partner and/or school-age children engaged in distance-learning primarily. Therefore, it should be noted that WFH during the pandemic has brought about many difficulties in the Italian population as well as in other European countries where social confinement has been adopted for several weeks. The houses were often unsuitable to host more people engaged in study and work activities, 19 thus generating a distracting environment. A previous study conducted on teleworkers 36 highlighted that control on the work environment is positively related to job satisfaction, whereas distractions while working generates work environment dissatisfaction. Studies suggested that a positive full-time WFH experience is associated with the quality of the workspace, such as control on light and acoustic isolation 37 and a workspace that is sufficiently separated from the living space. 38 When this separation is not possible, working in a space with environmental distractions may represent an additional and relevant job demand. Specifically, we hypothesized that environmental distractions are negatively associated with productivity and engagement in remote work and positively with stress.

According to the JD-R model, 13 , 14 job and personal resources affect employees’ well-being and productivity. One of the most prominent job resources of remote work is job autonomy, 13 , 14 which is the extent of independence and discretion permitted while performing professional tasks. 39 Job autonomy positively associates with the number of hours performed remotely. Furthermore, it positively influences remote workers’ engagement, satisfaction, and performance but negatively affects their stress. 5 , 20 – 22 Job autonomy is a major job resource for employees and, in the right doses, it encourages profitable innovations at work. 40 We argue that the positive effects of job autonomy can be observed or even accentuated during the enforced WFH due to the pandemic. WFH was an unforeseen phenomenon necessitated by the outbreak of the pandemic, and many employees had to cope with this new situation and coordinate with colleagues and supervisors to manage the unprecedented autonomy associated with the remote work. For this reason and in line with the literature, 5 , 10 we posit that autonomy positively associates with productivity and engagement but negatively with stress experienced when WFH during the pandemic.

Finally, in our model, we included one personal resource that is particularly helpful in times of change as it enables employees to actively shape their own job practices and work environment. 41 Unfortunately, there is limited evidence on the effects of personal resources when WFH. Nonetheless, especially in unprecedented times such as this, it is important to investigate the role of work-related personal resources because, differently from personal traits (eg, personality), they can be trained. 11 In the present study, we considered self-leadership, measured in its facets of goal setting and self-observation because among the most salient aspects of WFH, as well as one the mutual consequence of the other (the observation of one's work helps to establish goals, and their achievement must in turn be monitored), as an important resource when WFH. Through self-leadership, individuals regulate and control their behavior, influencing and leading themselves using specific sets of behavioral and cognitive strategies. 42 Self-leading individuals efficaciously monitor their actual performance and the standard they set for themselves thus regulating their own motivation. In this vein, it has been evidenced how self-leadership behaviors facilitate higher psychological functioning, which in turn influences work engagement. 43 , 44 A recent study yielded promising results showing that goal-setting behaviors, a component of self-leadership behaviors, may sustain job satisfaction especially when WFH. 21 In light of this, the present study aims to extend the literature by considering self-leadership and evaluating its relationship with WFH engagement and productivity, as well as with stress levels. According to the JD-R model, 13 , 14 we assumed self-leadership as a personal resource for WFH that positively affects employees’ productivity and work engagement, and negatively affects stress.

Participants and Procedure

A study on the work-life quality of remote workers during COVID-19 was conducted using a self-report questionnaire administered online from May to July 2020, using the Qualtrics platform. At the time of data collection, all the participants were WFH full-time in Italian public and private organizations. Participation in the research was voluntary, anonymous, and without any reward. Prior to filling the questionnaire, the respondents signed informed consent. The research was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and all ethical guidelines on social research were followed. The study was approved by the Bioethics Committee of the University of Bologna.

The study included 209 employees (71.3% women and 28.7% men). The average age of the participants was 49.81 years (standard deviation 9.4, minimum 25, maximum 65). Approximately 70% of the respondents reported having at least one child, and 32% of them reported having children younger than 14 years old. Only 9.1% of the employees in the sample reported being involved in WFH prior to the COVID-19 emergency, suggesting that 91.9% of them were WFH for the first time.

The job demands related to WFH were measured using three different scales. The first scale was measuring family-work conflict, which consists of three items from the scale developed by Netemeyer et al, 45 describing the interference that family life has on work when WFH (eg, “Family stress interferes with my ability to perform work-related tasks”). Perceived social isolation was assessed using four items of the scale by Golden et al, 34 which measures a sense of isolation and lack of support experienced by workers (eg, “I miss face-to-face contact with colleagues”). Finally, the scale of the distracting working environment consists of three items developed by Lee and Brand, 36 which measures the level of distraction experienced during WFH (eg, “In my working area, I experience acoustic distractions”).

Job autonomy was assessed using four items developed by Morgeson and Humphrey. 39 These items measured both the possibilities of autonomy in scheduling work activities and taking work-related autonomous decisions (eg, “My job allows me to make my own decisions about how to schedule my work”).

Self-leadership was assessed using four items of the Revised Self-Leadership Questionnaire 23 measuring both the employees’ behaviors of setting job-related goals and self-observation of their work (eg, “When I work, I always keep my tasks in mind”).

Perceived WFH productivity was measured in a section of the questionnaire requiring to compare the current situation of WFH with that one of the traditional office, experienced in the past, through a single item, already used in a remote work context, 18 whose formulation is “When I work remotely, I am more productive.”

WFH engagement was measured using the three-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale 46 adapted to the WFH context (eg, “When I work from home, I feel full of energy”).

Finally, stress experienced during WFH was measured through the four items previously adopted by Weinert et al 47 aimed to measure workers’ perception of exhaustion and fatigue due to WFH (eg, “I feel exhausted from working from home”).

All the above measures were evaluated using a five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Socio-demographic variables, such as age, sex, caring responsibility, and remote work experience were considered as control variables, as literature recognizes them as possible confounders in the relationships under study. 5 , 8 , 48 Specifically, sex (0 = M; 1 = F), caring responsibility (0 = not having children younger than 14 years old; 1 = having children older than 14 years old), and WFH experience (0 = no; 1 = yes) were coded as dummy variables. Furthermore, since this research was conducted during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, subjective perceptions and concerns regarding the COVID-19 may also have an impact on the experiences and well-being of the participants. 18 Therefore, fear of COVID-19 was used as a control variable and assessed using the seven items of the Italian version of the Fear of Covid-19 Scale. 49 For example, “I am very afraid of COVID-19.”

Data Analysis

Prior to data analysis, the validity and reliability of the scales were evaluated. In particular, the technique of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to assess the dimensionality of the scales. The reliability and convergent validity of the measures were then evaluated by computing composite reliability (CR) and average variance extracted (AVE) values, while the discriminant validity was assessed by calculating maximum shared variance (MSV) values.

Once established that all the measures in this study had reliability and validity values following the cut-offs usually adopted in research, 50 descriptive statistics and correlations among the major study variables were calculated. Finally, hierarchical multiple regressions evaluated which job demands and job resources influenced the three dependent variables of our study. In the three separated hierarchical regressions performed, one for each dependent variable, the stepwise method was used. In the first step, we included the control variables of sex, age, presence of children younger than 14 years old, WFH condition, and fear of COVID-19. In the second step, we added job demands, namely family-work conflict, social isolation, and distracting work environment. Finally, in the third step, we included the resources of job autonomy and self-leadership behaviors. All the data were analyzed using IBM AMOS and SPSS statistics version 26 (Armonk, NJ).

Test of Measurement Model

First, two CFAs were conducted to compare an eight-factor model, one for each construct of this study, with a model in which all the items were grouped into a single dimension. The eight-factor model showed a greater fit to data ( χ 2  = 503.54; df = 272; χ 2 /df = 1.85; comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.93; incremental fit index [IFI] = 0.93; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.06; and standardized root mean square residual [SRMR] = 0.06) compared with the model with a single factor grouping all the items ( χ 2  = 2147.77; df = 299; χ 2 /df = 7.18; CFI = 0.46; IFI = 0.46; RMSEA = 0.17; and SRMR = 0.16). The fit values of the eight-factor model were good, and each item loaded into its factor with saturation values greater than 0.40. With the only exception of job productivity, measured through a single item, we then calculated the values of composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), and maximum shared variance (MSV) for each scale. CR values for each dimension were greater than 0.70, giving evidence of the reliability of the scales. All the AVE values were above the cut-off of 0.50, while each MSV was lower than AVEs, indicating that the study measures had both convergent and discriminant validity. Table ​ Table1 1 reports the results of these analyses.

Values of Reliability (CR) and Convergent (AVE) and Discriminant (MSV) Validity

AVE, average variance extracted; CR, composite reliability; MSV, maximum shared variance.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

Descriptive statistics, Cronbach α, and correlations among variables are shown in Table ​ Table2. 2 . All the variables correlated in the expected direction. Job demands were found to be negatively associated with WFH job productivity and work engagement and positively related to WFH stress. The resources of job autonomy and self-leadership were positively related to work productivity and work engagement, but their relationships with stress, although negative, were not significant. Moreover, the two resources were not related to the three job demands.

Descriptive Statistics, Cronbach α, and Correlations Among the Variables

Cronbach α between brackets.

Regression Analysis for WFH Employees’ Productivity, Work Engagement, and Stress

Table ​ Table3 3 shows the results of the multiple regression analyses. Following the steps described in the Method paragraph, the first regression tested WFH productivity as dependent variable. For what concerns control variables, although in step 2 the experience with WFH resulted to be significant, its influence in step 3 revealed to be no more significant while, at step 3, age ( β  = –0.14; P  < 0.05) and fear of COVID-19 ( β  = 0.25; P  < 0.01) resulted, respectively, to affect negatively and positively WFH productivity. In step 2, when job demands were entered, a significant increase in explained variance (ADjR 2  = 0.27; ΔR 2  = 0.24; P  < 0.01), over and above the variance explained by control variables, was observed. At this step, both family-work conflict ( β  = –0.29; P  < 0.01) and social isolation ( β  = –0.29; P  < 0.01), were significantly and negatively associated to WFH productivity, whereas distracting work environment was not significantly associated to it ( β  = –0.05; P  > 0.05). In step 3, job autonomy and self-leadership showed a significant improvement in explained variance (ADjR 2  = 0.32; Δ R 2  = 0.05; P  < 0.01). At this step, both the job demands of family-work conflict ( β  = –0.29; P  < 0.01) and social isolation ( β  = –0.29; P  < 0.01), were negatively related to WFH productivity, whereas both job autonomy ( β  = 0.14; P  < 0.05) and self-leadership ( β  = 0.17; P  < 0.01) were positively related to WFH productivity. Distracting work environment was not significantly associated with it ( β  = –0.02; P  > 0.05).

Regression Parameters: Standardized Coefficients and Overall Changes in R 2 for WFH Job Productivity, Work Engagement, and Stress

Method: enter.

Gender: 0 = M, 1 = F; WFH experience: 0 = no, 1 = yes; Children <14: 0 = no, 1 = yes.

The second regression tested remote work engagement as a dependent variable. About the control variables, also in this case, in step 2, the experience with WFH resulted to be significant, while in step 3 its impact was no longer significant. Furthermore, in this case, fear of COVID-19 ( β  = 0.19; P  < 0.01) positively and significantly affected remote work engagement even after inserting variables at steps 2 and 3.

In step 2, when entering job demands, a significant increase in variance was observed (ADjR 2  = 0.37; ΔR 2  = 0.31; P  < 0.01), over and above the variance explained by control variables in the first step. Specifically, step 2 of this regression shows that all the three job demands of family-work conflict ( β  = –0.19; P  < 0.01), social isolation ( β  = –0.36; P  < 0.01) and distracting work environment ( β  = –0.18; P  < 0.05) negatively affected work engagement. At step 3, both the resources of autonomy ( β  = 0.19; P  < 0.01) and self-leadership ( β  = 0.23; P  < 0.01) positively affected work engagement. All the three job demands of family-work conflict ( β  = –0.19; P  < 0.01), social isolation ( β  = –0.36; P  < 0.01) and distracting work environment ( β  = –0.14; P  < 0.05) were still negatively associated to work engagement, and an increase in the explained variance (ADjR 2  = 0.44; ΔR 2  = 0.10; P  < 0.01) was observed.

Finally, our focus shifted to the impact of WFH on workers’ well-being. Using WFH stress as a dependent variable, the third hierarchical regression did not show any effect of the control variables on this outcome. At step 2, both family-work conflict ( β  = 0.31; P  < 0.01) and social isolation ( β  = 0.48; P  < 0.01), but not distracting work environment ( β  = 0.05; P  > 0.05), were positively related to stress showing a significant increase in explained variance (ADjR 2  = 0.44; ΔR 2  = 0.42; P  < 0.01). At step 3, both family-work conflict ( β  = 0.31; P  < 0.01) and social isolation ( β  = 0.48; P  < 0.01), but not distracting work environment ( β  = 0.05; P  > 0.05), were positively associated with stress. On the contrary, neither autonomy nor self-leadership had a significant impact on WFH stress. Therefore, no significant increase in explained variance was observed (ADjR 2  = 0.44; ΔR 2  = 0.00; P  > 0.05).

The present study examined employees’ well-being and productivity when WFH during the pandemic. We addressed this issue by using the JD-R model 13 , 14 as a framework and by investigating the effect that specific WFH job demands and resources have on WFH outcomes. Among the job demands, we examined the effects of family-work conflict, social isolation, and distracting environment. Job autonomy was evaluated as a job resource, and self-leadership as a personal resource. The JD-R model 13 , 14 has also practical implications since it not only allows to focus on job-related risk prevention strategies (by decreasing job demands) but also on benefit promotion (by increasing job resources and, when possible, personal resources) to sustain employees’ productivity and work engagement and decrease the stress experienced when WFH for the long periods required from the pandemic. In a time in which employees had to adapt quickly to WFH, the identification of obstacles, as well as of enablers, to well-being and job performance is a priority for many organizations, and this study contributes to this purpose. Overall, findings observed in the present study are in line with the assumptions developed following the theoretical framework of the JD-R model 13 , 14 and also consistent with the literature related to remote work.

Social isolation and family-work conflict were associated with all the three tested outcomes, in the direction we envisioned, thus proving to be important job demands of remote work that can significantly decrease productivity and work engagement on the one hand and increase job stress on the other. These results are in line with previous studies 4 , 8 , 18 and also improve extant knowledge concerning the relationship with productivity, engagement, and stress experienced during WFH. Findings suggest that organizations and employees should consider these factors and develop guidelines on how to better manage them to observe the positive outcomes typically expected from remote work. In particular, increasing opportunities to communicate with colleagues and superiors represents the first strategy for organizations, HR officers, and employees, because communications can decrease social isolation perceptions. The available technological resources can do a lot in this direction: although lean communications, such as e-mails, allow an exchange of information often functional for work, the social exchange between human beings takes place through “richer” forms of interactions, among which the face-to-face interaction represents the “gold standard.” 51 Many companies accelerated the acquisition and use of technologies and software that offer interactive experiences that imitate the face-to-face or group interactions among people. The other side of the coin, however, concerns the issue of the digital privacy defense and the fear of digital surveillance 52 , 53 that the massive use of technologies may increase. At the same time, managers and HR officers should also effectively reflect on the frequency, timing, and structure of such communicative exchanges to avoid the risk of excessive interruptions and distractions of workers.

The theme of distractions is, in fact, another major issue related to WFH. The results of this study capture the deleterious role that family-work conflict and a chaotic environment, characterized by visual and acoustic distractions and lack of privacy, play on WFH outcomes. Distracting environments, while fortunately proving not to be predictors of reduced productivity and increased stress, seem to exert a negative influence on the motivational drivers of people. Employees may decrease their engagement, with weakened work motivation when their work setting becomes more distracting. The family-work conflict, instead, has shown significant and unfavorable effects on every dependent variable of this study. Probably, its centrality—already known in research on telework 4 —is also increased by the contingent situation related to the COVID-19 pandemic: in this period, workers’ homes are often “crowded” by cohabitants grappling with their work and educational commitments. A crowded home further complicates the family and work-life balance, a learning process that previous studies suggested to require 1 year of WFH experience. 5

Learning how to manage remote work can decrease the perception of family-work conflict. In addition, organizations should support employees’ time management skills, enabling them to divide the two spheres and give each of them the right attention at the right time, with a view to the right to disconnection and physical and mental recovery of each worker.

The importance of personal work management skills is also underlined by the resources tested in this study. Our findings show that autonomy and self-leadership have a positive relationship with productivity and work engagement. So, they may represent two relevant resources, able to sustain WFH productivity and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to potentially bring favorable outcomes for both organizations and employees. In practical terms, promoting autonomy and self-leadership may be a solution to improve the efficacy of remote work programs and related implications in terms of WFH engagement. In light of this, training interventions may be supplied to WFH employees to develop self-observation strategies and to promote the schedule of work-related goal-based deadlines and priorities. Furthermore, these findings call attention to new work processes supporting the work autonomy of individuals, leveraging the specific skills of individuals, and providing functional tools for job management in the new context of remote work. Advancements in this sense seem fully compatible with work visions that are increasingly geared to working towards objectives and less based on directive leadership processes, and instead more participatory. 54 Consequently, organizations should empower workers through training courses aimed at developing self-leadership behaviors.

No significant relationship has been observed between resources and stress levels. In the JD-R model, job and personal resources are expected to directly impact well-being and motivational processes or to moderate the impact of job demands on stress and ill-health. 16 These results suggest that future studies should investigate the buffering role of specific WFH jobs and personal resources on the relationship between WFH demands and stress.

Other notable findings should be outlined. Our results suggest that remote work can be a useful solution especially for people concerned about COVID-19. In line with the previous literature, 18 the perceptions of people about the COVID-19 virus seem to play an important role in work during the pandemic. Our findings show that the fear for this pathogen is positively associated with higher levels of productivity and engagement. In other words, people emotionally affected by COVID-19 also reported being more productive and motivated when WFH. This suggests that, consistently with the literature, 55 , 56 this way of working may also play a protective, anxiety-relieving role for workers, since they were not asked to go to work, and thus be exposed to possible contagion by leaving home. On the other hand, we also observe that perception of lower productivity is associated with the increasing age of workers, a result probably explained both through the difficulties that these employees may have with technological tools, and their potential less ability to adapt to changes, 57 especially if they take place quickly.

There are some implications for future research in this field that derive from the present study. Indeed, our model, although including many variables, gives only a small account of the many dynamics that underlie the complex phenomenon of the WFH. Based on this, we believe it is important that future studies take into consideration, with a more specific research design and a more representative sample, other constructs, particularly among the job and personal resources. In particular, we point out that the PsyCap, a psychological state consisting of the dimensions of self-efficacy, optimism, resilience, determination, 58 applied both at the personal and team level, can open important horizons for future studies, which still have much to investigate on the complex reality of remote work and its outcomes in terms of employees’ well-being and health.

We also point out some of the limitations of this study, as well as some suggestions for future studies. One limitation of this study is its cross-sectional design, which allows us to trace associations between the investigated constructs but on the other hand does not allow determining causal relationships between the variables. Furthermore, we also believe that to generalize the results may be not possible, since our sample was a convenience sample, susceptible to biases, including the fact that the data collection took place online, among people accustomed to the use of digital technologies.

In this study, we investigated if WFH-related job demands and job resources are related to remote work productivity and work engagement as well as on stress. We found that the empirical results we analyzed and discussed, except for the relationships between distracting working environment and the outcomes of productivity and stress, and the relationships between both autonomy and self-leadership and stress, mostly confirmed our assumptions.

We believe that this study contributes to the literature concerning remote work and the well-being of remote workers that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is marked with relevant emotional and health implications. Furthermore, the implications of this study are of further importance as they provide information concerning the needs of workers who have had to adapt to enforce full-time WFH due to the pandemic, most of whom have no prior WFH experience. Managers, HR officers, and workers engaged in remote activities should consider family-work conflict, social isolation, and distracting work environments as potential obstacles and job autonomy and self-leadership as potential enablers of WFH engagement. In times of pandemic, such as the COVID-19, where containing the spread of the disease is crucial, WFH is a key opportunity and can give a competitive advantage to sustain and improve performance of organizations.

Funding Sources: nothing to declare.

Conflict of Interest: nothing to declare.

Ethical Considerations & Disclosure: This research fully respects the Declaration of Helsinki. All ethical guidelines were followed. The Bioethics Committee of the University of Bologna formally approved this study.

Clinical significance: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused people to work from home, in most cases without any preparation. Our results help identify factors associated with employee well-being, charting ways to follow to make sure people at home can work without negatively impacting their health.

How does working from home affect developer productivity? — A case study of Baidu during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Research Paper
• Published: 14 March 2022
• Volume 65 , article number  142102 , ( 2022 )

Cite this article

• Lingfeng Bao 1 ,
• Xin Xia 3 ,
• Kaiyu Zhu 2 ,
• Hui Li 2 &
• Xiaohu Yang 1  

8520 Accesses

28 Citations

2 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Nowadays, working from home (WFH) has become a popular work arrangement due to its many potential benefits for both companies and employees (e.g., increasing job satisfaction and retention of employees). Many previous studies have investigated the impact of WFH on the productivity of employees. However, most of these studies usually use a qualitative analysis method such as surveys and interviews, and the studied participants do not work from home for a long continuing time. Due to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a large number of companies asked their employees to work from home, which provides us an opportunity to investigate whether WFH affects their productivity. In this study, to investigate the difference in developer productivity between WFH and working onsite, we conduct a quantitative analysis based on a dataset of developers’ daily activities from Baidu Inc., one of the largest IT companies in China. In total, we collected approximately four thousand records of 139 developers’ activities of 138 working days. Out of these records, 1103 records are submitted when developers work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that WFH has both positive and negative impacts on developer productivity in terms of different metrics, e.g., the number of builds/commits/code reviews. We also notice that WFH has different impacts on projects with different characteristics including programming language, project type/age/size. For example, WFH has a negative impact on developer productivity for large projects. Additionally, we find that productivity varies for different developers. Based on these findings, we get some feedback from developers of Baidu and understand some reasons why WFH has different impacts on developer productivity. We also conclude several implications for both companies and developers.

Article PDF

Download to read the full article text

Similar content being viewed by others

The four-day work week: a chronological, systematic review of the academic literature

The Impact of Technological Progress on the Future of Work: Insights from a Survey on Alternative Employment Contracts in OECD Countries

A method for identifying different types of university research teams

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Shin B, El Sawy O A, Sheng O R L, et al. Telework: existing research and future directions. J Organ Comput Electron Commer, 2000, 10: 85–101

Article   Google Scholar  

Spark R. Accessibility to work from home for the disabled: the need for a shift in management style. In: Proceedings of the 14th Web for All Conference on the Future of Accessible Work, 2017. 1–4

Hill E J, Ferris M, Märtinson V. Does it matter where you work? A comparison of how three work venues (traditional office, virtual office, and home office) influence aspects of work and personal/family life. J Vocat Behav, 2003, 63: 220–241

Meyer A N, Barton L E, Murphy G C, et al. The work life of developers: activities, switches and perceived productivity. IIEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2017, 43: 1178–1193

Wolf T, Schroter A, Damian D, et al. Predicting build failures using social network analysis on developer communication. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, 2009. 1–11

Neufeld D J, Fang Y. Predicting telecommuter productivity. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004

Neufeld D J, Fang Y. Individual, social and situational determinants of telecommuter productivity. Inf Manage, 2005, 42: 1037–1049

Baker E, Avery G C, Crawford J. Satisfaction and perceived productivity when professionals work from home. Res Practice Human Resour Manag, 2007, 15: 37–62

Google Scholar  

Laihonen H, Jääskeläinen A, Lönnqvist A, et al. Measuring the productivity impacts of new ways of working. J Facil Manage, 2012, 10: 102–113

Campbell K M. Flexible work schedules, virtual work programs, and employee productivity. Dissertation for Ph.D. Degree. Minneapolis: Walden University, 2015

Kamei Y, Shihab E, Adams B, et al. A large-scale empirical study of just-in-time quality assurance. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2013, 39: 757–773

Walston C E, Felix C P. A method of programming measurement and estimation. IBM Syst J, 1977, 16: 54–73

Devanbu P, Karstu S, Melo W, et al. Analytical and empirical evaluation of software reuse metrics. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1996. 189–199

Nguyen V, Huang L, Boehm B. An analysis of trends in productivity and cost drivers over years. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering, 2011. 1–10

Xia X, Bao L F, Lo D, et al. Measuring program comprehension: a large-scale field study with professionals. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2018, 44: 951–976

von Krogh G, Spaeth S, Lakhani K R. Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study. Res Policy, 2003, 32: 1217–1241

Bao L F, Xia X, Lo D, et al. A large scale study of long-time contributor prediction for GitHub projects. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2021, 47: 1277–1298

Melo C, Cruzes D S, Kon F, et al. Agile team perceptions of productivity factors. In: Proceedings of AGILE Conference, 2011. 57–66

Meyer A N, Fritz T, Murphy G C, et al. Software developers’ perceptions of productivity. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, 2014. 19–29

Paiva E, Barbosa D, Lima R, et al. Factors that influence the productivity of software developers in a developer view. In: Proceedings of Innovations in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering, 2010. 99–104

Zhou Y M, Leung H, Xu B W. Examining the potentially confounding effect of class size on the associations between object-oriented metrics and change-proneness. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 2009, 35: 607–623

Wilcoxon F. Individual comparisons by ranking methods. Biometrics Bull, 1945, 1: 80–83

Cliff N. Ordinal Methods for Behavioral Data Analysis. London: Psychology Press, 2014

Book   Google Scholar  

Coenen M, Kok R A W. Workplace flexibility and new product development performance: the role of telework and flexible work schedules. Eur Manage J, 2014, 32: 564–576

Kazekami S. Mechanisms to improve labor productivity by performing telework. TeleCommun Policy, 2020, 44: 101868

Yan M, Xia X, Lo D, et al. Characterizing and identifying reverted commits. Empir Softw Eng, 2019, 24: 2171–2208

Nilles J M. Making Telecommuting Happen: A Guide for Telemanagers and Telecommuters. New York: van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994

Kurkland N B, Bailey D E. The advantages and challenges of working here, there anywhere, and anytime. Organ Dyn, 1999, 28: 53–68

Pérez M P, Sánchez A M, de Luis Carnicer M P. Benefits and barriers of telework: perception differences of human resources managers according to company’s operations strategy. Technovation, 2002, 22: 775–783

Felstead A, Henseke G. Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well-being and work-life balance. New Tech Work Employ, 2017, 32: 195–212

Aguilera A, Lethiais V, Rallet A, et al. Home-based telework in France: characteristics, barriers and perspectives. Transpation Res Part A-Policy Practice, 2016, 92: 1–11

Ford D, Milewicz R, Serebrenik A. How remote work can foster a more inclusive environment for transgender developers. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering (GE), 2019. 9–12

Perry D E, Staudenmayer N A, Votta L G. People, organizations, and process improvement. IEEE Softw, 1994, 11: 36–45

Bailey B P, Konstan J A, Carlis J V. The effects of interruptions on task performance, annoyance, and anxiety in the user interface. In: Proceedings of INTERACT, 2001. 593–601

Chong J, Siino R. Interruptions on software teams: a comparison of paired and solo programmers. In: Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2006. 29–38

Czerwinski M, Horvitz E, Wilhite S. A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In: Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2004. 175–182

Horvitz E C M C E. Notification, disruption, and memory: effects of messaging interruptions on memory and performance. In: Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction: INTERACT, 2001

Parnin C, DeLine R. Evaluating cues for resuming interrupted programming tasks. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010. 93–102

van Solingen R, Berghout E, van Latum F. Interrupts: just a minute never is. IEEE Softw, 1998, 15: 97–103

Sanchez H, Robbes R, Gonzalez V M. An empirical study of work fragmentation in software evolution tasks. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), 2015. 251–260

Albrecht A J. Measuring application development productivity. In: Proceedings of IBM Applications Development Joint SHARE/GUIDE Symposium, 1979

Minelli R, Mocci A, Lanza M. I know what you did last summer-an investigation of how developers spend their time. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension, 2015. 25–35

Cataldo M, Herbsleb J D, Carley K M. Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2008. 2–11

DeMarco T, Lister T. Programmer performance and the effects of the workplace. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1985. 268–272

Boehm B W. Improving software productivity. Computer, 1987, 20: 43–57

Vasilescu B, Blincoe K, Xuan Q, et al. The sky is not the limit: multitasking across github projects. In: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2016. 994–1005

Khan I A, Brinkman W P, Hierons R M. Do moods affect programmers’ debug performance? Cogn Technol Work, 2011, 13: 245–258

Meyer A N, Zimmermann T, Fritz T. Characterizing software developers by perceptions of productivity. In: Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2017. 105–110

Ralph P, Baltes S, Adisaputri G, et al. Pandemic programming: how COVID-19 affects software developers and how their organizations can help. 2020. ArXiv:2005.01127

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB1003904), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U20A20173, 61902344), and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. LY21F020011).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

Lingfeng Bao & Xiaohu Yang

Baidu Inc., Beijing, 100085, China

Tao Li, Kaiyu Zhu & Hui Li

Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xin Xia .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Bao, L., Li, T., Xia, X. et al. How does working from home affect developer productivity? — A case study of Baidu during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 65 , 142102 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3278-4

Download citation

Received : 18 December 2020

Revised : 10 March 2021

Accepted : 19 May 2021

Published : 14 March 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3278-4

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• developer productivity
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

• Balazs Aczel, 
• Marton Kovacs, 
• Tanja van der Lippe, 
• Barnabas Szaszi

• Published: March 25, 2021
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics’ efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level of personal experience. Using a convenient sampling, we surveyed 704 academics while working from home and found that the pandemic lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers but around a quarter of them were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on the gathered personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that in the future they would be similarly or more efficient than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data. Taking well-being also into account, 66% of them would find it ideal to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown. These results draw attention to how working from home is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to learn more about its influencer factors and coping tactics in order to optimize its arrangements.

Citation: Aczel B, Kovacs M, van der Lippe T, Szaszi B (2021) Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0249127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127

Editor: Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, The University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG

Received: September 24, 2020; Accepted: March 11, 2021; Published: March 25, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Aczel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All research materials, the collected raw and processed anonymous data, just as well the code for data management and statistical analyses are publicly shared on the OSF page of the project: OSF: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

Funding: TVL's contribution is part of the research program Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (SCOOP). She is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) for their support in the context of its 2017 Gravitation Program (grant number 024.003.025).

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Fleeing from the Great Plague that reached Cambridge in 1665, Newton retreated to his countryside home where he continued working for the next year and a half. During this time, he developed his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation—fundamentally changing the path of science for centuries. Newton himself described this period as the most productive time of his life [ 1 ]. Is working from home indeed the key to efficiency for scientists also in modern times? A solution for working without disturbance by colleagues and being able to manage a work-life balance? What personal and professional factors influence the relation between productivity and working from home? These are the main questions that the present paper aims to tackle. The Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to analyze the implications of working from home in great detail.

Working away from the traditional office is increasingly an option in today’s world. The phenomenon has been studied under numerous, partially overlapping terms, such as telecommuting, telework, virtual office, remote work, location independent working, home office. In this paper, we will use ‘working from home’ (WFH), a term that typically covers working from any location other than the dedicated area provided by the employer.

The practice of WFH and its effect on job efficiency and well-being are reasonably well explored outside of academia [ 2 , 3 ]. Internet access and the increase of personal IT infrastructure made WFH a growing trend throughout the last decades [ 4 ]. In 2015, over 12% of EU workers [ 5 ] and near one-quarter of US employees [ 6 ] worked at least partly from home. A recent survey conducted among 27,500 millennials and Gen Z-s indicated that their majority would like to work remotely more frequently [ 7 ]. The literature suggests that people working from home need flexibility for different reasons. Home-working is a typical solution for those who need to look after dependent children [ 8 ] but many employees just seek a better work-life balance [ 7 ] and the comfort of an alternative work environment [ 9 ].

Non-academic areas report work-efficiency benefits for WFH but they also show some downsides of this arrangement. A good example is the broad-scale experiment in which call center employees were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for nine months [ 10 ]. A 13% work performance increase was found in the working from home group. These workers also reported improved work satisfaction. Still, after the experiment, 50% of them preferred to go back to the office mainly because of feeling isolated at home.

Home-working has several straightforward positive aspects, such as not having to commute, easier management of household responsibilities [ 11 ] and family demands [ 12 ], along with increased autonomy over time use [ 13 , 14 ], and fewer interruptions [ 15 , 16 ]. Personal comfort is often listed as an advantage of the home environment [e.g., 15 ], though setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands [ 17 ]. People working from home consistently report greater job motivation and satisfaction [ 4 , 11 , 18 , 19 ] which is probably due to the greater work-related control and work-life flexibility [ 20 ]. A longitudinal nationally representative sample of 30,000 households in the UK revealed that homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction [ 21 ], suggesting that people working from home can allocate more time for leisure activities.

Often-mentioned negative aspects of WFH include being disconnected from co-workers, experiencing isolation due to the physical and social distance to team members [ 22 , 23 ]. Also, home-working employees reported more difficulties with switching off and they worked beyond their formal working hours [ 4 ]. Working from home is especially difficult for those with small children [ 24 ], but intrusion from other family members, neighbours, and friends were also found to be major challenges of WFH [e.g., 17 ]. Moreover, being away from the office may also create a lack of visibility and increases teleworkers’ fear that being out of sight limits opportunities for promotion, rewards, and positive performance reviews [ 25 ].

Importantly, increased freedom imposes higher demands on workers to control not just the environment, but themselves too. WFH comes with the need to develop work-life boundary control tactics [ 26 ] and to be skilled at self-discipline, self-motivation, and good time management [ 27 ]. Increased flexibility can easily lead to multitasking and work-family role blurring [ 28 ]. Table 1 provides non-comprehensive lists of mostly positive and mostly negative consequences of WFH, based on the literature reviewed here.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t001

Compared to the private sector, our knowledge is scarce about how academics experience working from home. Researchers in higher education institutes work in very similar arrangements. Typically, they are expected to personally attend their workplace, if not for teaching or supervision, then for meetings or to confer with colleagues. In the remaining worktime, they work in their lab or, if allowed, they may choose to do some of their tasks remotely. Along with the benefits on productivity when working from home, academics have already experienced some of its drawbacks at the start of the popularity of personal computers. As Snizek observed in the ‘80s, “(f)aculty who work long hours at home using their microcomputers indicate feelings of isolation and often lament the loss of collegial feedback and reinforcement” [page 622, 29 ].

Until now, the academics whose WFH experience had been given attention were mostly those participating in online distance education [e.g., 30 , 31 ]. They experienced increased autonomy, flexibility in workday schedule, the elimination of unwanted distractions [ 32 ], along with high levels of work productivity and satisfaction [ 33 ], but they also observed inadequate communication and the lack of opportunities for skill development [ 34 ]. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to study the WFH experience of a greater spectrum of academics, since at one point most of them had to do all their work from home.

We have only fragmented knowledge about the moderators of WFH success. We know that control over time is limited by the domestic tasks one has while working from home. The view that women’s work is more influenced by family obligations than men’s is consistently shown in the literature [e.g., 35 – 37 ]. Sullivan and Lewis [ 38 ] argued that women who work from home are able to fulfil their domestic role better and manage their family duties more to their satisfaction, but that comes at the expense of higher perceived work–family conflict [see also 39 ]. Not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, female scientists suffered a greater disruption than men in their academic productivity and time spent on research, most likely due to demands of childcare [ 40 , 41 ].

In summary, until recently, the effect of WFH on academics’ life and productivity received limited attention. However, during the recent pandemic lockdown, scientists, on an unprecedented scale, had to find solutions to continue their research from home. The situation unavoidably brought into focus the merits and challenges of WFH on a level of personal experience. Institutions were compelled to support WFH arrangements by adequate regulations, services, and infrastructure. Some researchers and institutions might have found benefits in the new arrangements and may wish to continue WFH in some form; for others WFH brought disproportionately larger challenges. The present study aims to facilitate the systematic exploration and support of researchers’ efficiency and work-life balance when working from home.

Materials and methods

Our study procedure and analysis plan were preregistered at https://osf.io/jg5bz (all deviations from the plan are listed in S1 File ). The survey included questions on research work efficiency, work-life balance, demographics, professional and personal background information. The study protocol has been approved by the Institutional Review Board from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary (approval number: 2020/131). The Transparency Report of the study, the complete text of the questionnaire items and the instructions are shared at our OSF repository: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

As the objective of this study was to gain insight about researchers’ experience of WFH, we aimed to increase the size and diversity of our sample rather than ascertaining the representativeness of our sample. Therefore, we distributed our online survey link among researchers in professional newsletters, university mailing lists, on social media, and by sending group-emails to authors (additional details about sampling are in S1 File ). As a result of the nature of our sampling strategy, it is not known how many researchers have seen our participation request. Additionally, we did not collect the country of residence of the respondents. Responses analyzed in this study were collected between 2020-04-24 and 2020-07-13. Overall, 858 individuals started the survey and 154 were excluded because they did not continue the survey beyond the first question. As a result, 704 respondents were included in the analysis.

We sent the questionnaire individually to each of the respondents through the Qualtrics Mailer service. Written informed consent and access to the preregistration of the research was provided to every respondent before starting the survey. Then, respondents who agreed to participate in the study could fill out the questionnaire. To encourage participation, we offered that upon completion they can enter a lottery to win a 100 USD voucher.

This is a general description of the survey items. The full survey with the display logic and exact phrasing of the items is transported from Qualtrics and uploaded to the projects’ OSF page: https://osf.io/8ze2g/ .

Efficiency of research work.

The respondents were asked to compare the efficiency of their research work during the lockdown to their work before the lockdown. They were also asked to use their present and previous experience to indicate whether working more from home in the future would change the efficiency of their research work compared to the time before the lockdown. For both questions, they could choose among three options: “less efficient”; “more efficient”, and “similarly efficient”.

Comparing working from home to working in the office.

Participants were asked to compare working from home to working from the office. For this question they could indicate their preference on a 7-point dimension (1: At home; 7: In the office), along 15 efficiency or well-being related aspects of research work (e.g., working on the manuscript, maintaining work-life balance). These aspects were collected in a pilot study conducted with 55 researchers who were asked to indicate in free text responses the areas in which their work benefits/suffers when working from home. More details of the pilot study are provided in S1 File .

Actual and ideal time spent working from home.

To study the actual and ideal time spent working from home, researcher were asked to indicate on a 0–100% scale (1) what percentage of their work time they spent working from home before the pandemic and (2) how much would be ideal for them working from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance.

Feasibility of working more from home.

With simple Yes/No options, we asked the respondents to indicate whether they think that working more from home would be feasible considering all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and the given circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance).

Background information.

Background questions were asked by providing preset lists concerning their academic position (e.g., full professor), area of research (e.g., social sciences), type of workplace (e.g., purely research institute), gender, age group, living situation (e.g., single-parent with non-adult child(ren)), and the age and the number of their children.

The respondents were also asked to select one of the offered options to indicate: whether or not they worked more from home during the coronavirus lockdown than before; whether it is possible for them to collect data remotely; whether they have education duties at work; if their research requires intensive team-work; whether their home office is fully equipped; whether their partner was also working from home during the pandemic; how far their office is from home; whether they had to do home-schooling during the pandemic; whether there was someone else looking after their child(ren) during their work from home in lockdown. When the question did not apply to them, they could select the ‘NA’ option as well.

Data preprocessing and analyses

All the data preprocessing and analyses were conducted in R [ 42 ], with the use of the tidyverse packages [ 43 ]. Before the analysis of the survey responses, we read all the free-text comments to ascertain that they do not contain personal information and they are in line with the respondent’s answers. We found that for 5 items the respondents’ comments contradicted their survey choices (e.g., whether they have children), therefore, we excluded the responses of the corresponding items from further analyses (see S1 File ). Following the preregistration, we only conducted descriptive statistics of the survey results.

Background information

The summary of the key demographic information of the 704 complete responses is presented in Table 2 . A full summary of all the collected background information of the respondents are available in S1 File .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t002

Efficiency of research work

The results showed that 94% (n = 662) of the surveyed researchers worked more from home during the COVID-19 lockdown compared to the time before. Of these researchers, 47% found that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 23% found it more efficient, and 30% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Within this database, we also explored the effect of the lockdown on the efficiency of people living with children (n = 290). Here, we found that 58% of them experienced that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 20% found it more efficient, and 22% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Of those researchers who live with children, we found that 71% of the 21 single parents and 57% of the 269 partnered parents found working less efficient when working from home compared to the time before the lockdown.

When asking about how working more from home would affect the efficiency of their research after the lockdown, of those who have not already been working from home full time (n = 684), 29% assumed that it could make their research, in general, less efficient, 29% said that it would be more efficient, and 41% assumed no difference compared to the time before the lockdown ( Fig 1 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g001

Focusing on the efficiency of the subgroup of people who live with children (n = 295), we found that for 32% their research work would be less efficient, for 30% it would be no different, and for 38% it would be more efficient to work from home after the lockdown, compared to the time before the lockdown.

Comparing working from home to working in the office

When comparing working from home to working in the office in general, people found that they can better achieve certain aspects of the research in one place than the other. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data ( Fig 2 ).

The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g002

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

We also asked the researchers how much of their work time they spent working from home in the past, and how much it would be ideal for them to work from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and well-being. Fig 3 shows the distribution of percentages of time working from home in the past and in an ideal future. Comparing these values for each researcher, we found that 66% of them want to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown, whereas 16% of them want to work less from home, and 18% of them want to spend the same percentage of their work time at home in the future as before. (These latter calculations were not preregistered).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g003

Feasibility of working more from home

Taken all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and provided circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance), of researchers who would like to work more from home in the future (n = 461), 86% think that it would be possible to do so. Even among those who have teaching duties at work (n = 376), 84% think that more working from home would be ideal and possible.

Researchers’ work and life have radically changed in recent times. The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology and the continuous access to the internet disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary. Where, when, and how we work depends more and more on our own arrangements. The recent pandemic only highlighted an already existing task: researchers’ worklife has to be redefined. The key challenge in a new work-life model is to find strategies to balance the demands of work and personal life. As a first step, the present paper explored how working from home affects researchers’ efficiency and well-being.

Our results showed that while the pandemic-related lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers (47%), around a quarter (23%) of them experienced that they were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that after the lockdown they would be similarly (41%) or more efficient (29%) than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. The remaining 30% thought that after the lockdown their work efficiency would decrease if they worked from home, which is noticeably lower than the 47% who claimed the same for the lockdown period. From these values we speculate that some of the obstacles of their work efficiency were specific to the pandemic lockdown. Such obstacles could have been the need to learn new methods to teach online [ 44 ] or the trouble adapting to the new lifestyle [ 45 ]. Furthermore, we found that working from the office and working from home support different aspects of research. Not surprisingly, activities that involve colleagues or team members are better bound to the office, but tasks that need focused attention, such as working on the manuscript or analyzing the data are better achieved from home.

A central motivation of our study was to explore what proportion of their worktime researchers would find ideal to work from home, concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance. Two thirds of the researchers indicated that it would be better to work more from home in the future. It seemed that sharing work somewhat equally between the two venues is the most preferred arrangement. A great majority (86%) of those who would like to work more from home in the future, think that it would be possible to do so. As a conclusion, both the work and non-work life of researchers would take benefits should more WFH be allowed and neither workplace duties, nor their domestic circumstances are limits of such a change. That researchers have a preference to work more from home, might be due to the fact that they are more and more pressured by their work. Finishing manuscripts, and reading literature is easier to find time for when working from home.

A main message of the results of our present survey is that although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency during the lockdown, the majority of them would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. It is important to stress, however, that working from home is not equally advantageous for researchers. Several external and personal factors must play a role in researchers’ work efficiency and work-life balance. In this analysis, we concentrated only on family status, but further dedicated studies will be required to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interaction of professional, institutional, personal, and domestic factors in this matter. While our study could only initiate the exploration of academics’ WFH benefits and challenges, we can already discuss a few relevant aspects regarding the work-life interface.

Our data show that researchers who live with dependent children can exploit the advantages of working from home less than those who do not have childcare duties, irrespective of the pandemic lockdown. Looking after children is clearly a main source of people’s task overload and, as a result, work-family conflict [ 46 , 47 ]. As an implication, employers should pay special respect to employees’ childcare situations when defining work arrangements. It should be clear, however, that other caring responsibilities should also be respected such as looking after elderly or disabled relatives [ 48 ]. Furthermore, to avoid equating non-work life with family-life, a broader diversity of life circumstances, such as those who live alone, should be taken into consideration [ 49 ].

It seems likely that after the pandemic significantly more work will be supplied from home [ 50 ]. The more of the researchers’ work will be done from home in the future, the greater the challenge will grow to integrate their work and non-work life. The extensive research on work-life conflict, should help us examine the issue and to develop coping strategies applicable for academics’ life. The Boundary Theory [ 26 , 51 , 52 ] proved to be a useful framework to understand the work-home interface. According to this theory, individuals utilize different tactics to create and maintain an ideal level of work-home segmentation. These boundaries often serve as “mental fences” to simplify the environment into domains, such as work or home, to help us attend our roles, such as being an employee or a parent. These boundaries are more or less permeable, depending on how much the individual attending one role can be influenced by another role. Individuals differ in the degree to which they prefer and are able to segment their roles, but each boundary crossing requires a cognitive “leap” between these categories [ 53 ]. The source of conflict is the demands of the different roles and responsibilities competing for one’s physical and mental resources. Working from home can easily blur the boundary between work and non-work domains. The conflict caused by the intrusion of the home world to one’s work time, just as well the intrusion of work tasks to one’s personal life are definite sources of weakened ability to concentrate on one’s tasks [ 54 ], exhaustion [ 55 ], and negative job satisfaction [ 56 ].

What can researchers do to mitigate this challenge? Various tactics have been identified for controlling one’s borders between work and non-work. One can separate the two domains by temporal, physical, behavioral, and communicative segmentation [ 26 ]. Professionals often have preferences and self-developed tactics for boundary management. People who prefer tighter boundary management apply strong segmentation between work and home [ 57 , 58 ]. For instance, they don’t do domestic tasks in worktime (temporal segmentation), close their door when working from home (physical segmentation), don’t read work emails at weekends (behavioral segmentation), or negotiate strict boundary rules with family members (communicative segmentation). People on the other on one side of the segmentation-integration continuum, might not mind, or cannot avoid, ad-hoc boundary-crossings and integrate the two domains by letting private space and time be mixed with their work.

Researchers, just like other workers, need to develop new arrangements and skills to cope with the disintegration of the traditional work-life boundaries. To know how research and education institutes could best support this change would require a comprehensive exploration of the factors in researchers’ WFH life. There is probably no one-size-fits-all approach to promote employees’ efficiency and well-being. Life circumstances often limit how much control people can have over their work-life boundaries when working from home [ 59 ]. Our results strongly indicate that some can boost work efficiency and wellbeing when working from home, others need external solutions, such as the office, to provide boundaries between their life domains. Until we gain comprehensive insight about the topic, individuals are probably the best judges of their own situation and of what arrangements may be beneficial for them in different times [ 60 ]. The more autonomy the employers provide to researchers in distributing their work between the office and home (while not lowering their expectations), the more they let them optimize this arrangement to their circumstances.

Our study has several limitations: to investigate how factors such as research domain, seniority, or geographic location contribute to WFH efficiency and well-being would have needed a much greater sample. Moreover, the country of residence of the respondents was not collected in our survey and this factor could potentially alter the perception of WFH due to differing social and infrastructural factors. Whereas the world-wide lockdown has provided a general experience to WFH to academics, the special circumstances just as well biased their judgment of the arrangement. With this exploratory research, we could only scratch the surface of the topic, the reader can probably generate a number of testable hypotheses that would be relevant to the topic but we could not analyze in this exploration.

Newton working in lockdown became the idealized image of the home-working scientist. Unquestionably, he was a genius, but his success probably needed a fortunate work-life boundary. Should he had noisy neighbours, or taunting domestic duties, he might have achieved much less while working from home. With this paper, we aim to draw attention to how WFH is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to be prepared for this change. We hope that personal experience or the topic’s relevance to the future of science will invite researchers to continue this work.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.

• View Article
• Google Scholar
• 5. Parent-Thirion A, Biletta I, Cabrita J, Vargas O, Vermeylen G, Wilczynska A, et al. Sixth European working conditions survey: Overview report. Eurofound (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working …; 2016.
• 6. US Department of Labor B of LS. American time use survey—2015 results. 2016;
• 7. Deloitte. The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020: Millennials and Gen Zs hold the key to creating a “better normal” [Internet]. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu; 2020 [cited 2020 Jul 5]. https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/millennialsurvey.html
• PubMed/NCBI
• 23. Pinsonneault A, Boisvert M. The impacts of telecommuting on organizations and individuals: A review of the literature. In: Telecommuting and virtual offices: Issues and opportunities. IGI Global; 2001. p. 163–85.
• 40. Frederickson M. COVID-19’s gendered impact on academic productivity [Internet]. GitHub. 2020 [cited 2020 Jul 15]. https://github.com/drfreder/pandemic-pub-bias
• 50. Barrero JM, Bloom N, Davis SJ. Why Working From Home Will Stick. Univ Chic Becker Friedman Inst Econ Work Pap. 2020;(2020–174).
• 53. Zerubavel E. The fine line. University of Chicago Press; 1993.
• 58. Nippert-Eng C. Calendars and keys: The classification of “home” and “work”. In: Sociological Forum. Springer; 1996. p. 563–82.

Two court cases about working from home. Two startling decisions

It's not just one room that's the workplace.

Technology has eroded the separation between work and, well, life.

ZDNET Recommends

The best video conferencing software.

Which video conferencing platform is right for your business? We've gathered details about 10 leading services.

Working from home has, for many, created a situation where, thanks to computers, wifi and Zoom, work has entirely taken over life.

Many employers, of course, haven't minded this at all. Think of all the money they've saved on office space. Think of the long hours people are now working  as they toil in the confines of their bedrooms, living rooms, or tiny home offices.

But have you ever thought about what happens when, say, an accident occurs? At home. While you're working at home.

I've been moved by two recent legal cases that have mined the realities of your home being your office.

In Germany, a man got out of bed and walked down a spiral staircase toward his home office. He slipped and broke his back.

His employer's insurance company declined to honor his claim for compensation.

Yet, as the Guardian reported , a court declared that the man was technically commuting, so he could claim workplace accident insurance. This, it concluded, was his first trip that day from the "home" of his bed to his office. Ergo, a commute.

The court added: "If the insured activity is carried out in the household of the insured person or at another location, insurance cover is provided to the same extent as when the activity is carried out at the company premises."

You might think this would make one or two employers around the world take notice and not, perhaps, consider themselves so very lucky to have their employees in their own homes, with their own insurance policies.

But then, another court case.

An Air Canada employee worked her call center job from home, as so many call center employees have been forced to over the last two years.

While at home, and during office hours, she, too, slipped down the stairs and sustained injuries.

The airline didn't believe she qualified for workers' compensation.

The Vancouver Sun related the judge's words like this: "Air Canada argues that this fall on the stairs did not occur during work, since Ms. Gentile-Patti was no longer in her professional sphere, but rather in her personal sphere, because the fall occurs as she heads out to eat."

That hurts. Yes, you're working from home. But if you're going downstairs to get lunch, you're off the clock and not at work?

The judge wasn't moved by the airline's attempt to suggest that only the home office counts as a place of work. He added that the only reason Gentile-Patti was going down the stairs at the time she did was to take the lunchtime designated by her employer.

In the judge's words: "Ms. Gentile-Patti's fall, which occurred moments after disconnecting from her workstation to go to dinner, is an unforeseen and sudden event that occurs during work. She therefore suffered an occupational injury."

I'm sure lawyers all over the world will pore over the nuances and debate the legalities and limitations with verve.

I prefer to focus on a more human notion. At least some courts are beginning to recognize that employers can't take all the advantages of having their employees work from home, without accepting responsibility for some of the disadvantages.

I can only wonder how many more cases will be brought, in which the blurring of workplace and home will be tested.

Surely one or two might just cover employers' new remote surveillance software .

How AI can rescue IT pros from job burnout and alert fatigue

How a new law protects your thoughts from tech companies – and why it matters, the best travel vpns: expert tested.

• Client Services
• Small Business

WFH Case Study: A Closer Look At Working Remote

By: amanda young.

Work From Home Case Study:  50% of the US workforce is employed with a job that is compatible with at least partial telework. 

80% to 90% of the US workforce says they would like to work remotely at least part time (2-3 days a week).

Fortune 1000 companies around the globe are entirely reinventing their workspace around the fact that employees are already working remotely. studies have shown that these employees are not at their desk 50-60% of the time..

Moving a company to work completely remote is financially and mentally unburdening. Here are the pros and cons of ditching an HQ:

Pros: Work From Home

• Increased productivity
• Flexible hours
• Time saving
• Money saving
• Increased talent pool

Con: Work From Home

• Less collaboration
• Harder to climb the company ladder
• Cyber security  
• Possible communication difficulties
• Lack of discipline

Some amazing companies at scale with no HQ: 

Automattic .

At Automattic employees get to pick their place of work.  In fact, the company is spread out across 70 countries.  To give employees a chance to meet in person, Automattic holds an event for a whole week for employees to meet up. This meeting lets employees meet in their teams to brainstorm and bond. Automattic provides employees parental leave, career coaching, an open vacation policy, paid-for home office setup, wellness opportunities, and other perks. 

GitLab in San Francisco 

GitLab hires employees all over the world rather than hire employees to work all from one location. 

For the past 10 years, Clevertech has been allowing employees to work from anywhere in the world. Clevertech works to make their employees feel like they have a purpose while also encouraging employees to meet one unifying goal. Clevertech believes in flexible work spaces; flexible work time; not judging employees on how long it takes to do something, but rather the actual results; and building a strong international community.

43% of remote workers feel that it is important to work for a company where all employees are remote

38% of remote workers saw lack of commute as a top benefit, with that time instead spent with family (43%), working (35%), resting (36%), and exercising (34%)

86% of respondents believe remote work is the future

52% of remote workers believed they have increased their productivity and 48% believe that they have increased efficiency. 

Chris has led brand campaigns across creative and technical landscapes for British Telecommunications & Toni & Guy.

He’s helped build creative agencies from the ground up with to his universal design acumen and ability to manage creative talent!

At J. Arthur & Co, he is a key pillar to our team due to his innate ability to connect brand vision with user interface/experience concepts, finished with stellar execution.

When things need to happen behind the scenes — He’s our guy.

Having started his career in finance, Tom has been working in Ecom going on 5 years now.

Although he changed industries, he really values his time in finance picking up a lot of valuable and transferable skills.

Tom’s passion is the customers and the relationships he’s built with them over the years.

He’s been extremely effective for us in balancing many tasks, strategic planning, logistics management and always coming up with ways to thrill customers.

Having studied Music Production & Music Business at Point Blank Music School in London, when he’s not working hard, Tom runs a small record label with a group friends.

“Be it expediting orders, overseeing our ambassadors program, or assisting with marketing needs, I’m a jack of all trades (master of none).

My ethos has always been to keep things fun & light hearted, but professional at the heart of it.

You’ll even sometimes catch me in the gym…

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

What’s up guys, I’m Jeff and I started this shop in 2014 out of my bedroom.

I had moved into an apt with a buddy, lived on $200/mo rent and got going.

You had to walk through my room to get to the kitchen and that room became sort of a hybrid br/office.

It took me a couple failed ideas before gaining traction with J. Arthur and for a period of almost two years I slept on a couch to get the company off the ground.

First in that room and then the back of our first (real) office. Both times a couch.

I love delivering results for clients, working with our team here and growing this co (obviously), which now has a humble but global base of both team and customers.

We have just barely started and I know the sky is the limit.

Admittedly I don’t have that many hobbies, But I enjoy all types of physical training and you can usually catch me doing things like: expounding on the pitfalls of fractional reserve banking, discussing the standards of American liberty, or eating unreasonable quantities of food.

I also like to read.

Love spending time with family.

Thanks to Lensa for tightening up my hairline in exchange for my facial dna in some Orwellian database 🙂

Jo has worked in the advertising and design industry since 2015 and has over 8 years of experience with visual communication and design.

Product is her passion with a deep focus in sportswear design and creative direction.

Her key expertise combines many years in both retail and manufacturing with a proactive vision of creating new products and driving them successfully to market.

“I believe in keeping things simple, having honest intentions, and making things fun. Working in an ego-less manner, I bring my whole self to every project, always aiming to exceed expectations and create work that is well thought through and commercially compelling.”

And exceeding expectations she does. We’re very lucky to have Jo’s rare combination of marketing creative, outstanding product design, ambitious strategy and true dedication to her craft.

In Joanna’s free time her hobbies include yoga & aerial fitness, functional training at the gym and occasionally snowboarding.

You can catch much more of her branding magic at @physiqapparel 💪

Aish graduated with a bachelor of engineering in computer science, freelancing for several years before joining J. Arthur as a Junior Web Developer. She’s now been with the company for 3 years.

Aish has the intangible qualities that make a fantastic developer: the desire for continual learning, a “whatever it takes” mentality, and an intense focus on the (ever-changing) task at hand.

She meets every obstacle with optimism and has grown to become a core member of our team who we’re all grateful to work alongside everyday.

In her off time she likes to get outside and go for a much needed walk. She also loves reading books + daily news to learn something new every day. And of course, watching movies 🍿

Shortly after getting a marketing degree from Clemson University, Denton amassed a large following on Twitter after creating several viral, funny tweets that touched on everything from pop culture to music and sports 📲

Realizing he had a knack for creative writing and social media, he decided to continue developing his talents even further.

As a content manager at J. Arthur, he’s has been able to show off his creativity and bring unique ideas to the table.

He’s currently based in Raleigh, NC with his fiancé and their two cats (Nova & Bean).

In his free time you’ll find him playing tennis, listening to music, or knee deep in a good book.

We appreciate his creative adaptability, consistency & steadfast commitment to deliver success on every account.

Dhan is a multidisciplinary solution architect who helps people translate ideas from words and visuals into prototypes and applications, using code that helps organizations address business challenges.

He motivates people to think positively through the power of technology by helping solve a large number of critical situations quickly.

Having been involved in both collaborative and independently-driven roles, he is a forward-thinking leader with refined analytical and critical thinking skills, with deep experience in translating business priorities to IT roadmaps and fine-tuned IT Operating models.

In his spare time, he enjoys traveling playing (and building) video games, watching movies and listening to music.

Dhan is responsible for making our critical IT and technology decisions and has been with J. Arthur for 5 years and we greatly value his leadership.

He’s a grandmaster in complex problem solving, rapid analysis and delivery, high level infrastructure planning, and full stack engineering.

His character is proven time and again by always working in our clients best interests and never failing to deliver a solution to even the most brain busting and urgent issues, with a coolness and poise to be admired 🙌

He studied Computer Science in Brazil before coming to the States four years ago and now works out of our Newport office.

If you’re a J. Arthur client you’ve probably been in contact before, as he works directly with the team and clients to bring projects to completion.

But if you’re within his close friends, you probably know him for playing (very loud) guitar!

Paulo is responsible for tracking an often high paced workflow between project management, design, development and vendors to ensure successful delivery to customers.

We admire his patience, agile ability to learn new skills, and laser focused commitment to problem solving 👏

Based in Chicago, she loves work from home days alongside her furry co-workers. Ralphie likes his personal space, but Murray prefers to sit on mom’s keyboard to help with important emails – and he never misses a team meeting.

What keeps her motivated throughout the day? A combination of matcha lattes, espresso, and Liquid IV (often consuming all of them at the same time).

Outside of work, Hannah likes to unwind with yoga, check out local coffee shops, and spend time outside in the sunshine.

We value her outstanding communication, marketing savvy, ability to bring positivity to every situation and too many other traits to list 🙌

• We'll send you examples of some full stack solutions we're delivering for clients.

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Case Study: Can a Work-at-Home Policy Hurt Morale?

• Sangeeta Shah Bharadwaj

A manager must decide whether an experimental program is growing too fast.

Amrita Trivedi couldn’t help overhearing the heated argument outside her office door. As general manager of the Noida, India, office of KGDV, a global knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) company, she had always encouraged healthy debate on her team, but she was surprised that her head of human resources, Vijay Nayak, and her top project manager, Matt Parker, were going at it in the hallway.

• Sangeeta Shah Bharadwaj is a professor of information management at the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon, India.

Partner Center

Advertisement

Supported by

Hot Oceans Worsened Dubai’s Dramatic Flooding, Scientists Say

An international team of researchers found that heavy rains had intensified in the region, though they couldn’t say for sure how much climate change was responsible.

• Share full article

By Raymond Zhong

Scenes of flood-ravaged neighborhoods in one of the planet’s driest regions stunned the world this month. Heavy rains in the United Arab Emirates and Oman submerged cars, clogged highways and killed at least 21 people. Flights out of Dubai’s airport, a major global hub, were severely disrupted.

The downpours weren’t a total surprise — forecasters had anticipated the storms several days earlier and issued warnings. But they were certainly unusual.

Here’s what to know.

Heavy rain there is rare, but not unheard-of.

On average, the Arabian Peninsula receives a scant few inches of rain a year, although scientists have found that a sizable chunk of that precipitation falls in infrequent but severe bursts, not as periodic showers. These rains often come during El Niño conditions like the ones the world is experiencing now.

U.A.E. officials said the 24-hour rain total on April 16 was the country’s largest since records there began in 1949 . And parts of the nation had already experienced an earlier round of thunderstorms in March.

Oman, with its coastline on the Arabian Sea, is also vulnerable to tropical cyclones. Past storms there have brought torrential rain, powerful winds and mudslides, causing extensive damage.

Global warming is projected to intensify downpours.

Stronger storms are a key consequence of human-caused global warming. As the atmosphere gets hotter, it can hold more moisture, which can eventually make its way down to the earth as rain or snow.

But that doesn’t mean rainfall patterns are changing in precisely the same way across every part of the globe.

In their latest assessment of climate research , scientists convened by the United Nations found there wasn’t enough data to have firm conclusions about rainfall trends in the Arabian Peninsula and how climate change was affecting them. The researchers said, however, that if global warming were to be allowed to continue worsening in the coming decades, extreme downpours in the region would quite likely become more intense and more frequent.

Hot oceans are a big factor.

An international team of scientists has made a first attempt at estimating the extent to which climate change may have contributed to April’s storms. The researchers didn’t manage to pin down the connection precisely, though in their analysis, they did highlight one known driver of heavy rain in the region: above-normal ocean temperatures.

Large parts of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have been hotter than usual recently, in part because of El Niño and other natural weather cycles, and in part because of human-induced warming .

When looking only at El Niño years, the scientists estimated that storm events as infrequent as this month’s delivered 10 percent to 40 percent more rain to the region than they would in a world that hadn’t been warmed by human activities. They cautioned, however, that these estimates were highly uncertain.

“Rainfall, in general, is getting more extreme,” said Mansour Almazroui, a climate scientist at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and one of the researchers who contributed to the analysis.

The analysis was conducted by scientists affiliated with World Weather Attribution, a research collaboration that studies extreme weather events shortly after they occur. Their findings about this month’s rains haven’t yet been peer reviewed, but are based on standardized methods .

The role of cloud seeding isn’t clear.

The U.A.E. has for decades worked to increase rainfall and boost water supplies by seeding clouds. Essentially, this involves shooting particles into clouds to encourage the moisture to gather into larger, heavier droplets, ones that are more likely to fall as rain or snow.

Cloud seeding and other rain-enhancement methods have been tried around the world, including in Australia, China, India, Israel, South Africa and the United States. Studies have found that these operations can, at best, affect precipitation modestly — enough to turn a downpour into a bigger downpour, but probably not a drizzle into a deluge.

Still, experts said pinning down how much seeding might have contributed to this month’s storms would require detailed study.

“In general, it is quite a challenge to assess the impact of seeding,” said Luca Delle Monache, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Dr. Delle Monache has been leading efforts to use artificial intelligence to improve the U.A.E.’s rain-enhancement program.

An official with the U.A.E.’s National Center of Meteorology, Omar Al Yazeedi, told news outlets that the agency didn’t conduct any seeding during the latest storms. His statements didn’t make clear, however, whether that was also true in the hours or days before.

Mr. Al Yazeedi didn’t respond to emailed questions from The New York Times, and Adel Kamal, a spokesman for the center, didn’t have further comment.

Cities in dry places just aren’t designed for floods.

Wherever it happens, flooding isn’t just a matter of how much rain comes down. It’s also about what happens to all that water once it’s on the ground — most critically, in the places people live.

Cities in arid regions often aren’t designed to drain very effectively. In these areas, paved surfaces block rain from seeping into the earth below, forcing it into drainage systems that can easily become overwhelmed.

One recent study of Sharjah , the capital of the third-largest emirate in the U.A.E., found that the city’s rapid growth over the past half-century had made it vulnerable to flooding at far lower levels of rain than before.

Omnia Al Desoukie contributed reporting.

Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. More about Raymond Zhong