DeepSummary
The podcast episode features an interview with Jose Maria Barrero, an economist who has studied the productivity impacts of remote and hybrid work models. He discusses research showing that full-time remote work can lead to a productivity decrease of up to 10% for certain jobs due to communication challenges and difficulties with collaboration and idea generation when not in-person.
Barrero highlights that hybrid work models, where employees come into the office a few days a week, can help mitigate these productivity losses while still offering the benefits of remote work like eliminating commutes. He emphasizes the importance of designing hybrid schedules thoughtfully, with entire teams coming in on the same days to enable in-person collaboration.
While productivity impacts are mixed, Barrero argues that offering remote or hybrid options is important for employee satisfaction and retention, as surveys show workers want more flexibility than many employers plan to give. He believes the pandemic helped overcome the stigma around remote work and opened companies' eyes to its potential benefits.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Full-time remote work may decrease productivity by up to 10% for some jobs due to communication and collaboration challenges.
- Hybrid schedules with teams coming into the office on the same days can help balance productivity needs with employee flexibility desires.
- Simply allowing ad-hoc hybrid schedules is unlikely to be effective - organizations need structured hybrid policies.
- Offering remote/hybrid options is important for employee satisfaction and talent retention in a competitive job market.
- The pandemic normalized and destigmatized remote work by showing it could be productive for many roles.
- Measuring productivity for knowledge workers is very difficult, contributing to debates around remote work impacts.
- While productivity effects are mixed, employee preference for flexibility is a key driver of hybrid adoption.
- Intentional workforce management is required to make hybrid models successful for both employees and employers.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Okay, so measuring productivity for many of the people who can work from home is very, very hard knowledge jobs like consulting, like lawyers, like engineers, and kind of measuring the productivity of these sorts of workers is extremely hard. So I think that's a big part of why there's a huge debate in this literature.“ by Jose Maria Barrero
- “I think for the sorts of jobs where you can measure this accurately, it's anywhere up to a negative 10% effect on productivity.“ by Jose Maria Barrero
- “And basically the facts that we see is that people really like working from home. It seems to work reasonably well in many jobs, in particular for knowledge jobs that college graduates have, and you can do a little bit of the best of both worlds.“ by Jose Maria Barrero
- “They need to think about this and design a hybrid and manage a hybrid workforce kind of in a more deliberate way.“ by Jose Maria Barrero
- “The pandemic sort of broke that equilibrium, kind of. It reduced the stigma associated with working from home significantly, and in the process, probably taught us that working from home is actually more productive than we expect.“ by Jose Maria Barrero
Entities
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Episode Information
Planet Money
NPR
12/19/23
This episode was first published as a bonus episode for our Planet Money+ listeners. Today, we're making it available for everyone!
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