The latest headlines regarding return to office are contradictory. “One will say that being in the office full time will make your workers more productive, and then the next day you might see one that says being hybrid or fully remote will make your workers more productive. What is the actual answer?” asked moderator Katherine Bindley, technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference.

As more large employers enforce a return to office, the foremost expert on remote work, Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University, shared insights on what the latest research shows about productivity, employee engagement, and other factors that companies need to take into account when developing their policies. For employers insisting on RTO, what can they do to make the arrangement more effective? And for those offering flexible arrangements, what approaches provide the best results?

We all want to know: which is the more effective strategy, RTO (return to office) or WFH (work from home)? “It really depends on the task,” Bloom said. Certain duties like call center work benefit from the quiet of home. Generally, Bloom and his student researchers have found that a hybrid model is optimal.

A recent two-year study on the company Trip.com did an A/B test of their workers, with half working from home two days per week and the other half in the office full time. The study showed no demonstrable effect on performance.

“[In interviews] they’d say there’s a huge benefit of coming into the office. It’s great for mentoring, it’s better for innovation, it’s better for building culture,” Bloom said. “But by the time you’ve gone three days a week in the office, it’s not obvious that days four and five are useful.”

In fact, spending the other two days at home allowed for deep work and an additional 90-minutes of working time. And the employees who were allowed to work part-time from home were 35% less likely to quit. “The Trip.com CEO and the board said this is massively profitable, because every person that quits costs us something like $30,000  to $50,000,” Bloom said. 

It can be hard to measure performance among certain professions–even more so when employees are working from home and you can’t physically see or hear what they are doing, says Bloom. But it’s crucial for employers to figure out how to gauge results to allow employees this highly sought-after benefit. “Make sure you have good performance evaluations,” Bloom said, suggesting complex metrics and sliding scales based on each role.

How to Enforce RTO

Bloom cautions against using RTO as a method of downsizing, referring to Amazon and even DOGE as guilty of versions of this, essentially making work so uncomfortable through RTO and other mandates that people quit. 

But organizations that do really need a full RTO need to roll it out in a way that is both enforceable and attractive. Companies that announce RTO, he says, see an uptick in “card swipes and Wi-Fi logins” at the office at first, but after the initial mandate, compliance starts to slip. Buy-in from managers is key, as they set the tone for their teams. “What’s happening is this very weak enforcement. In order to enforce, you have to have a strong mandate and incentives,” he said. 

Bindley also notes the importance of having the actual space to bring back workers, especially after so many companies downsized their spaces during the pandemic. “You have to have enough desks,” she said. 

Despite headlines over the last year touting the full RTO of major corporations like J.P. Morgan Chase and Amazon, Bloom says, the RTO trend seems to have already passed. Citing a recent study of more than 1,000 companies, he said “we asked them about their return to office plans, looking ahead a year, and 85% of them said they have no plans to change.”

“The big data I’ve seen suggests there is not a major return to the office. I don’t think there’s going to be much major change outside of the government sector,” said Bloom. 

Some companies have been tying bonuses to office attendance to incentivize employees to come in, which Bloom finds ineffective. “There are only so many dollars you can give [an employee] for a bonus,” he said. “If you start to take away some of that from performance and put it onto days in the office, you’re just giving her less bonus for performance. You’re basically saying, as a business to a manager, ‘We care less about performance.’”

The Best Model of Hybrid 

With hybrid schedules, it can be hard to coordinate workers, Bindley says. You don’t want a situation where people head to the office just to be on Zoom with colleagues at home. “The most common model is three days in the office: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,” Bloom said. 

“There’s no exact science on which days, but you want to coordinate two or three days.” People still work on Fridays, but most do it from home, Bloom says. In fact, the London Underground has even made Friday an off-peak travel day due to the change in workstyles.

And with coordination must come enforcement. “There’s an old Roman saying that a good law is an easy to enforce law,” Bloom said. Allowing employees to work from home means “treating employees more like an adult,” Bloom said. It means you trust them, knowing that even though they might be technically working fewer hours as they pick up their kids or go to the dentist, they will still make it up on the other end to get everything done. Workers end up less stressed, and more personally and professionally productive, when they are trusted to manage their own time. 

Looking ahead, WFH is the way of the future, Bloom says. And we’ve been moving toward it for years, with the advent of personal computers in the 1980s, inexpensive Wi-Fi phone calls in the 2000s, and the like. Innovations like Google’s Starliner project and other technological advances will make remote work that much easier.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s what the next generation wants. “If you look at the people that are against working from home, they tend to be 50 plus. As time goes on, those folks tend to drift out,” Bloom said. “If you look at leaders in [their 30s-40s], they’re much more balanced on this. Those folks, in 10 years, are going to be the CEOs of the future.” 

Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

(Photos by David Coe for From Day One)