These cookies are essential to enable the services to provide the requested feature, such as remembering you have logged in.
Confirm My Selections
Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t your typical office worker. He was No. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. But there’s at least one thing Zuckerberg has in common with many other workers: he seems to like working from home. In an internal memo, which made its way to the Wall Street Journal , as Facebook announced plans to offer increased flexibility to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he would work remotely for at least half the year.
“Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” Zuckerberg wrote. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebook’s employees to be fully remote within the next decade.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage in many countries, and variants are complicating the picture, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, people are desperate for life to return to normal—everywhere but the office. After more than a year at home, some employees are keen to return to their workplaces and colleagues. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Somewhere between their bedrooms and kitchens, they have established new models of work-life balance they are loath to give up.
This has left some companies trying to recreate their work policies, determining how best to handle a workforce that in many cases is demanding more flexibility. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Goldman’s CEO David Solomon, in February, called working from home an “aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.” And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said of exclusively remote work: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”
This pivotal feature of pandemic life has accelerated a long-running debate: What do employers and employees lose and gain through remote work? In which setting—the office or the home—are employees more productive? Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. But this giant, forced experiment has only just begun.
A persistent sticking point in this debate has been productivity. Back in 2001, a group of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, led by Robert E. Kraut , wrote that “collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than collaboration when members of a work group are collocated.” Two decades later, this statement remains part of today’s discussion.
However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that “dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration.” For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.
Two decades later, remote-work technology is far more developed. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that, even in pre-pandemic 2019, more than 26 million Americans—approximately 16 percent of the total US workforce—worked remotely on an average day. The Pew Research Center put that pre-pandemic number at 20 percent, and in December 2020 reported that 71 percent of workers whose responsibilities allowed them to work from home were doing so all or most of the time.
The sentiment toward and effectiveness of remote work depend on the industry involved. It makes sense that executives working in and promoting social media are comfortable connecting with others online, while those in industries in which deals are typically closed with handshakes in a conference room, or over drinks at dinner, don’t necessarily feel the same. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a person’s line of work.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom was bullish on work-from-home trends. His 2015 study, for one—with James Liang , John Roberts , and Zhichun Jenny Ying , all then at Stanford—finds a 13 percent increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency.
But in the early days of the pandemic, Bloom was less optimistic about remote work. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom told a Stanford publication in March 2020. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”
To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis launched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 20–64 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019.
Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.
The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com .
In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7 percent higher than they expected. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy.
“Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted,” Bloom says.
Some workers arguing in favor of flexibility might say they’re more efficient at home away from chatty colleagues and the other distractions of an office, and that may be true. But above all, the increased productivity comes from saving transit time, an effect overlooked by standard productivity calculations. “Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time,” Davis says. Eliminate commuting as a factor, and the researchers project only a 1 percent productivity boost in the postpandemic work-from-home environment, as compared with before.
It makes sense that standard statistics miss the impact of commutes, Davis explains. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesn’t shift significantly in the aggregate. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity.
Before the pandemic, US workers were commuting an average of 54 minutes daily, according to Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. In the aggregate, the researchers say, the pandemic-induced shift to remote work meant 62.5 million fewer commuting hours per workday.
People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.
With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom , and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis . The researchers launched a survey of US workers, starting in May 2020 and continuing in waves for more than a year since, to capture a range of information including workers’ attitudes about their new remote arrangements.
Read more >>
Aside from commuting less, remote workers may also be sleeping more efficiently, another phenomenon that could feed into productivity. On days they worked remotely, people rose about 30 minutes later than on-site workers did, according to pre-pandemic research by Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and SUNY Empire’s Victoria Vernon . Both groups worked the same number of hours and slept about the same amount each night, so it’s most likely that “working from home permits a more comfortable personal sleep schedule,” says Vernon. “Teleworkers who spend less time commuting may be happier and less tired, and therefore more productive,” write the researchers, who analyzed BLS data from 2017 to 2018.
While remote employees gained back commuting time during the pandemic, they also worked fewer hours, note Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. Hours on the job averaged about 32 per week, compared with 36 pre-pandemic, although the work time stretched past traditional office hours. “Respondents may devote a few more minutes in the morning to chores and childcare, while still devoting about a third of their old commuting time slot to their primary job. At the end of the day, they might end somewhat early and turn on the TV. They might interrupt TV time to respond to a late afternoon or early evening work request,” the researchers explain.
This interpretation, they write, is consistent with media reports that employees worked longer hours from home during the pandemic but with the added flexibility to interrupt the working day. Yet, according to the survey, this does not have a negative overall effect on productivity, contradicting one outdated stereotype of a remote worker eating bonbons, watching TV, and getting no work done.
The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. This technology will boost work-from-home productivity by 46 percent by the end of the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic situation, according to a model developed by Rutgers’s Morris A. Davis , University of North Carolina’s Andra C. Ghent , and University of Wisconsin’s Jesse M. Gregory . “While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption,” the researchers note.
There are significant costs to leaving the office, Rutgers’s Davis says, pointing to the loss of face-to-face interaction, among other things. “Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always,” he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast.
One reason, he says , has to do with the function of cities as business centers. “Cities exist because, we think, the crowding of employment makes everyone more productive,” he explains. “This idea also applies to firms: a firm puts all workers on the same floor of a building, or all in the same suite rather than spread throughout a building, for reasons of efficiency. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes.” While some employees are more productive at home, that’s not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration “implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic,” he says.
What will happen to urban business districts and the cities in which they are located in the age of increasing remote work?
About three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to need less office space in the future, according to a May 2021 poll. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.
And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregory’s model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. While physical proximity may be superior, working from home is far more productive than it used to be. Had the pandemic hit in 1990, it would not have produced this rise in relative productivity, per the researchers’ model, because the technology available at the time was not sufficient to support remote work.
A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Citing the 5.4 percent increase in US labor productivity in the first quarter of 2021, as reported by the BLS, the researchers attribute at least some of this to the rise of work-from-home technologies. The pandemic, they write, has “compressed a decade’s worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year.” The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue.
Not all the research supports the idea that remote work increases productivity and decreases the number of hours workers spend on the job. Chicago Booth’s Michael Gibbs and University of Essex’s Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth find contradictory evidence from a study of 10,000 high-skilled workers at a large Asian IT-services company.
The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.
Total hours worked during that time increased by approximately 30 percent, including an 18 percent rise in working beyond normal business hours, the researchers find. At the same time, however, average output—as measured by the company through setting work goals and tracking progress toward them—declined slightly. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings also increased, while uninterrupted work hours shrank. Additionally, employees spent less time networking and had fewer one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, find the researchers, adding that the increase in hours worked and the decline in productivity were more significant for employees with children at home. Weighing output against hours worked, the researchers conclude that productivity decreased by about 20 percent. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. “Of course, that time was spent in productive work instead of sitting in traffic, which is beneficial,” they acknowledge.
Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules.
Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? It could take more data to answer this question. “I suspect that a high fraction of employees of all types, across the globe, value the flexibility, lack of a commute, and other aspects of work from home. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity,” says Gibbs.
The findings of his research do not entirely contradict those of Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, however. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesn’t necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. “While the average effect of working from home on productivity is negative in our study, this does not rule out that a ‘targeted working from home’ regime might be desirable,” they write.
Additionally, the research data are derived from a single company and may not be representative of the wider economy, although Gibbs notes that the IT company is one that should be able to optimize remote work. Most employees worked on company laptops, “and IT-related industries and occupations are usually at the top of lists of those areas most likely to be able to do WFH effectively.” Thus, he says, the findings may represent a cautionary note that remote work has costs and complexities worth addressing.
As he, Mengel, and Siemroth write, some predictions of work-from-home success may be overly optimistic, “perhaps because professionals engage in many tasks that require collaboration, communication, and innovation, which are more difficult to achieve with virtual, scheduled interactions.”
The focus on IT employees’ productivity, however, excludes issues such as worker morale and retention, Booth’s Davis notes. More generally, “the producer has to attract workers . . . and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, they’re going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.”
Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. The data from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis reveal that some workers are willing to take a sizable pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely two or three days a week. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman—who said at the company’s US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”—a bit less bite. Meanwhile, Duke PhD student John W. Barry , Cornell’s Murillo Campello , Duke’s John R. Graham , and Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma find that companies offering flexibility are the ones most poised to grow.
Working policies may be shaped by employees’ preferences. Some workers still prefer working from the office; others prefer to stay working remotely; many would opt for a hybrid model, with some days in the office and some at home (as Amazon and other companies have introduced). As countries emerge from the pandemic and employers recalibrate, companies could bring back some employees and allow others to work from home. This should ultimately boost productivity, Booth’s Davis says.
Or they could allow some to work from far-flung locales. Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury has long focused his research on working not just from home but “from anywhere.” This goes beyond the idea of employees working from their living room in the same city in which their company is located—instead, if they want to live across the country, or even in another country, they can do so without any concern about being near headquarters.
At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and women—but only to a point.
“In my mind, there’s no question that it has to be a plus, on net,” says Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Before the pandemic, many women deemphasized their careers when they started families, she says.
Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi and Northeastern University’s Barbara Larson analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime.
“Work from anywhere offers workers geographic flexibility and can help workers relocate to their preferred locations,” Choudhury says. “Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers.”
He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. “In addition to benefits to workers and organizations, WFA might also help reverse talent flows from smaller towns to larger cities and from emerging markets,” he says. “This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.”
It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. People who were sent home to work because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more motivated than before to prove they were essential, says Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist. Additionally, there were fewer distractions from the outside because of the broad shutdowns. “The world helped them stay motivated,” she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would.
Before the pandemic, workers who already knew they performed better in a remote-working lifestyle self-selected into it, if allowed. During the pandemic, shutdowns forced remote work on millions. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. “The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still don’t have great data,” Fishbach says.
Adding to the less optimistic view of a work-from-home future, Booth’s Austan D. Goolsbee says that some long-term trends may challenge remote work. Since the 1980s, as the largest companies have gained market power, corporate profits have risen dramatically while the share of profits going to workers has dropped to record lows. “This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time,” he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. Companies may try to claw back time from those who are remote, he says, by expecting employees to work for longer hours or during their off hours.
And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men).
Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. “Managers may specify that the entire team meets in person every Monday morning, for example,” he says. “R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.”
Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. Japanese workers are reportedly still mostly opting to go to the office, even as the government promotes remote work. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office.
Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. While only about 28 percent of US office workers were back onsite by June 2021, employees who had become used to more flexibility were demanding it remain. A May survey of 1,000 workers by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News finds that about half of millennial and Gen Z workers, and two-fifths of all workers, would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about work-from-home policies. And additional research from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis finds that four in 10 Americans who currently work from home at least one day a week would look for another job if their employers told them to come back to the office full time. Additionally, most employees would look favorably upon a new job that offered the same pay as their current job along with the option to work from home two to three days a week.
The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. A study by Chicago Booth’s Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman finds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. Of these jobs, the majority—including many in engineering, computing, law, and finance—pay more than those that cannot be done at home, such as food service, construction, and building-maintenance jobs.
Barrero, Bloom, and Davis project that, postpandemic, Americans overall will work approximately 20 percent of full workdays from home, four times the pre-pandemic level. This would make remote work less an aberration than a new norm. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings.
Works Cited
Paying off credit-card debt may take more than a nudge.
One idea for helping consumers avoid debt traps didn’t work in a UK experiment, partly because people didn’t have the funds.
The Chicago Booth finance professor and Capitalisn’t cohost fields questions on everything from competition policy to his favorite soccer team.
Forty percent of commute time savings went back into jobs.
Your Privacy We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice , which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.
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
Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
Roles Formal analysis, Writing – original draft
Affiliation Department of Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong
Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing
During the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, many employees have switched to working from home. Despite the findings of previous research that working from home can improve productivity, the scale, nature, and purpose of those studies are not the same as in the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied the effects that three stress relievers of the work-from-home environment–company support, supervisor’s trust in the subordinate, and work-life balance–had on employees’ psychological well-being (stress and happiness), which in turn influenced productivity and engagement in non-work-related activities during working hours. In order to collect honest responses on sensitive questions or negative forms of behavior including stress and non-work-related activities, we adopted the randomized response technique in the survey design to minimize response bias. We collected a total of 500 valid responses and analyzed the results with structural equation modelling. We found that among the three stress relievers, work-life balance was the only significant construct that affected psychological well-being. Stress when working from home promoted non-work-related activities during working hours, whereas happiness improved productivity. Interestingly, non-work-related activities had no significant effect on productivity. The research findings provide evidence that management’s maintenance of a healthy work-life balance for colleagues when they are working from home is important for supporting their psychosocial well-being and in turn upholding their work productivity.
Citation: Chu AMY, Chan TWC, So MKP (2022) Learning from work-from-home issues during the COVID-19 pandemic: Balance speaks louder than words. PLoS ONE 17(1): e0261969. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969
Editor: Mohammad Hossein Ebrahimi, Shahrood University of Medical Sciences, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Received: June 1, 2021; Accepted: December 14, 2021; Published: January 13, 2022
Copyright: © 2022 Chu 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: Due to ethical restrictions, data are available from The Education University of Hong Kong for researchers who meet the criteria for access to sensitive data. Data requests will need to be submitted to Dr. Amanda Chu, Principal Investigator ( [email protected] ) for access to sensitive data.
Funding: This work was partially supported by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research grant “Big Data Analytics on Social Research” (grant number CEF20BM04). The funding recipient was MKPS. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Covid-19 leads to working from home.
Before the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, most companies had not adopted the work-from-home (or working from home, WFH) approach. Employees needed to go to their offices on every working day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals have been and are continuing to be advised to maintain social distancing to minimize the chance of infection [ 1 ]. To control the crisis, some countries and cities even need to institute lockdown measures to restrict the activities of their citizens [ 2 ]. However, under social distancing and lockdown policies, many employees are not able to go to their offices as usual. To maintain business operations, a majority of companies have responded improvisationally by introducing new WFH arrangements, although most of them have had little experience with such arrangements [ 3 , 4 ]. Because WFH can reduce infection rates and is accompanied by the low economic costs of confinement [ 5 ], it should be a suitable measure for facing the COVID-19 challenge. However, not everyone is happy with working from home or is able to carry it out [ 6 ].
The WFH arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on employees’ psychological well-being and, by extension, on their work performance. Because many employees have been forced to make WFH arrangements as a result of social distancing or lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, their WFH experiences may differ from those of employees in earlier studies, who were voluntarily working from home for a variety of reasons [ 4 , 7 , 8 ].
Indeed, the forced home confinement during lockdowns to control COVID-19 might affect individuals’ psychological well-being, including increasing their chances of disturbed sleep and insomnia because of the stressful situation and lack of positive stimuli [ 9 ]. Previous studies have confirmed the association between lockdown and negative psychological outcomes [ 10 ], such as higher stress levels [ 11 ]. However, the impact of WFH on workers’ psychological well-beings is not yet known. Being forced to engage in WFH but also unprepared for it may cause added stress on employees. On the positive side, remote employees have a high control of their working schedule and are able to work flexibly, which may have a positive impact on their job satisfaction [ 7 ]. They can adjust their working time so that they can fulfill other demands in their life, including family matters. A study [ 12 ] revealed that job flexibility could reduce work-to-home conflicts (conflicts caused by work issues interrupting home issues), and those reduced conflicts may help employees lower the distress of not fulfilling their family responsibilities.
Previous research has also suggested that positive psychological well-being is important for maintaining productivity in the workplace [ 13 ] although relatively little research has been done to study negative psychological well-being on employees’ job performance, especially during the WFH period. In addition, giving employees autonomy at home, along with controlling their boundaries, such as whether they conduct non-work-related activities during working hours, may be a great concern for employers [ 14 ]. According to the stress mindset theory, stress can be either enhance or debilitate one’s productivity [ 15 ] and growing evidence has shown that mindset shapes one’s stress response [ 16 ]. If employees hold the mindset that stress is debilitating, they will tend to focus on negative information from stressors, and that in turn will reinforce their negative beliefs and cause them to take action to avoid the stressors. In contrast, if employees hold the mindset that stress is enhancing, they will focus on positive information about stressors and will face their stresses and cope well with them [ 17 ]. By applying the stress mindset theory, we believe that when employees face stress, some can cope with it and maintain their focus on their work tasks while others may move on to other tasks to avoid the stress, instead of focusing on their work tasks. Those other tasks could be non-work-related activities, such as playing sports, shopping, and handling family matters. However, little empirical research has been conducted in these areas because they involve sensitive questions, such as whether the respondent is feeling stressed, and whether the respondent is conducting non-work-related activities during working hours [ 18 ]. Respondents are less willing to provide honest responses when they are asked such sensitive questions directly, and that dishonesty leads to response bias [ 19 ]. Therefore, we adopted the modified randomized response technique (RRT) to collect data on stress and non-work-related activities during working hours.
This research sought to investigate how the WFH environment affects individuals’ psychological well-being, and in turn how WFH impacts their work productivity and the frequency with which they conduct non-work-related activities during working hours when they are working from home.
Methodology, participants..
A purposeful sample of 500 full-time employees in Hong Kong who experienced WFH for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic was recruited online. The survey took place in early September 2020, which was near the end of the second period of growth in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong [ 20 ]. Table 1 shows a summary of the respondents’ demographic data. Such a diversity of participants reduces potential bias caused by the influence of socioeconomic backgrounds.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.t001
We identified our target respondents through personal networks and referrals, and then contacted them via emails and informed them of the study’s rationale. After confirming that the individuals were indeed our target respondents, we invited them to complete our self-administrated online questionnaire. All respondents were informed of the following in the first page of the online questionnaire: (1) the researcher’s name, affiliation, and contact details; (2) the topic and the aim of the study; and (3) the assurance that information about participation was anonymous and would be gathered on a voluntary basis. We obtained the respondents’ consent by asking them to click a button on the screen before starting the questionnaire. The study was conducted according to the prevailing guidelines on ethics in research, and it was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The Education University of Hong Kong (reference number 2019-2020-0104).
To ensure full confidentiality of the participants’ responses, we made the survey anonymous, and applied the RRT for the sensitive questions about stress and non-work-related activities during working hours. We followed the guidance of Chong et al. (2019) and Chu et al. (2020) [ 18 , 21 ] by implementing the RRT and constructing a covariance matrix for the responses. For details of the RRT procedure and application of RRT, readers may refer to Chong et al. (2019) and Chu et al. (2020) [ 18 , 21 ].
To ensure that the respondents understood the purpose of using the RRT to further protect their privacy and clearly understood how to answer the RRT questions, we also included a brief introduction to the RRT procedures before we asked the RRT questions.
All items in the survey were measured on a seven-point Likert scale. Unless otherwise specified, we provided seven options for each item, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), and we asked each respondent to pick the option that best described the situation.
To build the research model, we constructed our survey questions on the basis of seven constructs, with each construct consisting of two to three items. A complete list of items is available in the S1 Table .
Communication with colleagues and access to technical support are important for enabling a smooth transition to WFH [ 22 ]. Following the work of Sull et al. (2020) [ 22 ], we developed three items to measure company support. A high score indicated strong support from the company for employees who were working from home.
When employees work from home, they have little opportunity to meet with their supervisors [ 23 ]. In the absence of supervisors and employees working face-to-face, supervisors’ trust in their subordinates is an important contribution to successful WFH [ 24 ]. We used three items to measure supervisor trust, with a high score indicating a high level of supervisors’ trust in their employees during WFH.
A favorable environment and a healthy balance between working time and personal time could be an advantageous result of WFH [ 25 ]. With reference to Chaiprasit and Santidhirakul (2011) [ 26 ], we developed three items to measure work-life balance during WFH, with a high score indicating a good work-life balance.
On the basis of the existing literature, we developed three items to measure employees’ level of stress: sleep quality [ 27 ], loss of energy [ 28 ], and depressed mood [ 29 ]. A high score indicated a high level of stress during WFH.
For the current study, we modified the three items relating to happiness that were developed by Chaiprasit and Santidhirakul (2011) [ 26 ]. The original items were in a five-point Likert scale, but we converted them into a seven-point Likert scale for measurement consistency in our study. A high score indicated a high level of happiness during WFH.
During WFH, family issues and entertainment activities can distract employees from their work [ 30 ]. Following Ford et al. (2020) and Javed et al. (2019) [ 31 , 32 ], we developed two items referring to these two possible distractions to measure the respondents’ non-work-related activities and we used a seven-point scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (very many times), to quantify the respondents’ engagement in non-work-related activities [ 33 ]. A high score indicated a high frequency of conducting non-work-related activities during working hours when working from home.
We adopted the top three factors from the Endicott Work Productivity Scale [ 34 ] as items for measuring work productivity. The items were originally in a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (“never”) to 5 (“almost always”), but we modified the wording to adapt the scale to our context on WFH and our seven-point Likert scale approach. A high score indicated a high level of perceived productivity during WFH.
Wfh environment and psychological well-being..
Employees have had no choice but to work from home when their companies or government policies have required it in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. For WFH to be successful, company support is necessary in three areas. First, some employees have insufficient equipment for WFH, and some may lack sufficient knowledge of the use of telecommunication technology [ 35 ]. Companies need to support their employees by providing them with the necessary equipment [ 36 ] and training them in the use of new technology [ 37 ]. Second, to avoid any impact of WFH on employees’ home time, companies have to set clear guidelines for distinguishing between work time and home time [ 38 ]. Third, companies have to decide when to start WFH and when to resume the normal working mode, and then they have to give their employees sufficient notice about the need to switch modes. We expected that company support during WFH would enhance job happiness [ 39 ] and would moderate the stresses from work and family. Therefore, we developed the following hypotheses:
As we have already noted, employers and employees do not see each other face-to-face in the WFH working environment. Thus, on one hand, employees have to show their employers that they are self-disciplined in completing their tasks on time and maintaining the expected quality of work [ 40 ] and, on the other hand, employers have to trust their employees that they have already tried their best in working on their assigned tasks [ 41 ]. In fact, some previous literature has mentioned that trust is the most critical factor in making WFH a success [ 42 ]. Therefore, we expected that supervisors’ trust in their subordinates would be important in maintaining employees’ happiness and reducing their stress on work [ 43 ]. Correspondingly, we developed the following hypotheses:
A previous study of managers and fitness trainers discovered that loss of work-life balance could potentially boost the level of work-related stress because the workers spent extra time on work and did not have sufficient time for other life matters [ 44 ]. The association between a poor work-life balance and perceived job stress, which is caused by conflict between one’s job and other life activities, was further confirmed in a previous study on Australian academics [ 45 ]. The researchers explained that difficulty in maintaining work-life balance caused employees to feel additional stress. Moreover, research by Haar et al. (2014) [ 46 ] revealed that work-life balance was negatively related to depression across seven cultures in Asia, Europe, and Oceania, whereas work-life balance was positively associated with job and life satisfaction. Another study on healthcare employees also discovered a positive relationship between work-life balance and job satisfaction [ 47 ]. In addition, Fisher (2003) [ 44 ] found that having a good work-life balance could minimize the interference between employees’ work life and their personal life, thus allowing them to maintain their job engagement and family involvement at the same time, and fostering greater happiness in their work. Thus, we formulated the following two hypotheses:
Previous studies have revealed the causal relationship that increased stress leads to a reduction in employees’ productivity [ 48 – 50 ]. Indeed, chronic stress can have several negative effects on employees, including insomnia, concentration difficulty, and increased risk of depression, all of which are likely to reduce productivity.
Some employees may choose to conduct non-work-related activities (e.g., non-work-related computing) while at work [ 33 ]. In our context, non-work-related activities are not referring to necessary activities such as going to the washroom or having a short break. We are considering situations in which an employee chooses to conduct non-work-related activities during work hours even if he or she could do those activities later. The reasons for conducting non-work-related activities during work hours are varied. Some studies have suggested that non-work-related activities can be caused by resistance and lack of management [ 51 , 52 ]. If an employee has a negative impression of the company or of management, that worker will have a low level of working engagement. In other words, a stressful working environment or management style can generate negative feelings in employees, and those negative feelings may motivate them to do something unrelated to their work during work hours. Accordingly, we formulated Hypotheses 4a and 4b as follows:
In contrast, happiness can have a positive impact on employees’ productivity. Under a classic piece rate setting, happier individuals have greater productivity than less happy individuals do, no matter whether the happiness derives from long-term or short-term events [ 53 ]. If employees think that they can achieve happiness by performing better at work, they will work harder for that reinforcement [ 54 ]. Therefore, the following hypothesis was also included:
Moreover, employees may have difficulty in concentrating on their work when they are working from home because of the lack of an organizational climate and in response to interruptions from family members [ 55 ]. In particular, employees who have children need to shoulder extra child care duties because of school closures [ 56 , 57 ]. At the same time, a feeling of insecurity because of rising numbers of COVID-19 cases also can distract employees [ 10 ], perhaps promoting them to conduct non-work-related activities during working hours at home to drive themselves out from the feeling of insecurity. Two major types of non-work-related activities are (1) activities fulfilling some demand in one’s life, such as caring for children, doing housework, or other activities that the person cannot escape when working from home; and (2) entertainment activities, such as playing video games and sports during working hours [ 31 , 32 ]. Some previous research has suggested that conducting non-work-related activities at work, such as using the Internet for personal purposes in the workplace, can affect job performance [ 52 , 58 ]. Hence, the final hypothesis we postulated was as follows:
We tested our hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM) in AMOS statistical software. The main purpose of using SEM in our analysis was to test the hypotheses about the constructs that we determined from the observed items we collected from the respondents [ 59 ].
To ensure that our model had a consistent construction, we analyzed the convergent validity and discriminant validity of the constructs by considering their Cronbach’s alpha values, average variance extracted (AVE) values, and square root of AVE values, on the respective constructs and the item loadings. Cronbach’s alpha measures the internal consistency of constructs [ 60 ]. The average variance extracted provides the average of variation explained by a construct [ 61 ].
Moreover, we assessed the model fit using (1) absolute fit indexes, including the goodness-of-fit index (GFI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and (2) incremental fit indexes, including the comparative fit index (CFI) and the normed fit index (NFI) [ 62 ].
After confirming that the model was consistent and had a good fit, we examined the model by SEM. We then calculated the significance of each path using a two-tailed t -test to test the cause and effect relationships among the constructs.
We list the summary statistics, including the mean and standard deviation of each item, the item loadings, and the Cronbach’s alpha of each construct in Table 2 . The correlations between constructs, average variances extracted (AVEs), and the square roots of the AVEs are listed in Table 3 . The Cronbach’s alpha of each construct was above the benchmark value of acceptable reliability 0.7 [ 63 ], thus suggesting a good internal consistency of each construct. In order to ensure that each item represented its construct, each item needed to have a loading larger than 0.4 [ 64 , 65 ]. All of the item loadings in our research exceeded 0.4, and the AVE value for each construct was larger than 0.5 (except one, which was 0.5), thus demonstrating that the items satisfied the requirements for convergent validity [ 66 , 67 ]. In addition, the square root of the AVE of each construct was larger than its correlations with all of the other constructs [ 67 ] meaning that the discriminant validity was at an acceptable level.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.t002
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.t003
The cut-off criteria of a good model fit are: RMSEA < 0.06, and GFI, CFI, and NFI ≥ 0.9 [ 68 – 71 ]. In this case, the study’s model demonstrated a satisfactory fit (RMSEA = 0.061; CFI = 0.947; GFI = 0.919; NFI = 0.922).
We report the standardized path coefficients and the significance of each of the hypotheses in Fig 1 . Based on a significance level of 5%, four hypotheses were significant and six were not significant.
N.S. represents not significant. *** indicates a p -value less than 0.01. The numbers to the right of the hypotheses’ numbers are the standardized path coefficients.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.g001
The research findings supported Hypotheses H3a, H3b, H4b, and H5. Hypothesis H3a was supported ( β = -0.222, p < 0.001), indicating that work-life balance was negatively related to the employees’ stress level when those employees were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothesis H3b was also supported ( β = 0.750, p < 0.001), indicating that employees’ work-life balance was positively related to their happiness when those employees were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothesis H4b was supported ( β = 0.626, p < 0.001), indicating that employees’ stress level was positively related to the employees’ participation in non-work-related activities during working hours when those employees were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothesis H5 was supported ( β = 0.418, p < 0.001), indicating that employees’ happiness had a positive effect in promoting their work productivity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many employees who were accustomed to working in the office and did not have previous WFH experience to do their work from home during part of the pandemic, because of social distancing or lockdown policies. In this research, we sought to investigate the effects that switching to WFH in response to the COVID-19 pandemic had on employees’ psychological well-being and, by extension, on their work productivity. We applied the stress mindset theory to study the relationships between three stress relievers (company support, supervisor trust, and work-life balance) on the positive and negative sides of employees’ psychological well-being (happiness versus stress), which in turn affected their job performance (productivity and non-work-related activities during working hours) when they were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, among the three stress relievers we studied, work-life balance is the only reliever that have influenced on the employees’ psychological well-being. At the same time, this reliever has a positive effect on one’s psychological well-being by promoting happiness and relieving stress. Our research findings also suggest that when employees feel happy in their WFH arrangements, their work productivity increases. Surprisingly, when the employees encountered stress in their WFH arrangements, they still maintained their work productivity, but at the same time, they participate more in non-work-related activities to relieve their stress. The good news is that their non-work-related activities did not affect their work productivity. Our study takes the lead in developing a research model that shapes the relationship between employees’ WFH environment and their psychological well-being and performance in relation to sudden and forced WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a methodological contribution, our study adopted the modified randomized response technique to ask the sensitive questions involved in the study, including queries about the employees’ negative psychological well-being status and their engagement in non-work-related activities. We provided extra protection to their privacy by using this survey method, so as to encourage them to provide truthful responses when answering such sensitive questions. Management may wish to consider adopting the same methodology in an effort to collect honest responses when sensitive questions are involved in the workplace.
Regarding the effect of stress relievers on psychological well-being, we found that having a healthy work-life balance promotes happiness and also relieves stress. However, WFH does not imply an improvement in work-life balance, especially when the employees do not have a suitable environment to work. Employees should have a private workspace, which allows access to a strong and stable Internet connection, and has sufficient equipment to carry out their work at home. If employees encounter difficulties when they are working from home, management should provide the employees with flexible arrangements and alternative approaches to work. For example, if an employee does not have a comfortable environment to work, management may arrange a private space or room in the office for the employees given that a proper social distance is maintained.
As is the case in other fast-paced metropolises, Hong Kong has long followed the standard practice of employees working in a formal office environment and offering them no flexible working options [ 72 ]. During the pandemic, when the employees are allow to work from home, some companies have also set strict rules, such as requiring staff to stay at home during working hours or to answer calls from supervisors within three tones. However, a blurred boundary between work space and home space can make it difficult for employees to set a clear line of separation between their work and their home life [ 73 ]. Under a work-life balance working approach, it is assumed that employees can reserve enough time to handle non-work-related life issues and activities while managing their work tasks. Although some previous studies have suggested that non-work-related activities in the workplace affect work productivity [ 52 , 58 ], our research findings did not support that argument in regard to WFH. In other words, performing non-work-related activities during work hours at home does not necessarily appear to impact work productivity. In fact, when employees are feeling burned-out, they could relieve stress via such non-work-related activities and hence maintain their work engagement. For example, at the time when use of the Internet was just emerging in the workplace, Internet recreation in the workplace was found to make employees more creative [ 74 ] and help employees to become accustomed to the new and advanced systems [ 75 ].
Therefore, management may wish to offer their employees a flexible working hour to help the employees to meet their needs when they are working from home [ 57 ]. Management could also encourage employees to set boundaries, as long as the committed working hours per week are achieved, thereby enabling them to secure the balance between their work and home life. Feeling happy, satisfied, and enthusiastic when working from home can help workers maintain a high level of productivity [ 76 ].
The present study had certain limitations. First, the significance of the research findings is dependent on the reliability of self-reports. To minimize bias, in this study we attempted to collect the most representative responses, including through application of the RRT for sensitive questions and through use of an anonymous, web-based survey, as well as through the choice of highly diverse participants. A pretest and pilot test were also conducted before the actual survey, to ensure the quality of the study. Second, this study was based on 500 employees in Hong Kong, a group that certainly cannot represent the worldwide population. In addition, the working and living environments in Hong Kong may be significantly different from those in other regions or countries. Additionally research among more heterogeneous samples will be needed to test the research model.
Although managers are trying their best to maintain their employees’ work productivity at the same level as that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also important for them to maintain a good balance for their employees between work and life and provide flexibility in their working time and arrangements. Our research findings suggest that a healthy balance between work and home life makes employees feel happier, and in turn has a significant effect on them maintaining a good level of work productivity when they are required to switch to WFH. Meanwhile, an imbalance between work and life would have a negative impact on employees’ psychological well-being, spurring them to carry out non-work-related activities during working hours. Interestingly, those non-work-related activities apparently do not influence WFH employees’ work productivity. We conclude that balance is the key to successful implementation of sudden and forced WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic and achieving a smooth transition from working at the office to working from home.
S1 table. list of all items and measures..
Suffixes with–S and–U indicate that the items are sensitive questions and are paired with unrelated questions.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.s001
Preliminary recommendations arising from enforced homeworking during the COVID-19 lockdown
The COVID-19-induced lockdown offered unprecedented opportunities for UK employers to trial working from home at scale. This prompted the CIPD to conduct research into the lessons that employers can take from the period of enforced homeworking to improve their flexible working offering in the future.
This eight-month research project aimed to understand the opportunities and challenges from this period of enforced homeworking and to offer recommendations that seek to overcome these challenges and take advantage of the opportunities. The full findings of the research can be found in our report Flexible working: Lessons from the pandemic .
While these findings are based on UK data, the broader trends and implications should be of interest wherever you are based.
The aim of this research is to:
The first phase of this research is a review of existing research on homeworking. The recommendations from this first phase are outlined below and you can also download a copy of the interim report to find out more about these preliminary recommendations.
The next stage of the research involves conducting qualitative and quantitative research with workers in different occupations and settings. The findings from this research are outlined in our report Flexible working: Lessons from the pandemic .
The first phase of this research identified eight key themes from the review of existing research on homeworking during the COVID-19 lockdown:
1. Be aware of the differences between ‘standard’ and COVID-enforced homeworking
Employers need to distinguish between homeworking experiences that are specific to the pandemic, and those lessons that can be taken forward into the post-pandemic era. The specific challenges we saw during COVID-enforced homeworking (poor planning, lack of choice, total homeworking and lack of childcare) are not as prevalent during usual homeworking arrangements (and in more usual circumstances) and while employers can learn from these challenges they should not be used to judge the effectiveness of homeworking arrangements. Instead, employers should work with employees on an individual level to understand and overcome any challenges of individual homeworking arrangements and build on any opportunities presented.
2. Homeworking is here to stay – design your working practices to suit all locations
Employers should design work processes that support both homeworkers and conventionally-sited employees, concentrating particularly on knowledge sharing, coordination of work, task-related communications and team relationships to encourage performance and innovation. Work intensification and homeworkers’ career development need to be monitored and managed.
Employers should provide support for homeworkers to manage work-home boundaries and avoid isolation, as well as making the cost-benefit calculations around the ‘hard’ elements of technology and office space.
3. Concentrate on partial, voluntary homeworking as part of designing high quality jobs
The appropriate balance of home and office work depends on the type of work, the team processes in place, the manager’s capability, and the degree of cultural support within the organisation, as well as the individual’s home circumstances and the support the employer can provide for technology and equipment.
As with any kind of flexible working – or indeed any kind of job design – a person-centred approach is most likely to result in a solution that suits the individual, the team and the organisation.
Download the report below
Bullying and harassment.
Discover our practice guidance and recommendations to tackle bullying and harassment in the workplace.
Tackling barriers to work today whilst creating inclusive workplaces of tomorrow.
A Wales summary of the CIPD Good Work Index 2024 survey report
Dedicated analysis of job quality and its impact on working lives in Scotland
A North of England summary of the CIPD Good Work Index 2024 survey report
The CIPD Good Work Index provides an annual snapshot of job quality in the UK, giving insight to drive improvement to working lives
A randomized controlled trial published in the leading academic journal Nature finds two days of working from home improved job satisfaction and reduced turnover when compared to those working in offices five days a week.
A new study in the academic journal Nature used a randomized controlled trial to look at the impact of hybrid work schedules on turnover, job satisfaction and performance.
T he long-simmering debate over whether remote work hurts productivity or dampens worker performance has reached the peak of academic prestige: A study in the journal Nature.
Leaders eager to get workers back to the office often believe it leads to things like lower worker output and an erosion of workplace culture. But a new paper to be published Wednesday in the leading academic journal by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom and his co-authors suggests new evidence for advantages to hybrid schedules. A randomized controlled trial of employees in a tech firm based in China found that two days of work from home and three days in the office reduced quit rates, improved job satisfaction and had no impact on performance, when compared with employees who worked full-time in the office.
“Everyone’s heard of Nature ,” says Bloom. If you’re talking about flexible work arrangements with a CEO who wants people back full time, “having a large, randomized controlled trial—they can still ignore it, but it gets a lot harder.”
The study randomly divided 1,612 workers at Trip.com, a large global travel firm, by whether they had even or odd birthdates. One group was able to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays; the other worked in the office all five days. The researchers found that for those with hybrid schedules, attrition rates dropped by one-third over the six-month experiment period—and were even greater for non-managers, female employees and those with long commutes—while work satisfaction scores improved. The hybrid group also did not have significant differences on performance reviews or promotion rates, even for up to two years after the start of the experiment, and there were not significant differences in the lines of code submitted by the software engineers between the two groups.
That trial method—a real-life experiment on two employee groups randomly split by nothing other than birthdate—allowed the researchers to conclude it was the hybrid work schedule that caused the improvements in retention and job satisfaction, Bloom says, rather than simply being coincidental to other factors. “In many studies you don’t [have that],” Bloom says. “There are no differences between people born on even and odd birthdays.”
The study did not look specifically at workers who are full-time remote, or at arrangements where employees have personal choice over where and when they work, which remains a priority for many workers. That debate will likely continue. But the current study offers additional evidence to support the value of employees getting to work from home at least part of the time as opposed to full-time in the office.
In the paper, Bloom and his co-authors note that some may wonder if a possible explanation for the reduced turnover in the hybrid work group is that members of the full-time office group were frustrated they didn’t get the flexible schedule during the experiment. However, turnover rates for full-time office workers were slightly reduced from the six-month period before the experiment, the researchers write in the paper, suggesting that some may have “guessed (correctly) that the policy would be rolled out to all employees once the experiment ended.”
Another effect: The study found that managers at the company shifted their views of hybrid work over the experiment period. Before it started, managers at the company perceived that hybrid work would reduce productivity by 2.6%; by its close, they believed flexible arrangements could improve productivity by 1%. “There is value in experimentation,” the study authors write.
The paper follows months of debate over the impact of remote work on company culture, employee productivity and potential downsides to innovation or collaboration. Bloom, who has studied remote work for decades, prompted a stir last year when a working paper that reviewed existing studies on the topic pointed to research showing that fully remote workforces appeared to have slightly reduced productivity on average. But the studies also showed that when the work schedule was well-managed and hybrid at least some of the time, the effect was flat or slightly positive, Bloom told Forbes at the time .
Indeed, an early paper by Bloom looked at the same company, Trip.com (one of its co-founders, James Liang , is a co-author and former PhD student of Bloom’s). It found that among a group of remote call center agents who worked in person just one day a week, productivity increased 13% and turnover fell by half.
The newer study looked at workers in fields like marketing, software engineering, finance and accounting, helping to address concerns that past studies on lower-paid employees doing repetitive tasks with more objective measurements may not be generalizable to the workforce at large. “These are creatives, they’re in graduate or professional jobs, and they’re innovating, creating, training,” Bloom says of participants in the current study.
Trip.com, Bloom says, was seeking a way to reduce costs in doing the experiment, estimating that each employee who quit cost the company $20,000 in recruiting and training, the paper reports. As a result of the study, the company decided to extend the hybrid policy to all employees.
“There are good and bad things about working from home, but it turns out with hybrid they roughly net each other out,” says Bloom. “Employees were dramatically happier if they get to work from home two days a week, and as a result their quit rates fell by a third. ... The company looked at this and said, ‘what’s not to like?’ ”
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.
Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .
Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges
1 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary
2 Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary
3 Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Associated data.
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/ .
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.
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.
Mostly positive | Mostly negative |
---|---|
Less commuting | Isolation from colleagues |
More control over time | Less defined work-life boundaries |
More autonomy | Higher need for self-discipline |
Less office-related distractions | Reliance on private infrastructure |
More comfortable environment | Communication difficulties with colleagues |
More flexibility with domestic tasks |
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.
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/ .
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”.
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 .
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.
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 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.
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.
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 .
Background information question | Subgroup | Number of responses | Proportion of the subgroup |
---|---|---|---|
Gender | Female | 356 | 50.57 |
Gender | Male | 338 | 48.01 |
Gender | Prefer not to say | 9 | 1.28 |
Gender | Other | 1 | 0.14 |
Academic position | full professor | 209 | 29.69 |
Academic position | associate professor | 172 | 24.43 |
Academic position | assistant professor | 126 | 17.90 |
Academic position | PhD student | 72 | 10.23 |
Academic position | postdoc | 72 | 10.23 |
Academic position | non-academic researcher | 38 | 5.40 |
Academic position | research assistant | 14 | 1.99 |
Academic position | not applicable | 1 | 0.14 |
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 ).
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.
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.
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).
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.
Acknowledgments.
We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.
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).
PONE-D-20-30010
Dear Dr. Aczel,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.
Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 25 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.
Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.
If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols
We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.
Kind regards,
Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, D.S.W.
Academic Editor
Journal requirements:
When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.
1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf
2. Please ensure that the methods, including the sampling strategy, are detailed enough to enable replication and peer review using the information provided in the main body of the manuscript. Please move information from the supporting materials as necessary.
3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information .
Comments to the Author
Reviewer #1: PONE-D-20-30010
Title: Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges
Reviewer’s article summary: This manuscript provides results from a survey on work-life balance among academics who switched to remote work-from-home during the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe the article contributes insight on both the work-life balance among academics and how researchers have experienced their work during the pandemic, and will be of interest to the PloS One audience. Below, please see suggestions for improving the manuscript.
Abstract: Please include a brief statement about methodology, including sample size of the survey population, how the survey was conducted (convenience sample? Recruitment strategy?).
Introduction: The authors questions, “Is the relation between working from home and productivity influenced by personal and professional factors?” This question seems like a non-starter – how could working from home not be influenced by personal and professional factors? Advise revising this question to better focus your key arguments (i.e. what personal and professional factors most influence the productivity of working from home?).
“just as well increased autonomy over time use” – awkward sentence; please revise to clarify.
“physical and social distance to teal members” – do you mean team members?
Table 1 – please refer to the table in the text to guide the audience to this comparison of pros/cons in context of the introduction. It may also better position this manuscript within the literature to include more details from the studies that list these pros/cons (i.e. include the % of people who have reported each of the pros/cons within the table itself, and include a reference to the study where each % was derived).
Reference to Snizek in the 80’s – the benefit of including this quote is questionable; it would be more helpful to include more recent literature on this point since generational changes have perhaps changed this experience.
“just as well high levels of work productivity and satisfaction” – awkward sentence, please revise for clarity.
Materials and Methods: Please provide the study number for IRB approval.
The authors do include links to their study procedure, but it would be helpful for a more complete overview of the procedure within the manuscript so the audience can more easily ascertain the methodology employed. In comparison, the “Materials” section provides intricate detail that may not be necessary (in this reviewer’s opinion, it would be more efficient to simply list the types of questions asked—i.e. “Survey questions asked participants to report on changes that occurred in relation to research work efficiency, comparison of home to office work, amount of time spent…”(etc. or something of this nature)–with a link to the actual survey instrument).
There is no section or statement regarding data analysis. Please describe your analytical procedure (descriptive statistics, any regressions?) and software used for analysis.
Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. Please include data about the countries where respondents live, if available; if not available, please include a statement regarding residence in the Methods section (i.e. was the sample all within a single country?).
Figures – please include sample size (n = ) in the figure titles.
” From these values we can assume that some of the obstacles of their work were specific to the pandemic lockdown and not directly to working from home” – please explain and clarify.
“…seems to be a generally wanted and beneficial model of work” – this statement seems to ignore the result that nearly half of respondents reported being less efficient during the pandemic. Recommend revising this statement, and including a summary that the results indicate although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency, they would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. May also be useful to note that the implications of this require further investigation – what is it about this new work situation that people prefer? What amount of time did people previously spend in commute that they now can use for other tasks or personal interests? What other factors have changed that make the current situation more preferred?
#5 – incomplete reference
There are several references that are now quite old (1987, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009…) – Recommend reviewing these carefully to ensure that there is not more recent literature that would shed better light on the subject.
Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show % to increase clarity of results.
While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at gro.solp@serugif . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.
17 Feb 2021
Dear Dr. Johnson Cheung,
We are happy to submit a revised version of our manuscript to PLOS One.
We would like to thank you and the reviewer for their comments and suggestions.
Below, you can find the detailed responses to all comments in bold.
Balazs Aczel, on behalf of all co-authors
Reviewer #1
We have added these aspects to the Abstract.
We agree with the reviewer and changed that question as suggested.
Table 1 is referred to in the text, just above the table. After due consideration of this suggestion, we judged that three paragraphs about the pros/cons provide sufficient details on the given topic. We found no sound way to merge the empirical reports of the referred studies to provide overall percentages of people reporting each pros/cons.
The old Snizek reference serves as an indicator that academics have already experienced some of the drawbacks of working from home at the start of the popularity of personal computers. We have now extended our Introduction with more studies from the recent literature, especially with those conducted during the pandemic.
We have now placed the Procedure section before the Materials section. At the beginning of the Materials section, we provide a link to the original content of our Qualtrics survey. This file contains the wording of the items and the display logic of the questions. We would also prefer to keep the detailed description of the survey items in the manuscript as most of the items were developed by the authors for the study. Should the Editor prefer that, we could move the Materials section to the Supporting Information and leave just the link to the exact survey questions in the manuscript.
Now, we state in the Data preprocessing and Analyses section that we used the R statistical software for the analyses and that we report only descriptive statistical results in this study.
The table with the sample size and proportions for all the levels of all the survey items is provided in the Supplementary Materials. However, as the whole table is more than 4 pages long, we think that by including the table in the main text we would corrupt the readability of the manuscript.
Now, we state in the Sampling section that the country of residence of the respondents is not known.
The sample sizes are now included in the figure titles.
We would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out the vagueness of this section. We rephrased the sentence and added one more sentence to the section to clarify our point.
We have now updated this sentence incorporating the reviewer’s suggestion. The updated paragraph is on page 16.
We fixed the incomplete reference.
We agree that some of our references are from the ‘80s or ‘90s, yet they are still good sources of our claims (e.g., how researchers found working from home when personal computers started or that setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands). Nevertheless, we have added more recent studies to our references, especially from the relevant literature that has been published since our initial submission 5 months ago:
Johnson N, Veletsianos G, Seaman J. US Faculty and Administrators’ Experiences and Approaches in the Early Weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Online Learn. 2020;24(2):6–21.
Barrero JM, Bloom N, Davis SJ. Why Working From Home Will Stick. Univ Chic Becker Friedman Inst Econ Work Pap. 2020;(2020–174).
Korbel JO, Stegle O. Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on life scientists. Genome Biol. 2020;21(113).
Ghaffarizadeh SA, Ghaffarizadeh SA, Behbahani AH, Mehdizadeh M, Olechowski A. Life and work of researchers trapped in the COVID-19 pandemic vicious cycle. bioRxiv. 2021;
Thank you for the recommendation. We have now modified this figure.
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
23 Feb 2021
PONE-D-20-30010R1
Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 09 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.
Reviewer #1:
Reviewer’s response to revisions: Overall, the authors have revised the manuscript to increase clarity and improve understanding of the contributions that this research provides regarding the future outlook for academics working from home. I have a few minor comments:
Limitations: This revised document brings to light the fact that 1) we do not know how the transition to working from home differs between countries since country was not a survey question (which could differ significantly given a number of social and technological/infrastructure factors), and 2) since the analysis only included descriptive statistics there is great potential in learning more from this dataset – and it is wonderful that the dataset will be publicly available. I do recommend adding a statement on limitations, both because it is a best practice, and because it shows that the authors have been thoughtful about the limits of their current analysis.
Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. I appreciate the authors’ response to this request, but suggest that as a standard practice a shortened version of the key demographics could be provided in a table within the text, and the remainder of the demographics table could be in the supplemental material (having these results within the table is standard in my field since it provides the background information necessary for academics to easily understand the full scope of the results). In response to the question of length, I would suggest that the paragraph that lists the % of respondents who were male/female, etc. could be shortened and simply refer to the table instead.
Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show % to increase clarity of results. The authors responded that this change was made in the revision, but I could not find the updated figure in the revised document.
Overall, the authors have revised the manuscript to increase clarity and improve
understanding of the contributions that this research provides regarding the future outlook for
academics working from home. I have a few minor comments:
Limitations: This revised document brings to light the fact that 1) we do not know how the
transition to working from home differs between countries since country was not a survey
question (which could differ significantly given a number of social and
technological/infrastructure factors), and 2) since the analysis only included descriptive
statistics there is great potential in learning more from this dataset – and it is wonderful that
the dataset will be publicly available. I do recommend adding a statement on limitations, both
because it is a best practice, and because it shows that the authors have been thoughtful
about the limits of their current analysis.
We have now included a statement of limitations regarding the missing information
on country of residence and made it more clear in the limitations section that the
present study was only exploratory.
Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays
sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. I
appreciate the authors’ response to this request, but suggest that as a standard practice a
shortened version of the key demographics could be provided in a table within the text, and
the remainder of the demographics table could be in the supplemental material (having
these results within the table is standard in my field since it provides the background
information necessary for academics to easily understand the full scope of the results). In
response to the question of length, I would suggest that the paragraph that lists the % of
respondents who were male/female, etc. could be shortened and simply refer to the table
We have now included the key demographics as a table (Table 2) in the manuscript in
addition to the full summary of all the responses in the Supplementary information.
Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show
% to increase clarity of results. The authors responded that this change was made in the
revision, but I could not find the updated figure in the revised document.
We made sure that all the figures are updated and uploaded with this submission
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf
12 Mar 2021
PONE-D-20-30010R2
We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.
Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.
An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ , click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at gro.solp@gnillibrohtua .
If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .
16 Mar 2021
Dear Dr. Aczel:
I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.
If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .
If we can help with anything else, please email us at gro.solp@enosolp .
Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.
PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff
on behalf of
Dr. Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung
Key takeaways.
I often get asked by managers if working from home could be ended by the next recession. The question comes from the premise that CEOs are itching to drag their employees back to the office five days a week. But they are afraid their employees will jump ship for another remote-friendly job. If a recession hits, the thinking goes, job opportunities will shrivel and managers will be able to force workers back to their office desks without the risk of attrition.
If that scenario seems correct, then sorry. Theory and data suggest the exact opposite. A recession will likely boost the WFH trend.
Let’s start with the theory. Research shows that working from home improves employee recruitment and retention rates, driving down overall labor costs. In one recent randomized control trial working from home reduced quit rates by 35 percent (Bloom, Han and Liang 2024). In global surveys, employees report that hybrid arrangements with a few WFH days combined with in-office days is worth about as much as an 8 percent pay increase (Aksoy et al. 2022). Working from home also cuts office costs for firms, from lower rent, security, energy and support costs.
On the output side, research shows organized hybrid research has a zero to small positive impact on productivity. Fully remote working has more mixed impacts on productivity but can lead to more than offsetting cost reductions by enabling national or global talent sourcing (Barrero, Bloom and Davis 2023).
In short, a mix of hybrid and fully remote working can cut costs and perhaps increase productivity. In recessions firms want to cut costs at least as much as in booms, suggesting that if anything a recession could induce a rise in remote working.
On the empirical side the industry with the highest levels of working from home in 2024 was the information (tech) sector (Figure 1). Tech has had a tough 18 months, undergoing a drastic slowdown from 2022 onwards, with layoffs across many major firms.
As a Stanford professor I have seen first-hand the swing from boom to bust in technology hiring in Silicon Valley. Outside of the red-hot AI sector it is now extremely hard to get hired in tech, with software job postings down by two-thirds since 2022 [1] . But tech is also leading the way in working from home, suggesting that business slowdowns do not lead to return-to-office mandates. Indeed, I interpret this data as supporting exactly the reverse. The industry facing perhaps the biggest slowdown over the last two years has the highest levels of working from home.
Turning to the longer run, what will working from home look like a decade from now?
As Figure 2 shows, current U.S. levels of working from home are settling down towards about 25 percent of fully paid days. My prediction by 2035 is this will have risen to 35 percent. This is not a drastic change, but it is material. Two forces are driving my predictions for a longer-run growth of remote work.
The first is technology. Technology is everything when it comes to the ability to work from home. As one of four children of two working parents, I grew up seeing what working from home was like in the 1980s. It was very bad.
Before the personal computer, working from home involved carrying around huge wads of paper and the occasional expensive phone call to the office. Conditions improved in the 1990s with the spread of the personal computer and improved again in the 2000s with the development of the internet. Two recent critical breakthroughs were cloud computing — allowing easy file sharing —and video calls that enable higher-quality online meetings.
This rate of technological progress is only going to increase. As economist Frederic M. Scherer noted in 1965, bigger markets induce faster innovation. And the market for working from home technology has increased five-fold. So, expect the rate of technological improvement to surge.
The future will see leaps and bounds in better audio and visual equipment, virtual reality, holograms and remote apps. Figure 3 shows one example of this, which is the share of new patent applications in the U.S. Patent and Trademark office containing three or more mentions of remote work based on Bloom, Davis and Zhestkova (2021). This attempts to count the number of new patents with a strong connection to remote working. We can see a striking growth after 2020 as hardware and software firms swiveled billions of dollars of R&D into improving remote technology. The momentum continues to grow, meaning the technology we use every day to work remotely will continue to improve at an accelerating rate.
The other major driver is cohort effects on firms and managers. In the monthly Survey on Workplace Attitudes and Arrangements, we poll almost 10,000 Americans a month. We see employees of younger firms have far higher levels of remote work (Figure 4). Younger firms have enthusiastically adopted hybrid and fully remote work. These firms and their managers will grow from today’s smaller and younger firms into tomorrow’s larger firms, expanding remote work with them.
So, the next time somebody claims the next recession will end remote work, push back with theory and data. The opposite is more likely true.
Nick Bloom is a SIEPR Senior Fellow and the Eberle Professor in Stanford’s Department of Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His research focuses on management practices and uncertainty.
[1] Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States
Aksoy, Cevat Giray, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls and Pablo Zarate, 2022. “ Working from Home Around the World ,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall.
Barrero, Jose Maria, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis, “ The Evolution of Working from Home ”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023.
Bloom, Nicholas, Roubing Han and James Liang, 2024. “ Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance ”, Nature June 2024.
Bloom, Nicholas, Steven J. Davis, and Yulia Zhestkova, 2021. "COVID-19 Shifted Patent Applications toward Technologies that Support Working from Home." American Economic Association, Papers & Proceedings, May.
Scherer, Frederic M, 1965, “Firm size, market structure, opportunity, and the effect of patented inventions”, American Economic Review, December.
The painful implementation of california's stem cell research program, learning the silicon valley way, an analysis of the performance of target date funds.
Explore the fully remote researcher jobs worldwide. Apply to positions like Research Analyst, Market Researcher, Data Researcher, and more. Whether you're seeking full-time, part-time, freelance, or work-from-anywhere opportunities in research that allow you to work from home or from anywhere in the world, we have online researcher jobs hiring now to match your preferences. Start your search today!
People also search: Biology , Market Research , Psychology , Science
Working nomads, jobs by category, jobs by position type, jobs by region, jobs by skill, jobs by country.
Working Nomads curates remote digital jobs from around the web.
© 2024 Working Nomads.
Data on software engineers at a Fortune 500 company revealed that junior and senior women saw contrasting costs and benefits.
While much has been said about the potential benefits of remote work for women, recent research examines how working from home affects the professional development of female software engineers at a Fortune 500 company, revealing that its impact varies by career stage. Junior women engineers benefit significantly from in-person mentorship, receiving 40% more feedback when sitting near colleagues, while senior women face reduced productivity due to increased mentoring duties. Male engineers also benefit from proximity, but less so. The authors suggest that recognizing and rewarding mentorship efforts could mitigate these disparities, ensuring junior women receive adequate support remotely and senior women are properly compensated for their mentoring contributions.
Since the pandemic began, work from home (WFH) has at times been pitched as a means of supporting women in the workplace. This argument often focuses on WFH’s potential to help women juggle the demands of their jobs with the demands of their families. However, WFH’s impact on women’s professional development may vary over their careers. In our research, we explored how WFH impacts young women as they try to get a foothold in their careers and how it affects the often-invisible mentorship work done by more senior women.
IMAGES
COMMENTS
The Covid-19 pandemic sparked what economist Nicholas Bloom calls the " working-from-home economy .". While some workers may have had flexibility to work remotely before the pandemic, this ...
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 ...
The phenomenon of working from home (WFH) is linked to a variety of megatrends that companies have confronted over many years. These include demographic change, leading to shortages of skilled workers in many regions and professions; the individualisation of needs and lifestyles as a result of changing values; and most particularly, the digitalisation of the world of work (Schmoll and Süß ...
Working from home (WFH) surged after the COVID-19 pandemic, with university-graduate employees typically WFH for one to two days a week during 2023 (refs. 2,6). Previous causal research on WFH has ...
About the survey. The third edition of McKinsey's American Opportunity Survey provides us with data on how flexible work fits into the lives of a representative cross section of workers in the United States. McKinsey worked alongside the market-research firm Ipsos to query 25,000 Americans in spring 2022 (see sidebar, "About the survey").
Building on the McKinsey Global Institute's body of work on automation, AI, and the future of work, we extend our models to consider where work is performed. 1 Our analysis finds that the potential for remote work is highly concentrated among highly skilled, highly educated workers in a handful of industries, occupations, and geographies.
Note: Results are based on generalized ordered logit models, where the dependent variable (e.g., perceived change in flexibility) is measured with three categories: 1 = decreased, 2 = same, and 3 = increased (see the supplemental file for detail). The figure plots the average marginal effects of working from home all or most of the time relative to commuters (vertical line).
Our main specification exploits differences in outcomes for each employee, when working from home compared to working in the office, controlling for employee and customer team fixed effects. The unit of observation is the employee-month. Index the employee by i and the month by t = 1, 2, … , 17. For outcome variable y it, we estimate by OLS:
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 ...
Working from home rose five-fold from 2019 to 2023, with 40% of US employees now working remotely at least one day a week. The productivity of remote work depends critically on the mode. ... Looking ahead we predict working from home will continue to grow because of the expansion in research and development into new technologies to improve ...
1.1. Employees' Health in Home Office. Earlier studies addressed health effects of pre-pandemic telework. A systematic review by Charalampous et al. [] found telework increased employees' positive emotions, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment levels and ameliorated feelings of emotional exhaustion.Another systematic review suggested that telework can improve work-family life ...
Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly six-in-ten U.S. workers who say their jobs can mainly be done from home (59%) are working from home all or most of the time.The vast majority of these workers (83%) say they were working from home even before the omicron variant started to spread in the United States, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
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 ...
While working remotely, productivity increased among all examiners and continued to rise with each step toward the full work-from-anywhere policy, the researchers found. Productivity increased 4.4 percent when employees moved from working at home on a limited basis to the location of their choice. Based on a patent's average value, this ...
Frequent working from home (WFH) may stay as a new work norm after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior observational studies on WFH and work outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances are mostly cross-sectional and often studied employees who worked from home in limited capacity. To provide additional insights that might inform post-pandemic work policies, using longitudinal data collected before the ...
The hybrid workplace has empowered employees to reclaim physical health. Three-quarters of respondents (75%) stated that they move more frequently and have a more active work style when working ...
15 Questions About Remote Work, Answered. Summary. How should corporate leaders, managers, and individual workers shift to remote work in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic? Tsedal Neeley, a ...
Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi and Northeastern University's Barbara Larson analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was ...
During the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, many employees have switched to working from home. Despite the findings of previous research that working from home can improve productivity, the scale, nature, and purpose of those studies are not the same as in the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied the effects that three stress relievers of the work-from ...
The first phase of this research identified eight key themes from the review of existing research on homeworking during the COVID-19 lockdown: Increased productivity among homeworkers is often achieved through work intensification. For some workers, homeworking can provide a more productive environment because there are fewer distractions.
Researchers studied knowledge workers in 2013 and again during the 2020 pandemic lockdown and found significant changes in how they are working. They learned that lockdown helps people focus on ...
A randomized control trial published in the leading academic journal Nature finds two days of working from home improved job satisfaction and reduced turnover when compared to those working in ...
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 ...
Research shows that working from home improves employee recruitment and retention rates, driving down overall labor costs. In one recent randomized control trial working from home reduced quit rates by 35 percent (Bloom, Han and Liang 2024). In global surveys, employees report that hybrid arrangements with a few WFH days combined with in-office ...
Remote Researcher Jobs. Explore the fully remote researcher jobs worldwide. Apply to positions like Research Analyst, Market Researcher, Data Researcher, and more. Whether you're seeking full-time, part-time, freelance, or work-from-anywhere opportunities in research that allow you to work from home or from anywhere in the world, we have online ...
The data and research show well-managed work from home can raise and maintain productivity, while cutting costs and raising profits. It keeps employees happy, reduces pollution by cutting billions ...
Expanding our research team working with people in rural areas who use illicit drugs; the MIXMAX study 25 June 2024 The Methamphetamine and Injecting Drug Use Cohort Study (MIXMAX) Study into the health care needs of people who use illicit drugs in rural areas is excited to announce the recruitment of four researchers to support the project in ...
Summary. While much has been said about the potential benefits of remote work for women, recent research examines how working from home affects the professional development of female software ...
Search jobs - IBM Careers. Home Careers Search jobs Let's find you the right job. Here you'll find the jobs that best match your skills and interest. Use the filters to narrow down to what you're exactly looking for and apply.
The goal of Kim's proposed study is to look at research participants' needs when enrolling in clinical trials that offer exercise interventions for people with spinal cord injury. Kim hopes to develop intervention that is tailored to the population's preferences, increasing enrollment and retention of the participants.