Spending two days in the office and the rest working from home is the “sweet spot” that workers and bosses prefer.
New research suggests that a two-day in, three-day at home schedule might be the best hybrid model.
The information comes from researchers Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos Makridis, and Kyle Schirmann.
“The Review of Economics and Statistics” analyzed performance and sentiment among a sample of 148 employees at BRAC.
Before 2020 and the pandemic, those BRAC employees were in the office five days a week.
Employees were randomly selected to come into the office over a period of nine weeks, around 35 workdays.
The researchers split the employees into three buckets of work-from-home based on how many days they were randomly assigned.
- “High” work-from-home meant that they spent zero to eight days in the office, averaging 0-1 days in the office a week.
- “Intermediate” meant nine to 14 days in office, an average of 2 days in office a week.
- “Low” meant 15 or more days in the office over that nine-week period.
They found that “intermediate” workers were more satisfied at work and had greater work-life balance. As a result, they also felt less isolated.
Their managers were also more likely to rate them better than workers in the other two buckets of WFH. In conclusion, intermediate workers had a boost in their creativity and productivity scores.
“Intermediate WFH is plausibly the sweet spot. Employees report greater satisfaction and lower isolation, yet receive no penalties in performance ratings,” the authors write.
