Spending two days in the office could be the “sweet spot” that workers and bosses alike have been chasing.
New research suggests that two days in the office and three days at home might be the right schedule for the labor market.
The news comes from researchers Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos Makridis, and Kyle Schirmann.
They analized results in their “Review of Economics and Statistics”. The sample used was of 148 employees at BRAC, the world’s largest NGO in Bangladesh.
Before 2020 and the pandemic, those BRAC employees were in the office five days a week.
Employees in the experiment were randomly selected to come into the office over a period of nine weeks, around 35 workdays.
At the end of the experiment, researchers split the employees up into three different buckets of work-from-home based on how many days they were randomly assigned to come into the office.
“High” work-from-home meant that they spent an average of 0-1 days in the office a week. “Intermediate” meant an average of 2 days in office a week, and “Low” meant 15 or more days in office.
Research found “intermediate” workers were more satisfied at work. They also had greater work-life balance and felt less isolated.
Their managers were also more likely to rate them better than workers in the other two buckets of WFH.
“Intermediate WFH is plausibly the sweet spot, where employees report greater satisfaction and lower isolation,” the authors write.
“And yet, they receive no penalties in performance ratings compared to peers who work more or fewer days in the office.”
