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Meta is sending its Instagram unit back to the office five days a week. Amazon, AT&T, Boeing, and Dell are pushing for more in-office work too. And some industries like finance have hauled their staff fully in for a few years now. Does this mean work from home … is dying? At this point there is a lot of data and a lot of research on the costs and benefits of working remote.
“The remote worker is a very productive worker,” said Gabriela Mauch, head of the Productivity Lab at ActivTrak, a firm that measures and analyzes employee productivity.
In fact, a remote worker is the most productive worker, according to ActivTrak’s data. “Those employees that are fully remote not only start their day earlier, but their day tends to go longer,” Mauch said. This matches what a lot of studies show. “Most research on remote work seems to show positive impacts on the quantity of work that people do,” said Emma Harrington, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia. “Where we start to see more worrisome things cropping in is often the quality of the work.” Not for everyone, but in certain sectors — and for inexperienced workers in particular.
“Working from home all or most of the time causes software engineers to write buggier code, causes equity analysts to make less accurate forecasts of company earnings,” she said. But trapping everyone in the office every day for five days a week has costs too. For example, people hate it and they quit. “And for companies, quits are hugely expensive,” said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University. The sweet spot for companies, he said, is hybrid work. “That seems to be about net-zero on productivity, but in studies it reduces quit rates by up to a third,” Bloom said. | 
