Americans are shedding their masks, buying concert tickets and booking vacations like it’s 2019. But there’s one thing that’s doesn’t appear to be going anywhere as the pandemic fades: remote work.
Companies from Vanguard Group to Ford Motor are permanently adopting “hybrid” work schedules, where employees spend some of the week at home and the rest at an office. Forecasting the implications of these long-term work shifts on the U.S. economy is no small task.
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Enter Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who started researching the
In a conversation ahead of the release of his latest
The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Your research shows that Americans are congregating in the suburbs and, arguably, apartments in urban, more dense areas are being vacated at a faster pace.
We call it the “Donut Effect.” The places losing the most people are centers of big cities. Downtowns are doing very badly, they’ve lost roughly 15% of people and businesses, and the suburbs of the same large cities are doing really well. In fact, it looks like the suburbs of large cities are the hottest property markets. We think that this is all due to the move to hybrid. If you can work from home two days a week, it makes it more appealing
Do you imagine that companies opting for hybrid-work environments will adopt smaller commercial footprints?
Only 28% of Americans report that post-pandemic they go back to exactly the same activity as pre-pandemic. The other 72% report that at a minimum, they’d refuse to get into crowded elevators or lifts. So you’ve got a serious problem for what to do with high rises. In some sense that strikes me as the biggest issue for property is how to deal with skyscrapers. There are creative solutions but it’s not easy.
You found that work from home in the longer term will bring a 5% productivity boost post-pandemic. What are the components that contribute to that?
Three to four percent of that is saving on time that you spend commuting. The minority of it is, if you’re working from home two days a week, if it’s well managed
A well-organized company will set this up from the center and say, for example, the industrial team is going to come in Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. And then the industrial team has all their face-to-face meetings and training and clients on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Wednesday, Friday you’re now at home and you do all your quiet stuff like reading, writing, reports, expenses et cetera and that stuff turns out to be done more efficiently at home because it’s quieter.
There’s research that shows remote work makes it more difficult to get promoted. How will longer-term adoption of work-from-home impact that? Especially for women or parents in general who choose to work from home five days a week?
Who would choose to work from home more days post-pandemic is not random. For people with children under the age of 12, you find
If you let people choose [how often they work from home], my fear is the biggest cost in the long run is all the single young men come in five days a week, and college-educated women with a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old come in two days a week, and six to seven years down the road there’s a huge difference in promotion rates and