work from office essay

The bright future of working from home

There seems to be an endless tide of depressing news in this era of COVID-19. But one silver lining is the long-run explosion of working from home. Since March I have been talking to dozens of CEOs, senior managers, policymakers and journalists about the future of working from home. This has built on my own personal experience from running surveys about working from home and an experiment published in 2015 which saw a 13 percent increase in productivity by employees at a Chinese travel company called Ctrip who worked from home.

So here a few key themes that can hopefully make for some good news:

Mass working from home is here to stay

Once the COVID-19 pandemic passes, rates of people working from home will explode. In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that 8 percent of all employees worked from home at least one day a week.

I see these numbers more than doubling in a post-pandemic world. I suspect almost all employees who can work from home — which is estimated at about 40 percent of employees — will be allowed to work from home at least one day a week.

Why? Consider these three reasons

Fear of crowds.

Even if COVID-19 passes, the fear of future pandemics will motivate people to move away from urban centers and avoid public transport. So firms will struggle to get their employees back to the office on a daily basis. With the pandemic, working from home has become a standard perk, like sick-leave or health insurance.

Investments in telecommuting technology

By now, we have plenty of experience working from home. We’ve become adept at video conferencing. We’ve fine-tuned our home offices and rescheduled our days. Similarly, offices have tried out, improved and refined life for home-based work forces. In short, we have all paid the startup cost for learning how to work from home, making it far easier to continue.

The end of stigma

Finally, the stigma of working from home has evaporated. Before COVID-19, I frequently heard comments like, “working from home is shirking from home,” or “working remotely is remotely working.” I remember Boris Johnson, who was Mayor of London in 2012 when the London Olympics closed the city down for three weeks, saying working from home was “a skivers paradise.” No longer. All of us have now tried this and we understand we can potentially work effectively — if you have your own room and no kids — at home.

Of course, working from home was already trending up due to improved technology and remote monitoring. It is relatively cheap and easy to buy a top-end laptop and connect it to broadband internet service. This technology also makes it easier to monitor employees at home. Indeed, one senior manager recently told me: “We already track our employees — we know how many emails they send, meetings they attend or documents they write using our office management system. So monitoring them at home is really no different from monitoring them in the office. I see how they are doing and what they are doing whether they are at home or in the office.”

This is not only good news for firms in terms of boosting employee morale while improving productivity, but can also free up significant office space. In our China experiment, Ctrip calculated it increased profits by $2,000 per employee who worked from home.

Best practices in working from home post pandemic

Many of us are currently working from home full-time, with kids in the house, often in shared rooms, bedrooms or even bathrooms. So if working from home is going to continue and even increase once the pandemic is over, there are a few lessons we’ve learned to make telecommuting more effective. Let’s take a look:

Working from home should be part-time

I think the ideal schedule is Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the office and Tuesday and Thursday at home. Most of us need time in the office to stay motivated and creative. Face-to-face meetings are important for spurring and developing new ideas, and at least personally I find it hard to stay focused day after day at home. But we also need peaceful time at home to concentrate, undertake longer-term thinking and often to catch-up on tedious paperwork. And spending the same regular three days in the office each week means we can schedule meetings, lunches, coffees, etc., around that, and plan our “concentration work” during our two days at home.

The choice of Tuesday and Thursday at home comes from talking to managers who are often fearful that a work-from-home day — particularly if attached to a weekend — will turn into a beach day. So Tuesday and Thursday at home avoids creating a big block of days that the boss and the boss of the boss may fear employees may use for unauthorized mini-breaks.

Working from home should be a choice

I found in the Ctrip experiment that many people did not want to work from home. Of the 1,000 employees we asked, only 50 percent volunteered to work from home four days a week for a nine-month stretch. Those who took the offer were typically older married employees with kids. For many younger workers, the office is a core part of their social life, and like the Chinese employees, would happily commute in and out of work each day to see their colleagues. Indeed, surveys in the U.S. suggest up to one-third of us meet our future spouses at work.

Working from home should be flexible

After the end of the 9-month Ctrip experiment, we asked all volunteers if they wanted to continue working from home. Surprisingly, 50 percent of them opted to return to the office. The saying is “the three great enemies of working from home are the fridge, the bed and the TV,” and many of them fell victim to one of them. They told us it was hard to predict in advance, but after a couple of months working from home they figured out if it worked for them or not. And after we let the less-successful home-based employees return to the office, those remaining had a 25 percent higher rate of productivity.

Working from home is a privilege

Working from home for employees should be a perk. In our Ctrip experiment, home-based workers increased their productivity by 13 percent. So on average were being highly productive. But there is always the fear that one or two employees may abuse the system. So those whose performance drops at home should be warned, and if necessary recalled into the office for a couple of months before they are given a second chance.

There are two other impacts of working from home that should be addressed

The first deals with the decline in prices for urban commercial and residential spaces. The impact of a massive roll-out in working from home is likely to be falling demand for both housing and office space in the center of cities like New York and San Francisco. Ever since the 1980s, the centers of large U.S. cities have become denser and more expensive. Younger graduate workers in particular have flocked to city centers and pushed up housing and office prices. This 40-year year bull run has ended .

If prices fell back to their levels in say the 1990s or 2000s this would lead to massive drops of 50 percent or more in city-center apartment and office prices. In reverse, the suburbs may be staging a comeback. If COVID-19 pushed people to part-time working from home and part-time commuting by car, the suburbs are the natural place to locate these smaller drivable offices. The upside to this is the affordability crisis of apartments in city centers could be coming to an end as property prices drop.

The second impact I see is a risk of increased political polarization. In the 1950s, Americans all watched the same media, often lived in similar areas and attended similar schools. By the 2020s, media has become fragmented, residential segregation by income has increased dramatically , and even our schools are starting to fragment with the rise of charter schools.

The one constant equalizer — until recently — was the workplace. We all have to come into work and talk to our colleagues. Hence, those on the extreme left or right are forced to confront others over lunch and in breaks, hopefully moderating their views. If we end up increasing our time at home — particularly during the COVID lock-down — I worry about an explosion of radical political views.

But with an understanding of these risks and some forethought for how to mitigate them, a future with more of us working from home can certainly work well.

Work From Home vs. Work From Office: Which Is Actually Better?

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Why I Stopped Watching YouTube Videos at 1.5x Speed

I stopped posting photos to instagram for a year: here's why, here’s why i'll always buy a laptop with a dedicated gpu.

Lately, a lot of companies have started asking their workforce to return to the office after enjoying work from home (WFH) ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

But which is actually better for you as an employee? Let's compare working from home and working from an office and discuss the pros and cons of each.

The Pros of Work From Home

1. More Flexibility and Freedom

Being able to work in your comfy pajamas at your own pace away from scrutinous managers is a benefit that's hard to quantify. In fact, more than half of our readers prefer work from home .

Working from home is especially useful for parents with young kids since it allows them to attend to their needs without necessarily having to take leaves, contributing to a better work-life balance and increased job satisfaction.

2. No More Commute to Work

In the US, the average one-way commute to work is a little under 30 minutes according to Zippia . That's roughly an hour of round-trip commute a day or 260 hours a year assuming you work five days a week.

The average hourly wage as of July 2023 is $33.74 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . So that's $8,772 you're losing each year in lost wages. Note that we haven't even accounted for costs like fuel, car maintenance, and depreciation yet!

3. It's Better for the Environment

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency , transportation accounted for 28% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, making it the biggest contributor to climate change.

That means working from home is not just better for you, but also for the environment since you're reducing your carbon footprint by not driving your car to work, for example.

4. It Can Lower Your Expenses

Aside from not having to commute, you can also save money working from home by not having to spend on childcare, buying lunch at work, and updating your wardrobe every year.

Also, since rent is much higher in commercial areas than in residential areas, you can move to a cheaper place that's further away from your workplace without having to switch jobs.

The Cons of Work From Home

Woman multitasking with dog, baby, and laptop

1. It's Easier to Procrastinate at Home

Although it's less stressful, working at home makes it easier to procrastinate since the working hours are not clearly defined, and you don't have a direct manager supervising you. For people who lack self-control and a good work ethic, working from home can invite laziness.

2. It Can Be More Distracting

In an office, everyone has a mutual understanding that work is the main objective. But at home, there are a number of things that can distract you like important errands, housework, loud neighbors, visitors, your kids, or even just doomscrolling social media .

3. It Can Get Lonely and Isolating

Water cooler chats at work may seem trivial, but they do admittedly fulfill your social needs. Working from home has the tendency to feel isolating after a while. After all, Zoom meetings are not a substitute for rich, in-person conversations.

4. It Can Subject You to Bias During Appraisals

If you're working from home, but your colleagues aren't, you might be perceived as less committed or loyal to the company. This in turn can subject you to bias during appraisals as those who worked in the office may be able to negotiate a higher pay raise .

The Pros of Work From Office

colleagues in a meeting with laptops open

1. Faster Communication With Your Team

A verbal discussion with a colleague sitting next to you about a presentation due next week, for example, is way faster than texting them on Slack and waiting for their reply.

Working in an office with your team also fosters creativity, problem-solving, and rapport-building since you can brainstorm together and bounce ideas off each other.

2. It Teaches You Hard and Soft Skills

If you're new to the industry, it's better to work in an office than to work at home. Why? Because learning new skills and getting hands-on experience are more important priorities to you for now, and those things are harder to come when working from home.

3. It Makes Planning Your Day Easier

Planning your day becomes easier when you have a fixed schedule. Sure, it's not very convenient, but once you're done with your working hours in the office, how you use the rest of your day is totally up to you. But when working from home, employees are often expected to be available well past their normal schedule.

4. It's Better for Career Growth

Working on-site can also prove to be better for your career growth since it grants you deeper industry exposure, builds your network, and helps advance to higher positions. When working from home, those opportunities are easier to miss.

The Cons of Work From Office

woman looking stressed in the office as others point their pens at her

1. Lack of Privacy

Micromanaging superiors and overly friendly colleagues can encroach on your personal space at work and make you unable to concentrate. Such is not the case at home, although remote workers do have to deal with employee surveillance software .

2. Encourages a Sedentary Lifestyle

One lesser-discussed con of working from an office is the extreme lack of mobility. Sure, you might have the comfiest chair in the world, but we don't need to remind you how unhealthy it can be to sit in one place for eight hours in a row almost every day.

3. More Stressful and Demanding

There's no sugarcoating it—some offices are terrible places to work. Unless you're someone who has high stress tolerance or works in a company with a rather laid-back culture, working from an office is usually much more stressful and can be anxiety-inducing, especially in certain industries and high-profile jobs.

4. You Can't Work at Your Own Pace

Some people are naturally more productive in the evening or at night, but if your workplace is like most others, you're expected to come to work every morning at the exact same time. This can be ineffective because you're not allowed—let alone encouraged—to work when you're at your peak energy level.

More People Prefer Working From Home

Study after study concludes the same thing: more people prefer working from home than on-site. It's becoming increasingly more common for job seekers today to look for remote work opportunities and prioritize flexibility alongside pay.

Of course, WFH isn't ideal for all industries, and not everyone prefers it. And if you're new to the industry, it definitely helps to get some hands-on experience and industry exposure first before you go hunting for remote work.

Work & Career
Remote Work
Self-Employment

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Remote Working vs. the Office — Which is Better?

Over the past few years, remote working has transformed millions of people's lives — giving them more time for family, more control over their schedules, and a better work-life balance. But now, a growing number of companies — including tech giants like Google and Meta — are making their employees return to the office, citing concerns about productivity, innovation, creativity, and employee engagement. But how does working in the office measure up when compared to working remotely? On this episode, we explore the future of remote work, and hear about the latest research on which settings and models are best. When does it pay off to bring workers back, and when is working remotely more fruitful? We hear stories about how digital nomads are reshaping what work looks like — and the places they live; how working from home affects productivity; and how workplace psychologists say office design could lure employees back to the workplace.

What Mix of WFH and Office Time Is Right for You?

by Robert C. Pozen and Alexandra Samuel

Summary .

Many professionals will choose a hybrid approach to work after the pandemic, sometimes working from home, sometimes from the office. But how to decide where to spend each day isn’t always as obvious as it seems. The authors describe a data-driven process for understanding where you’re most productive on which kinds of tasks — and how to convince your boss that your resulting plan is best for their interests as well.

Over the past year, many of us have found things to love about working from home like flexibility , the ability to focus , and no commute. Now that offices are starting re-open, you might start to remember that there is a lot to love about the office, too: social interaction, the joys of collaboration, and of course, that endless pot of coffee.

Partner Center

The Case for Remote Work

The shift to remote work represents perhaps the single greatest modern opportunity to improve your company's happiness, diversity, economics, productivity, agility, talent pool and environmental impact. It's easier to do now than ever, and the world's most innovative companies are adopting it at an unprecedented rate. But while this may be an incredible opportunity for companies that embrace remote work, it's also poised to become an existential threat to companies that don't.

I believe that offices are a fundamentally antiquated concept. So in 2016, I sold nearly all of my belongings, moved to Brazil , and officially started working remote. I traveled, met and worked with some incredible people, and grew dramatically as a person and professional. A few years later, I moved to Silicon Valley and returned to an office.

Through this experience of oscillating between having an office and not, I've developed a deep appreciation for the impact that flexible work arrangements can have on individuals, companies, and society as a whole. And while remote work has become a more and more common reality, it has also been met with deep resistance and misconception.

This is not a trend; it's a conscious shift

It's very easy to treat remote work like it's just another "ping pong table" or "nap room". That is to say, it's easy to view it as a trendy Silicon Valley job perk. But it's not; it is a fundamental shift in the way that humans work and live, and it's bigger than any single company or industry.

69% of U.S. companies offer flexible work arrangements today, amounting to an increase of 173% since 2005 alone. 66% of knowledge workers and 71% of Millennials believe the office will be obsolete by 2030 . This shift represents perhaps the single greatest modern opportunity to improve your company's happiness, diversity, economics, productivity, agility, talent pool and environmental impact. All in one move.

Remote work makes people happy. 71% of remote workers say they're happy in their job, compared to only 55% of office workers. Over 80% of U.S. workers say that working remotely would make them happier. 91% of remote workers are glad they went remote, citing a better work-life balance, more time with family, and no commute as major contributors to their happiness.

While studying what makes people happy, researchers at Princeton found that commutes were the biggest detractor and family relationships were the biggest contributor to general human happiness and psychological health. The top reason people move is for work , and the top reason they don't is for family . Simply put, offices separate families. They force people to move away from home and spend an unnecessary amount of time just going to and from the office.

In San Francisco, over a lifetime, if you commute 3-4 days a week, you're talking about giving up 500 days of your life to commuting. – Scott Mautz, Senior Executive at Procter & Gamble

The average commute time in the U.S. is 50 minutes , and has been steadily on the rise for the past five decades. This means the average commuter loses 9 days of their life per year to the commute. But that's not all they lose. Couples with commutes longer than 45 minutes are 40% likelier to divorce. Lengthy commuters experience more recurring back and neck pain, sleep and exercise less, and eat more fast food.

A 20 minute commute increase has the same negative effect on job satisfaction as a 19% pay decrease , and one in four people have quit their job because of their commute. Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, estimates that every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10% fewer social connections at work.

Remote work is inclusive. Modern companies strive to champion diversity and inclusion, but are severely limited by the office, which excludes entire populations from the workforce by imposing geographic, economic, physical and cultural restrictions, among others. "Anybody can work here, including you, so long as you live in this country, in this state, in this city, which is invariably expensive and couldn't be further away from your family and culture..."

Remote work removes these restrictions and opens doors for women, minorities, parents, people with disabilities and more. Across virtually all categories, diverse candidates say that flexible work is the top benefit they desire. Women are significantly more likely than men to prefer remote work, and they're more likely to quit a job because it doesn't offer remote work. They also experience more harassment in an office setting, and are disproportionately affected by the lack of privacy that offices afford. Minorities are less likely to live in top job markets, and are given more access to opportunities when companies support remote work. More than one-third of remote workers are parents who decided to go remote so they could care for their children.

‍ 463,000 disabled Americans currently work from home, and 83% of them wouldn't be able to work from an office. Even so, only 7.1% of disabled Americans have been able to secure remote roles, while 81% are unemployed today. Remote work makes it possible for people like Matthew Ramir, a developer with cerebral palsy who once broke his ankle while commuting, to do his job safely, comfortably and confidently.

Being able to work from home is a huge stress relief. It gives me a lot of confidence that I'm able to function as a normal employee and be able to navigate the workplace with that disability. – Matthew Ramir, remote developer with cerebral palsy

From military spouses and veterans, to senior citizens, to introverts and people with social anxiety, remote work allows for accessible, enjoyable, and personalized work arrangements which respect the nuances of the individual. It broadens the talent pool, enabling companies to hire people they never would have previously had access to, regardless of identity, socioeconomic status, physical ability or location.

Speaking of location, geographic diversity is often overlooked, but the reality is that human cognition and creativity are inextricably linked to physical environments. When everyone is in the same environment, as they are in an office, their thoughts are homogenized. Remote work allows the space for diverse and creative thought, and in doing so, helps companies develop truly global mindsets. It's one thing to empathize with someone , it's another thing to be someone . To live in the community, speak the language, and share the emotions of the people you build for. The only way to do that is with a diverse, distributed team.

Remote work enriches companies, employees & economies. Multiple studies have shown that by 2030, the US could see an economic boost of $4.5 trillion annually from flexible working alone, with much of that benefitting the people and communities that need it the most, like minorities and women, the unemployed and underemployed, and the vast number of underdeveloped rural communities across the country. But going remote doesn't just boost the economy. It also saves employees and companies a ton of money.

Apple spent $5 billion constructing Apple Park in Cupertino and Google spent $2.4 billion acquiring Chelsea Market in New York. Offices occupy 474 million square feet of space in Silicon Valley alone (a region with a housing shortage of 7:1 ) at an average cost of $158 per square foot per year, or $23,858 per employee per year. And here's the kicker: studies have repeatedly shown that, across all industries, office desks are vacant 50-60% of the time .

Even modest flexible work programs have been found to save companies an average of $11,000 per employee per year. In 2005, Aetna started allowing its employees to transition to remote work. Today, 14,500 of Aetna's 35,000 employees have gone remote, allowing them to cut 2.7 million square feet of office space at $29 a square foot, for about $78 million in cost savings per year. Amazon , American Express , General Electric , McKesson , Dell , Salesforce , Oracle and countless others have all done the same thing and saved multiple millions per year in the process.

If a Silicon Valley company with 30,000 employees were to go 50% remote, they could expect a savings of $357 million per year, on real estate costs alone.

And real estate is just the beginning. On average, it costs $97,166 to relocate an employee. Typically, they're being brought to pretty expensive and crowded places. The top job markets are almost always the cities with the highest cost of living , like New York, Seattle and San Francisco, where the average home price soars above $1 million . In Silicon Valley, you'll need a salary of more than $230,000 to afford a starter home. This has become such a problem that companies are spending billions of dollars to build housing units near their offices, in addition to inflated salaries, benefits, and tax expenses.

Then, employees spend an average of $4,000 per year commuting to the office. In the process, significant wear and tear is caused to expensive public infrastructure, like roads and train systems. Over 150 million people commute to work every day in the US. 76% drive alone , 9% carpool, 5% use public transportation, and 3% walk or cycle. In more than half of the top U.S. metro areas, more people work remote than commute by public transportation. The reduced impact on public infrastructure is so significant that the IRS created special tax deductions just for people that work from home. And at the end of all this, companies invest millions of dollars in research immersion programs to send their people back out into the world from which they came.

Productivity

Remote work improves productivity. Researchers at Stanford University found that remote workers are an average of 35-40% more productive than their in-office counterparts. Arguably, one of the most productive aspects of offices is their ability to facilitate collaboration and connection. But they can also hurt it. 70% of office workers report feeling distracted at work, citing office noise and interruptions from co-workers.

Studies have shown that office workers can lose up to 86 minutes per day because of noise alone, and 65% of creatives said that silence was the most important requirement for them to do good work. It takes the average person 23 minutes to regain focus after being interrupted. What may be a serendipitous interaction to one person could be a productivity killer to another. Additionally, studies have shown that offices are breeding grounds for sickness . Unsurprisingly, remote workers are less likely to get sick, and thus take 56% less sick days .

Offices were invented during a time when collaboration and communication could only happen in person. The office was never optimal; it was necessary. That simply isn't true anymore.

Remote work also de-biases and reduces bureaucracy by forcing companies to measure performance by results and output , and nothing else. You're probably all too familiar with the fallacy that the people who spend the most time in the office are the most productive. When companies go remote, the focus shifts from office formalities to the work itself, because the work is what's most visible. This allows people to be judged by the quality of their work, rather than their physical appearance or office mannerisms.

Remote work attracts and retains talent. 95% of U.S. knowledge workers want to work remotely, 76% said they'd be more loyal to their employer if they could, and 74% would be willing to quit their job for one that offers remote work. Perhaps most compellingly, companies that allow remote work experience 25% less employee turnover than companies that don't. They're able to hire 33% faster too. Unsurprisingly, a lot of companies are catching on to this. In the last two years alone, there’s been a 78% increase of job posts on LinkedIn that mention work flexibility.

The ability for employees to work remotely used to be a distinctive perk. Today, it’s increasingly an expectation. You might not get special attention for offering flexibility, but you will probably stand out for not having it (and not in a good way). – LinkedIn's Annual Talent Report

Remote work is inherently flexible. As organizations scale and age, it becomes harder to adapt to change. But when companies introduce work flexibility, they themselves become flexible in the process. During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies all around the world panicked to set up remote work, warning that the transition would result in reduced capacity and services . Meanwhile, remote companies like InVision, Buffer, Basecamp, Automattic and Zapier continued business as usual. Remote companies are decentralized, and decentralized companies are adaptive.

Decentralized work arrangements are a hotbed, and a forcing function , for innovation. They force companies to adopt more efficient tools and processes, communicate transparently and asynchronously, iterate rapidly and openly, and include everyone in the process. Where offices make hallway conversations possible in the short term, they become a crux for broken processes in the long term. You can get away with more inefficiencies in person, because they're less obvious. But those hallway conversations aren't inclusive, aren't documented, and aren't efficient. Yet they're typically one of the things we defend most about offices. They're a bug, and as the transition to remote work causes a company to innovate on its own culture, those bugs are fixed.

Your company is a product, and probably your most important one. It's the one you use to build your other products. You should recognize it has bugs too, and needs to be iterated on. – Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp

A company's culture is just as much a product of the company as the goods it sells. And while conversations about innovation tend to focus primarily on products, often the first step to innovating on a product is to innovate on the company which produces it. For this reason, a company's appetite for remote work can serve as a sort of litmus test for its ability to innovate.

Remote work adoption is a highly visible and unambiguous form of innovation. It's something you can ask about in an interview and get a simple "yes" or "no" answer. Often, self-innovation is the genesis for product innovation. If you want to improve the thing you make, you have to be willing to improve the thing that makes it first. The companies that lean into this innovation, rather than resist it, are the same companies that lean into product innovation.

Environment

Remote work is better for the planet. Every year, U.S. remote workers prevent 3.6 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere by not commuting. That's the equivalent to planting 91 million trees . With those savings, you could power 538,361 homes for a year. Additionally, this results in 7.8 billion less vehicle miles traveled, 530 million vehicle trips avoided, $498 million in reduced traffic accident costs and $980 million in oil savings. Those aren't projections; they're real EPA statistics representing the impact of remote work today. Simply put, commuters and offices are two of the highest contributors of carbon emissions in the US, and remote work significantly cuts down on both.

But this doesn't even have to happen at a broad systemic level to make a difference. The impact that a single company can have on the environment, simply by adopting remote work, is immense on its own. When Sun Microsystems allowed its 24,000 U.S. employees to start working remotely, they discovered they were preventing the release of 32,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, reducing their carbon footprint by 98% , even after accounting for increased emissions at home. Xerox did the same thing and found that its remote workers drove 92 million fewer miles, saved 4.6 million gallons of gas, reduced carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 41,000 metric tons , and saved the company over $10 million.

Going remote

Flexible work policies are easier to adopt now than ever. The tools and processes are all in place, the cultural and individual implications have been studied in great depth, and the remaining resistance to remote work typically amounts to little more than general change aversion. My dad has worked fully remote since the '90s. If he could do it then, we can certainly do it now.

In fact, you've probably already had some degree of experience with remote work, even if not through a formal policy at your company. From staying home with the kids to taking shelter from a pandemic, many of us have benefited from flexibility at work, and in turn, we've proven that it's possible. But I want to be clear: quarantine and remote work are not the same thing. One-off experiences with flexible work are not comparable to formalized remote work arrangements.

When companies formally adopt remote work, it becomes ingrained in their culture, and the cognitive load of switching between the office and home dissipates. Remote workers become a priority, and the necessary tools and processes get put into place. But that only happens when organizations make the commitment to do so.

Furthermore, remote work isn't a panacea for your organization's problems. If it sucks to work at your company from an office, it will suck to work at your company from home. It's important to go in with the right expectations, knowing that remote work isn't perfect, but it is a critical step in the right direction. If you're ready to take that step, I have a model that I'd like to propose to you.

Hub & Spoke model

Despite the data and arguments presented here, offices (and people who like offices) aren't the problem. Rather, remote work is the opportunity. Companies can choose to go fully remote, partially remote, or simply support flexible work policies. The important thing is that they do what's right for them, within the context of their industry and corporate culture. Most will probably choose to have a little bit of both, and the data indicates that's actually the right way to approach this.

Gallup studies conducted with hundreds of thousands of employees show that the most productive and engaged workers spend 60%-80% of their time remote . They're also the most likely to have a best friend at work - even more so than office workers. Interestingly, these numbers slip as people spend more time remote, or more time in the office.

The sweet spot for productivity and relationship-building is a weekly schedule of roughly one day in the office and four days remote.

With this in mind, I would like to propose what I call the Hub & Spoke model. This is a hybrid approach to flexible work, where companies go regionally remote. Here are the core concepts:

Reduce and distribute: Instead of having a giant HQ in a major metro area with a desk for every employee, companies open numerous collaboration hubs in cities all around the country or globe. Smaller companies achieve the same effect through co-working spaces. Now, they're able to enter 2nd and 3rd tier cities, introducing location diversity to their organization and reducing their real estate footprint in the process.
Utilize at will: Employees may use the collaboration hub as much or little as they prefer, but the company establishes a baseline schedule where teams come together once every 1-2 weeks for collaborative work and meetings.
Live and work anywhere: Collaboration hubs are placed in central locations, so employees can live in multiple different communities. If adopted universally, employees will experience significantly shortened commute times. Not to mention, they'll only commute a minimum of once every two weeks. This broadens the radius of communities people can live in, thus easing the real estate and traffic burden on any given place.
Results over location: Employees are compensated based on the value they generate to the company, rather than their location or cost of living. Whether a piece of code was written in California or Nebraska makes no difference in the value it generates for the company. A senior engineer is a senior engineer, and their compensation must reflect that.

Importantly, this model is flexible and should be adjusted according to the needs and culture of each team that implements it. One could imagine numerous areas of optionality, including:

Team collocation vs. distribution: Some teams may find it's best to base all members in the same region. For example, the Email Software team could have a hub in Atlanta, while the Video Software team has a hub in Los Angeles. Everyone still works remotely, but each team is in the same time zone, and they get together at the same collaboration hub. Other teams may find they benefit from being fully distributed. For example, the Customer Service team could be based all around the world, and thus have people online at all times of day. The result is that each team benefits from flexible work in a way that's suited to them.
Schedule rigidity: Some teams may have no schedule requirements, others may need everyone to show up once per week, and more than likely, there will be several teams that still need to be fully onsite. Some lines of work are more fit for remote work than others. You can't maintain a data center from home, and that's alright. The key is to optimize for the unique needs of each team, and maximize the benefits they get from remote work.

Truly, optimization is at the heart of remote work. The problem isn't that companies still work from offices; it's that they only work from offices. We're taking a "one size fits all" approach to work arrangements, where the office is the only option. It isn't time to get rid of that option, but it is time to introduce a few others which fit the diverse individuals and teams that comprise a healthy company, and can adapt with the company as it grows.

De facto remote

As companies scale, remote work becomes less of a choice, and more of an unavoidable byproduct of growth. If you've ever worked at a large company, you've probably participated in countless meetings where every attendee is in an office, but nobody is together. You're all participating in a video call from multiple different offices. That's when the oxymoronic term "remote office" enters your corporate vernacular, and at that moment, you're officially de facto remote. You’re physically in an office, but you might as well be anywhere. And it happens much earlier than you'd anticipate. The tipping point is around 300-500 employees, depending on the quality of your organization design.

If you intend to scale your company, you also intend to go remote, whether it's explicitly part of the plan or not.

We recognized this at HubSpot when people started dialing into meetings from different floors of the same building. At the time, we had less than 500 people in the building, spread out across 3 floors. On a much larger scale, we've observed the same phenomena at Google , where we have teams in more than 150 cities around the world. 48% of our meetings involve employees from two or more buildings, 39% involve two or more cities, and 30% involve two or more time zones. It's unsurprising that both companies have become remote work innovators, recognizing the opportunity, and also the necessity.

Opportunity or threat

This is a defining moment for the world's greatest companies, which will be faced with the choice of adopting remote work or hemorrhaging top talent to more innovative cultures. In this way, remote work can either be viewed as a significant opportunity or a great existential threat to a company, depending on how they respond to it. The question simply isn't whether we will go remote. It's when and how, and each company's answer to that will determine whether they're thriving or dying at the end of this.

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Why Working From Home Is Better Essay

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Introduction

Benefits of working remotely, works cited.

Working from home, a worker is at a greater advantage with several benefits than those who work in the office. Employees working remotely have less stress because they do not have to commute daily to work. Besides, working from home guarantees better work-life balance since workers are more flexible in deciding when to open and close their work. In addition, workers operating remotely save more finance and spend less. Overall, employees working from home are likely to be more productive and experience higher growth than those performing their duties directly from the office.

During the COVID-19 period, individuals were forced to work from home following the global lockdown undertaken by most governments as a measure to mitigate the spread of the deadly virus. Despite the restriction, the approach proved essential since many staff found it easier and more convenient to work remotely as opposed to the workplace. Besides, workers recorded a higher productivity rate compared to the periods when they worked in the offices (Ozkan et al. 3). During the short period and the subsequent adoption by most organizations, it demonstrated that numerous hidden advantages characterize working from home and that most people benefited greatly from the measure (Parker et al. 12). While there could be some disadvantages of remote working, recent experience showed that people benefited and enjoyed working from their homes and would still prefer working remotely even after the end of the pandemic.

Saves Money

Additionally, employees working from home save more money and spend less than their colleagues going to the offices. When performing duties at home, a worker is spared unnecessary expenses such as transportation costs. Whether one uses public or private means, the daily movement cost to the workplace is always exorbitant. These costs translate to money (Purwanto et al. 6238). Remote working, therefore, comes with the relief of not incurring the daily transport cost and the related costs of traveling (Wolfer and Sondra). The money meant for transport costs can be channeled to other development projects for personal growth or saved for other things.

Besides the transport cost, individuals going to the workplace incur other expenses, such as refreshments during lunchtime, since not all organizations provide meals for their staff. For enterprises that do not offer food, workers are forced to purchase the meals on their own leading to more expenditure. Even for the businesses which provide mealtimes for their employees, the foodstuffs are never sufficient and often supplemented by other items bought with money from personal accounts (Ojala and Satu 78). Professional wardrobes are additional costs that characterize the workplace since many office jobs require cabinets. Therefore, remote working facilitates money saving by avoiding such expenses.

Improved mental health

Workers working remotely have proven to enjoy better mental health compared to their counterparts working in offices. This is attributed to the peace and relaxation they have at home because they are alone with no manager to bother and quarrel with them. In addition, employees working from home enjoy better mental health because they can have enough sleep, a thing denied by staff in offices (Wolfer). Remote work allows a worker to close work at a convenience and have enough rest.

Facilitates Flexibility and Work Balance

Additionally, employees working from home enjoy more flexibility than those in offices because they can have a personal schedule to balance both official and domestic work. Workers have various errands which they must perform, and at the same time, they are obligated to perform official duties designated by their employees. At the workplace, the staff is confined to one area and a typical work schedule, which makes it challenging to balance both responsibilities. However, remote working provides suppleness as one can set their timetables, which allows them to balance both duties (Ipsen et al. 2). Since an individual is able to organize private plans, they can end their day as they choose and resort to other domestic duties. Similarly, a colleague working remotely can multitask and achieve success domestically and at their respective organizations (Oskarsson et al. 39). For example, staff can suspend their official duties for a while and do laundry work or kitchen work and resume later, a privilege that cannot be obtained while going to the formal workplace.

Working from home is also flexible in the context of providing enough family time. Often, employees who visit the workplace in the morning and return in the evening need more time to spend with family members, leading to a family gap (Oskarsson et al. 40). Family bonds are strengthened by physical presence; be it a parent-kid bond or couple bond, the partners must at least spend some time together (Purwanto et al. 6239). This, however, is different with many families whose members do not work remotely because they spend most of their time in their workplaces and the remaining time sleeping due to exhaustion. After spending time in the workplace and traveling back home, it is evident that one gets tired and takes a nap (Galanti et al. 2). The ripple effect is then felt in the family, which will be the continued absence of the member. A father, for instance, will be considered absent by his kids and even his wife. Such mysteries are therefore prevented by working from home, which provides the needed flexibility and time for family members. Individuals working remotely have enough time with their family members and are always available whenever needed.

Provides Comfort

Furthermore, working from home grants employees some sort of comfort following limited supervision. While performing duties remotely, a worker is comfortable because they are free to do anything at any time and can choose any position for their workstation. Whether under a tree shade, in the bedroom, or wherever, an employee working from home is of their own volition to choose and can relocate the workstation whenever necessary (Wolfer & Sondra 2). Moreover, employees working from home enjoy the comfort of serenity and peace that the home environment provides. At the offices, a worker is likely to engage in brawls with colleagues or managers, something which is avoidable while working remotely. And since they work in comfort, employees are more productive while working from home. Besides, the comfort also gives workers at home a greater chance of personal growth and numerous opportunities.

Less Commuter Stress

Lastly, daily commuting is full of stressors, such as traffic jams and rude travelers. While this is not an everyday occurrence, on bad days, the workers will likely experience long traffic jams or face rude travelers who do not care about their feelings. Such experiences are dull and affect one’s productivity (Oskarsson et al. 40). Remote working, therefore, saves employees from facing such experiences and ensures they remain in high spirits for their respective duties. At home, a colleague will not meet a rude traveler or be held in a long traffic jam which will lower their productivity.

While it is not perfect due to minor challenges like lack of concentration due to possible distractions from family members, especially kids, which might lower one’s efficiency and effectiveness, such challenges can be easily avoided by setting up a home office far from the children’s reach. Another minor challenge that might be attributed to working from home is the lack of creativity and innovation since staff does not share ideas. However, that can be sorted by telephone consultation and engagement among colleagues (Ozkan et al. 2). After all, employees normally have communication outside of the workplace; thus, such information can be used for the same. Some may also argue that working remotely is difficult to supervise, but that is not a problem, provided a worker understands what is required of them. Some employees work well under minimum supervision, as they should. Despite these challenges, working from home remains the better option for many individuals owing to the comfort and tranquility it provides.

Despite the end of the Corona pandemic, workers in America and other countries would still prefer to work from home than work in the offices because it offers flexibility for easier work-life balance. In addition, working from home provides comfort and tranquility facilitated by the home environment. Furthermore, individuals working from home are spared of the commuter stressors like traffic jams that accompany staff going to the workplace daily. Lastly, working from home is economical as it helps employees to save money by avoiding unnecessary expenses like transport costs.

Galanti, Teresa, et al. Work from Home during the COVID-19 Outbreak: The Impact on Employees’ Remote Work Productivity, Engagement, and Stress .” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, vol. 63, no. 7, 2021, p. e426, Web.

Ipsen, Christine, et al. “ Six Key Advantages and Disadvantages of Working from Home in Europe during COVID-19 .” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 18, no. 4, 2021, p. 1826, Web.

Ojala, Satu. “ Supplemental Work at Home among Finnish Wage Earners: Involuntary Overtime or Taking advantage of Flexibility? ” Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies , vol. 1, no. 2, 2011, pp. 77-97, Web.

Oskarsson, Emma, et al. “Work-Life Balance among Newly Employed Officers – A Qualitative Study.” Health Psychology Report , vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, pp. 39-48.

Ozkan, Necmettin, Oya Erdil, and Mehmet Şahin Gök. “ Agile Teams Working from Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review on New Advantages and Challenges .” International Conference on Lean and Agile Software Development . Springer, Cham, 2022, Web.

Parker, Kim, et al. “How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has – and Hasn’t – Changed the Way Americans Work.” Pew Research Center , 2020, pp. 1-31.

Purwanto, Agus, et al. “ Impact of Work from Home (WFH) on Indonesian Teachers’ Performance during the Covid-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Study .” International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, vol. 29, no. 5, 2020, pp. 6235-6244, Web.

Wolfer, Sondra. “ 9 Best Benefits of Working from Home (and 5 Potential Drawbacks) .” The Muse, Web.

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More From Forbes

Remote vs. in-person work: pros and cons to weigh as a business owner.

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Founder/CEO of Rankings.io , an SEO agency that helps elite personal injury law firms dominate first page rankings.

We’re heading further into Q4 2021, and many companies have already decided whether they’ll remain remote, return to in-person work or take on some form of a hybrid model moving forward. Some companies, however, might not yet have decided how their employees should “show up” for work in the future.

As a business owner who has run a remote company for almost a decade, I’ve made several observations on the pros and cons of remote work over the years. If you’re a business owner still weighing what’s next for the future of your company’s working model, here are some pros and cons of remote work you should consider. Note: in this article, I’m focusing on the binary of remote versus in-person work, not on hybrid models.

Pro Of Remote Work: Access To Remote Talent

One of the most significant benefits remote work has given me as a business owner is access to talent from around the country.

A wider candidate pool enables you to find people with skills and knowledge that might not be common in your area. Access to remote talent can also help you keep your costs more stable. For example, hiring a marketing manager based out of Houston will likely cost you less than hiring a marketing manager based out of New York City, due in large part to the major difference in the cost of living between the two cities.

Con Of Remote Work: Navigating Different Legal Requirements

The flip side of the ability to hire employees from different areas? Having to make sure your business is in compliance with different legal requirements.

Minimum wage rates and payroll requirements are just two things that can differ by state. Consider this: according to the U.S. Department of Labor , the frequency of payday in California and Michigan “depends on the occupation” of the employee, whereas the frequency of payday in Arizona must be “two or more days in a month, not more than 16 days apart.”

Pro Of Remote Work: Lower Operational Costs

A major benefit of remote work is that it helps you lower your operational costs. Without a physical office, you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars in rent per year, buy and maintain office technology and furniture, pay for Wi-Fi and more.

Instead, you can take those savings and use them in other ways to scale your business and make life better for your team, like by hiring more help and giving more employee bonuses.

Con Of Remote Work: Inconsistent Work Environments

However, without a physical office, your employees won’t have consistent work environments. When you operate from a physical office, you can set everyone up with similar technology and furniture. You’ll know your employees are using your secure Wi-Fi network, surrounded by other company personnel.

Operating remotely, you can give your employees technology stipends or ship them equipment, but there’s no guarantee they won’t just use their personal laptops. Additionally, your employees can work from different types of locations. This is great for employees but can make work more challenging — for example, the employee might not hear important information in a Zoom call due to loud background music at a coffee shop.

Pro Of Remote Work: Easier Business Growth

When you run a company from a physical office, each time you prepare to hire a new employee, you have to figure out where in the office they’ll sit.

You’ll eventually hit a point where the growth of your business will be confined to the space you have left in the building. If you can’t squeeze in new employees, you might have to pause hiring while you look into a new office or see if your current office can be remodeled. However, with remote work, there are no physical barriers to your company’s growth.

Con Of Remote Work: Harder To Bond And Communicate

Not having physical barriers to your company’s growth enables you to hire more people but makes it harder for employees to bond and communicate with each other.

For one, interactions aren’t as spontaneous with remote work. There aren’t water cooler chats or spur-of-the-moment lunch gatherings. Day-to-day communication takes a hit, too. It can be tricky to comprehend communication over mediums like Zoom and Slack. After all, tone can be notoriously tough to decipher online.

Pro Of Remote Work: Less Likelihood Of Turbulent Drama

While communication and bonding are tougher in remote work settings, there’s a silver lining. When your business is remote, there’s less likelihood of turbulent office drama.

You don’t have to organize events like office birthday parties and happy hours, which can be ripe grounds for drama, or worse, employees getting harmed. Even day-to-day operations at an office can cause drama. For example, employees in one department might get upset if they see employees in a different department typically walking out of the office an hour earlier.

That’s not to say that drama and gossip won’t happen with remote work. But, in many ways, remote work makes it harder for that drama and gossip to take place.

Remote Versus In-Person Work: Other Considerations

As you can see, many of the arguments surrounding remote versus in-person work have pros and cons. The pros and cons I’ve explored are by no means exhaustive. Other factors to consider include:

• Work-Life Balance: In some ways, remote work encourages better work-life balance, like empowering employees to feel more comfortable taking breaks. In other ways, remote work fogs the boundaries of work and life.

• Interruptions And Distractions: Interruptions and distractions are inevitable regardless of the work setting; it’s just a matter of the kind of interruptions and distractions. At home , employees might get interrupted by a pet or distracted by the sound of their neighbor mowing the lawn. At the office , they might get interrupted by a coworker or distracted by their desk buddy’s loud music.

• Mental Health: Remote work can improve mental health in many ways, such as by giving employees more flexibility. However, remote work can also harm mental health in some ways, such as by making employees feel isolated.

For me, the pros of running a remote company outweigh the cons. However, ultimately, it’s up to you to consider the pros and cons of remote work from the lens of your company’s unique circumstances and make the best decision for you and your team.

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Illustration of a woman working from bed with her cats, laptop and chart papers

Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?

Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..

By Rebecca Stropoli
August 18, 2021
CBR - Economics
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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.

An accelerated debate

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.

The productivity paradigm

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.

No commute, and fewer hours worked

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.

Infographic: People want working from home to stick after the pandemic subsides

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.

Remote-work technology goes mainstream

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.

How remote work could change city centers

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.

Lost ideas, longer hours?

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.”

Attracting top talent

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.

Does remote work promote equity?

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.”

More data to come

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

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, “Why Working from Home Will Stick,” Working paper, April 2021.
———, “60 Million Fewer Commuting Hours per Day: How Americans Use Time Saved by Working from Home,” Working paper, September 2020.
———, “Let Me Work From Home Or I Will Find Another Job,” Working paper, July 2021.
John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham, and Yueran Ma, “Corporate Flexibility in a Time of Crisis,” Working paper, February 2021.
Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying, “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , October 2015.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson, “Work-from-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographic Flexibility,” Strategic Management Journal , forthcoming.
Morris A. Davis, Andra C. Ghent, and Jesse M. Gregory, “The Work-at-Home Technology Boon and Its Consequences,” Working paper, April 2021.
Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman, “How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?” White paper, June 2020.
Allison Dunatchik, Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, Jerry A. Jacobs, and Haley Stritzel, “Gender, Parenting, and the Rise of Remote Work during the Pandemic: Implications for Domestic Inequality in the United States,” Gender & Society , March 2021.
Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth, “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals,” Working paper, May 2021.
Robert E. Kraut, Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan, and Jane Siegel, “Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work,” in Distributed Work , eds. Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Victoria Vernon, “Telework and Time Use in the United States,” Working paper, May 2020.

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What’s next for remote work: An analysis of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and nine countries

For many workers, COVID-19’s impact has depended greatly on one question: Can I work from home or am I tethered to my workplace? Quarantines, lockdowns, and self-imposed isolation have pushed tens of millions around the world to work from home, accelerating a workplace experiment that had struggled to gain traction before COVID-19 hit.

Now, well into the pandemic, the limitations and the benefits of remote work are clearer. Although many people are returning to the workplace as economies reopen—the majority could not work remotely at all—executives have indicated in surveys that hybrid models of remote work for some employees are here to stay. The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people.

Now that vaccines are awaiting approval, the question looms: To what extent will remote work persist ? In this article, we assess the possibility for various work activities to be performed remotely. 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 The future of work in Europe: Automation, workforce transitions, and the future geography of work , McKinsey Global Institute, June 2020; The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow , McKinsey Global Institute, July 2019; Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation , McKinsey Global Institute, December 2017. 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.

More than 20 percent of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. If remote work took hold at that level, that would mean three to four times as many people working from home than before the pandemic and would have a profound impact on urban economies, transportation, and consumer spending, among other things.

The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people.

More than half the workforce, however, has little or no opportunity for remote work. Some of their jobs require collaborating with others or using specialized machinery; other jobs, such as conducting CT scans, must be done on location; and some, such as making deliveries, are performed while out and about. Many of such jobs are low wage and more at risk from broad trends such as automation and digitization. Remote work thus risks accentuating inequalities at a social level.

The potential for remote work is determined by tasks and activities, not occupations

Remote work raises a vast array of issues and challenges for employees and employers. Companies are pondering how best to deliver coaching remotely and how to configure workspaces to enhance employee safety, among a host of other thorny questions raised by COVID-19. For their part, employees are struggling to find the best home-work balance and equip themselves for working and collaborating remotely.

In this article, however, we aim to granularly define the activities and occupations that can be done from home to better understand the future staying power of remote work. We have analyzed the potential for remote work—or work that doesn’t require interpersonal interaction or a physical presence at a specific worksite—in a range of countries, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We used MGI’s workforce model based on the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to analyze more than 2,000 activities in more than 800 occupations and identify which activities and occupations have the greatest potential for remote work.

The potential for remote work depends on the mix of activities undertaken in each occupation and on their physical, spatial, and interpersonal context. We first assessed the theoretical extent to which an activity can be done remotely. This depends on whether a worker needs to be physically present on-site to do a task, interact with others, or use location-specific machinery or equipment.

Many physical or manual activities, as well as those that require use of fixed equipment, cannot be done remotely. These include providing care, operating machinery, using lab equipment, and processing customer transactions in stores. In contrast, activities such as information gathering and processing, communicating with others, teaching and counseling, and coding data can theoretically be done remotely.

Additionally, employers have found during the pandemic that although some tasks can be done remotely in a crisis, they are much more effectively done in person. These activities include coaching, counseling, and providing advice and feedback; building customer and colleague relationships; bringing new employees into a company; negotiating and making critical decisions; teaching and training; and work that benefits from collaboration, such as innovation, problem-solving, and creativity. If onboarding were to be done remotely, for instance, it would require significant rethinking of the activity to produce outcomes similar to those achieved in person.

For instance, while teaching has moved to remote work during the pandemic, parents and teachers alike say that quality has suffered. Similarly, courtrooms have functioned remotely but are unlikely to remain online going forward out of concern for legal rights and equity—some defendants lack adequate connectivity and lawyers, and judges worry about missing nonverbal cues in video conferences.

So we have devised two metrics for remote work potential: the maximum potential, including all activities that theoretically can be performed remotely, and a lower bound for the effective potential for remote work, which excludes activities that have a clear benefit from being done in person (Exhibit 1).

To determine the overall potential for remote work for jobs and sectors, we use the time spent on different activities within occupations. We find that remote work potential is concentrated in a few sectors. Finance and insurance has the highest potential, with three-quarters of time spent on activities that can be done remotely without a loss of productivity. Management, business services, and information technology have the next highest potential, all with more than half of employee time spent on activities that could effectively be done remotely (Exhibit 2). These sectors are characterized by a high share of workers with college degrees or higher.

Remote work potential is higher in advanced economies

The potential for remote work varies across countries, a reflection of their sector, occupation, and activity mix. Business and financial services are a large share of the UK economy, for example, and it has the highest potential for remote work among the countries we examined. Its workforce could theoretically work remotely one-third of the time without a loss of productivity, or almost half the time but with diminished productivity. (Exhibit 3). Other advanced economies are not far behind; their workforces could dedicate 28 to 30 percent of the time to working remotely without losing productivity.

In emerging economies, employment is skewed toward occupations that require physical and manual activities in sectors like agriculture and manufacturing. The potential for time spent on remote work drops to 12 to 26 percent in the emerging economies we assessed. In India, for instance, the workforce could spend just 12 percent of the time working remotely without losing effectiveness. Although India is known globally for its high-tech and financial services industries, the vast majority of its workforce of 464 million is employed in occupations like retail services and agriculture that cannot be done remotely.

Although India is known globally for its high-tech and financial services industries, the vast majority of its workforce of 464 million is employed in occupations like retail services and agriculture that cannot be done remotely.

A hybrid model that combines some remote work with work in an office is possible for occupations with high remote work potential

For most workers, some activities during a typical day lend themselves to remote work, while the rest of their tasks require their on-site physical presence. In the US workforce, we find that just 22 percent of employees can work remotely between three and five days a week without affecting productivity, while only 5 percent could do so in India. In contrast, 61 percent of the workforce in the United States can work no more than a few hours a week remotely or not at all. The remaining 17 percent of the workforce could work remotely partially, between one and three days per week (Exhibit 4).

Consider a floral designer. We estimate that between half and one-quarter of his job can be done remotely. He can take orders by phone or online and contract for delivery through an app, but floral arrangement itself requires being in a shop where the flowers are stored in a refrigerated case and ribbons, moss, vases, and other materials used to create a floral design are at hand. To make a floral designer’s job more remote would require dividing his various tasks among all employees in a flower shop. In contrast, credit analysts, database administrators, and tax preparers, among others, can do virtually all of their work remotely. In general, workers whose jobs require cognitive thinking and problem solving, managing and developing people, and data processing have the greatest potential to work from home. These employees also tend to be among the highest paid.

The ability to work remotely also depends on the need to use specialized equipment. According to our analysis, a chemical technician could work remotely only a quarter of the time because much of her work must be done in a lab housing the equipment she needs. Among healthcare occupations, general practitioners who can use digital technologies to communicate with patients have a much greater potential for remote work than surgeons and x-ray technicians, who need advanced equipment and tools to do their work. Thus, among health professionals overall, the effective remote work potential is just 11 percent.

Even for the same activity, the context in which a job is done matters. Consider the activity “analyzing data or information,” which can be done remotely by a statistician or financial analyst but not by a surveyor. Crime scene analysts and workers who analyze consumer trends both engage in what O*NET describes as “getting, processing, analyzing, documenting and interpreting information,” but the former must go to the location of, say, a murder while the latter can do his work in front of a computer at home. A travel agent can calculate the cost of goods or services from a kitchen table, but a grocery clerk does that from behind a counter in a store.

And then there are jobs that require workers to be on-site or in person more than four days a week. Due to the physical nature of most of their work activities, occupations such as transportation, food services, property maintenance, and agriculture offer little or no opportunity for remote work. Building inspectors must go to a building or construction site. Nursing assistants must work in a healthcare facility. Many jobs declared essential by governments during the pandemic—nursing, building maintenance, and garbage collection, for example—fall into this category of jobs with low remote work potential.

This mixed pattern of remote and physical activities of each occupation helps explain the results of a recent McKinsey survey of 800 corporate executives around the world. Across all sectors, 38 percent of respondents expect their remote employees to work two or more days a week away from the office after the pandemic, compared to 22 percent of respondents surveyed before the pandemic. But just 19 percent of respondents to the most recent survey said they expected employees to work three or more days remotely. This suggests that executives anticipate operating their businesses with a hybrid model of some sort, with employees working remotely and from an office during the workweek. JPMorgan already has a plan for its 60,950 employees to work from home one or two weeks a month or two days a week, depending on the line of business.

Hybrid remote work has important implications for urban economies

Currently, only a small share of the workforce in advanced economies—typically between 5 and 7 percent—regularly works from home. A shift to 15 to 20 percent of workers spending more time at home and less in the office could have profound impacts on urban economies. More people working remotely means fewer people commuting between home and work every day or traveling to different locations for work. This could have significant economic consequences, including on transportation, gasoline and auto sales, restaurants and retail in urban centers, demand for office real estate, and other consumption patterns.

A McKinsey survey of office space managers conducted in May found that after the pandemic, they expect a 36 percent increase in worktime outside their offices, affecting main offices and satellite locations. This means companies will need less office space, and several are already planning to reduce real estate expenses. Moody’s Analytics predicts that the office vacancy rate in the United States will climb to 19.4 percent, compared to 16.8 percent at the end of 2019, and rise to 20.2 percent by the end of 2022. A survey of 248 US chief operating officers found that one-third plan to reduce office space in the coming years as leases expire.

The impact of that will reverberate through the restaurants and bars, shops, and services businesses that cater to office workers and will put a dent in some state and local tax revenues. For example, REI plans to sell off its new corporate headquarters before even moving in and instead begin operating from satellite offices. In contrast, Amazon recently signed leases for a total of 900,000 feet of office space in six cities around the United States, citing the lack of spontaneity in virtual teamwork.

As tech companies announced plans for permanent remote work options, the median price of a one-bedroom rental in San Francisco dropped 24.2 percent compared to a year ago, while in New York City, which had roughly 28,000 residents in every square mile at the start of 2020, 15,000 rental apartments were empty in September, the most vacancies in recorded history.

Nor is residential real estate immune from the impact of remote work. As tech companies announced plans for permanent remote work options, the median price of a one-bedroom rental in San Francisco dropped 24.2 percent compared to a year ago, while in New York City, which had roughly 28,000 residents in every square mile at the start of 2020, 15,000 rental apartments were empty in September, the most vacancies in recorded history. Conversely, bidding wars are breaking out in suburbs and smaller cities as remote workers seek less harried, less expensive lifestyles and homes with a room that can serve as an office or gym—though it is unclear how successful companies will be with workers scattered in far-flung locales.

Remote workers may also shift consumption patterns. Less money spent on transportation, lunch, and wardrobes suitable for the office may be shifted to other uses. Sales of home office equipment, digital tools, and enhanced connectivity gear have boomed.

Whether the shift to remote work translates into spreading prosperity to smaller cities remains to be seen. Previous MGI research in the United States and Europe has shown a trend toward greater geographic concentration of work in megacities like London and New York and high-growth hubs, including Seattle and Amsterdam . These locales have attracted many of the same type of younger, highly educated workers who can best work remotely. It remains to be seen whether the shift to remote work slows that trend, or whether the most vibrant cities remain magnets for such people.

Organizations will have to adjust their practices to capture potential productivity gains from remote work

Is remote work good for productivity? Ultimately, the answer may determine its popularity, especially given the long period of waning labor productivity that preceded the pandemic. So far, there is scant clarity—and widespread contradiction—about the productivity impact. Some 41 percent of employees who responded to a McKinsey consumer survey in May said they were more productive working remotely than in the office. As employees have gained experience working remotely during the pandemic, their confidence in their productivity has grown, with the number of people saying they worked more productively increasing by 45 percent from April to May.

With nine months of experience under their belts, more employers are seeing somewhat better productivity from their remote workers. Interviews with chief executives about remote work elicited a mixed range of opinions. Some express confidence that remote work can continue, while others say they see few positives to remote work.

With nine months of experience under their belts, more employers are seeing somewhat better productivity from their remote workers.

One impediment to productivity may be connectivity. A researcher at Stanford University found that only 65 percent of Americans surveyed said they had fast enough internet service to support viable video calls, and in many parts of the developing world, the connectivity infrastructure is sparse or nonexistent. Developing digital infrastructure will require significant public and private investment.

For women in particular, remote work is a mixed blessing. It boosts flexibility—not needing to be physically co-located with fellow workers enables independent work and more flexible hours—as well as productivity, with less time wasted commuting. Yet remote work also may increase gender disparity in the workplace, exacerbating the regressive effects of COVID-19. The female workforce in many economies is more highly concentrated in occupational clusters like healthcare, food services, and customer service that have relatively low potential for remote work. Previous MGI research on gender parity found that jobs held by women are 19 percent more at risk than jobs held by men simply because women are disproportionately represented in sectors most negatively affected by COVID-19.

Some forms of remote work are likely to persist long after COVID-19 is conquered. This will require many shifts, such as investment in digital infrastructure, freeing up office space, and the structural transformation of cities, food services, commercial real estate, and retail. It also risks accentuating inequalities and creating new psychological and emotional stresses among employees, including from isolation. For most companies, having employees work outside the office will require reinventing many processes and policies. How long before someone invents the virtual watercooler?

The authors wish to thank Olivia Robinson, Gurneet Singh Dandona, and Alok Singh for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Stephanie Strom, a senior editor at the McKinsey Global Institute.

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Working from home (Corrected Essay)

Some say that it would be better if the majority of employees worked from home instead of traveling to a workplace every day. Do you think the advantages of working from home outweigh the disadvantages?

Office has no longer been the only work place since many people are considering working from home. Some may argue the majority of employees should change their work place from office to home. In my opinion, the benefits of working from home can surely surpass the drawbacks due to the following reasons:

The first sentence is not accurate. It implies that people did not work from home in the past; however, throughout history, many people did work from home, for example, the classical novelists and artists.

“ Can surely ” is an informal expression and does not contribute anything to the preciseness of your writing.

The correct verb to follow the word “benefit” is not “ to surpass ”, but rather “ to offset ”, “ to outweigh ”, or “ to exceed ”.

Do not end your sentence with a colon ( “:” ), unless you want to provide a list of items immediately after that.

Working from home is a lot more comfortable for lots of people. Employees can save a great deal of time and money since they do not have to travel so often, which means people will have more time for work and for themselves, too. Less travelling will also help reduce traffice traffic jam congestion and pollutants to our environment environmental pollution . Besides, working at home does not mean staying inside all day long, people can choose to work in their garden or backyard, wherever makes them feel convenient to work. Moreover, employees are under less stresses stress since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest with a flexible working schedule . These things will help giving out better perfomance to tasks.

Words like “comfortable”, or “convenient” are too generic to use in an IELTS writing context. Generally, it’s better to use other words.

Lengthy phrases like “a great deal of time and money” (7 words) are considered as informal and ambiguous. Try to use shorter expressions, for example “time-saving and cost-efficient” (3 words only).

In a formal context, “ traffic congestion ” is more preferrable than “ traffic jam ”. When being alone, the word “ jam ” can be understood as a type of food. It’s always better to use a word that only has one meaning, regardless of the context.

The third sentence in this body paragraph is an example of poor cohesion. “ Traffic jam ” is not parallel to “ pollutants to our environment ”. “ Traffic jam ” is a condition (abstract), not a physical material (touchable by human) like “ pollutants ”. Therefore, you need to use another condition that is parallel to “ traffic jam ” (“ environmental pollution ”)

The fourth sentence (“ Besides, working at… ”) should be placed in the second body paragraph. The author is tailoring his ideas by providing the advantages of working from home in the first body paragraph, then listing the disadvantages in the second body paragraph while attacking those disadvantages notion at the same time. This kind of idea (“ to play the devil’s advocate ”) is good, but the execution isn’t. Insufficient coherence like this will hamper your score in Coherence & Cohesion criterion.

“Stress” as in “psychological stress” is an uncountable noun.

Try to improve the conciseness of your essay by rewritting a sentence clause (S+V) into a noun phrase. For example, “ since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest ” can be shorten into “ with a flexible working schedule ”.

The last sentence is redundant and ungrammatical.

To be fair, There are still some disadvantages that home-working could bring of teleworking . For instance, working from personal space will reduce direct face-to-face interactions among colleagues. But However, the problem is solved thanks to the Internet. As for now, people from around the globe can easily contact and work with others from distances. Another drawback is that some people may get distracted from work by external factors. This situation requires employees to be highly awared awarded of what they should and should not do for their paid jobs.

The accurate way to describe the act of working from home is not “ home-working ”, but rather “ teleworking ” or “ telecommuting ”. The author has miss his chance to improve the Lexical Resource score.

Generally, in a writing context, do not start your sentence with a short subordinate conjuction (“ and ”, “ or ”, “ but ”, “ for ”).

The third sentence in this paragraph is very unclear, especially when the followed sentence does not provide a good explanation. The author has to elaborate more on the Internet’s merits (social softwares such as “ instant messaging ”, “ collaborative software ”, etc)

The author has failed to provide a counter-argument for the notion of “ people may get distracted from work by external factors ”. Not to mentions he does not elaborate what is the “ external factors ”. Again, weak cohesion.

Do not simply stating “ this ” as a sentence subject. This type of grammatical mistake is called “unclear antecedent”, or “unclear aphoric noun”, and should be avoid by extending the subject with a word like “ condition ”, “ situation ”, “ issue ”, etc.

In conclusion, working from home should be encouraged because the advantages overcome the disadvantages.

The conclusion is coherent with the introduction and the two body paragraphs. Though, it is a little bit too short.

(Words: 261)

Overall: 6.0

Task Response: 6

✓ addresses all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others (the author has written more than 250 words and addressed the topic question)

✓ presents a relevant position although the conclusions may become unclear or repetitive

✓ presents relevant main ideas but some may be inadequately developed/unclear

Coherence and Cohesion: 6

✓ arranges information and ideas coherently and there is a clear overall progression (the ideas in each paragraphs are coherent with eachother)

✓ uses cohesive devices effectively, but cohesion within and/or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical

✓ may not always use referencing clearly or appropriately (the author usually fails at providing good supporting evidence for his argument)

✓ uses paragraphing, but not always logically (the fourth sentence in Body Paragraph 1 should be placed in Body 2 instead)

Lexical Resource: 5

✓ uses a limited range of vocabulary, but this is minimally adequate for the task (all the vocab used in this essay are very generic) ✓ may make noticeable errors in spelling and/or word formation that may cause some difficulty for the reader

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: 6

✓ uses a mix of simple and complex sentence forms

✓ makes some errors in grammar and punctuation but they rarely reduce communication

----------------------------------------------------------

This essay is corrected by Anh Tran - Let's Write Something Group .

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Book Review — Comparison Report; Working From Home vs. Working From Office

Comparison Report; Working from Home Vs. Working from Office

Categories: Book Review

About this sample

Words: 659 |

Published: Jan 31, 2024

Words: 659 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Overview of working from home, overview of working from the office, comparison: productivity and efficiency, comparison: work-life balance, comparison: communication and collaboration, comparison: health and well-being.

Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165-218.
FlexJobs. (2018). The state of remote work. Retrieved from https://www.flexjobs.com/2018-State-of-Remote-Work/
Mann, S., & Holdsworth, L. (2003). The psychological impact of teleworking: Stress, emotions and health. New Technology, Work and Employment, 18(3), 196-211.
Stanford News. (2020). New study shows working from home boosts productivity. Retrieved from https://news.stanford.edu/2020/02/24/working-home-productivity/

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Working from Home vs. Working from the Office

August 26, 2021

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Working from home vs. office statistics

What are the benefits of working from home vs. being in the office, what are the costs of working from home vs. in an office, can you be productive working from home, work-from-home: the way of the future, subscribe to greenlight by thimble..

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Not all that long ago, many office-bound workers dreamt of what it would be like to work from home, fantasizing about eliminating the daily commute, the flexibility of a work-from-home schedule, not to mention the thrill of taking a call in your pajama pants. Just imagine!

And then 2020 hit, and with it came the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly overnight, about 71% of workers switched to a work-from-home lifestyle. Before the Coronavirus outbreak, only about 20% of people worked from home, so this marked a significant increase in telecommuting. 1

Now, COVID-19 restrictions are easing around the country, and small business owners are wrestling with how — and whether — to return to the office.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the work from home vs. work from office dilemma, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each approach for employees.

COVID changed many things about daily life, including the way millions of people in the U.S. worked.Here are a few working from home vs. office statistics to know if you’re considering a change in your work location:

Before 2020

62% of workers rarely or never worked from home before the COVID-19 outbreak. 2
Only one in five workers say they worked from home all or most of the time before COVID, while 18% reported working from home some of the time.
By April of 2020, A Gallup poll found that 70% of US workers were already working remotely. By September of the same year, the number had fallen to 58%. By January of 2021, 56% of workers reported working at home “always” or “some of the time.” 3
Demographics with higher levels of education and income were the most likely to report working from home all of the time during the COVID-19 pandemic.
About 60% of workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher levels of education could perform their jobs from home, compared to 51% of workers with less education.
18% of adults who are still teleworking don’t have a workplace outside the home. About 50% of this group is self-employed.

Of the workers who switched to a work-from-home model during the pandemic, about 54% say they’d like to continue working from home all or most of the time, even after their workplaces reopen.

When it comes to the work-from-home lifestyle, people tend to be fairly polarized on the topic: some love it, and some can’t wait to get back into a brick-and-mortar office.

Still, working from home does present some serious benefits for both companies and employees.

Most notably, working from home allows people to eliminate time and money spent on daily commutes. As a result, many workers report being better-rested and able to devote more time to their daily work.

Additionally, working from home tends to increase productivity and focus. In fact, people working from home spend 12% less time attending meetings and 9% more time communicating directly with external partners, customers, and other stakeholders important to their company’s success. 4

Finally, there’s the issue of flexibility. People working from home generally have much more flexible schedules than people working in offices. This means that they can achieve a better work-life balance, spend more time with children and family members, and make space for other important things during the day.

For companies, allowing people to work from home provides many benefits. These include increased employee loyalty and retention, lower overhead costs (less need for office space, etc.), and access to a much larger talent pool since hiring doesn’t need to be local.

In addition to improving time management, focus, and work-life balance for employees, working from home is also less expensive than being in a traditional office. Here are a few of the overhead costs working from home can help save both companies and employees:

Renting or leasing an office or coworking space
Gas, tolls, fees, and other expenses associated with commuting
Daily meals out
Professional wardrobes

While these things seem simple, they can add up. One study found that companies that allowed employees to work from home even 50% of the time would save an average of $11,000 per employee each year. The same study also found that each work-from-home employee would save between $2,000 and $7,000 annually. 5

That’s not to suggest that working from home does not have some downsides for small business owners. Some people find it difficult to adjust to a remote workforce, while others dislike working with project management software or find it difficult to track workflow in a remote workforce environment. Still others simply miss the camaraderie and collaboration of an in-office setting. Water cooler chat, anyone?

Even before COVID-19 inspired a widespread obsession with customized Zoom backgrounds, work-from-home productivity was a hot topic for companies throughout the country.

Could workers stay on task if they weren’t in the office? Was it possible that working from home could actually make them more productive?

The resounding answer seems to be, yes. Here are a few stats to back it up:

Nearly one in four virtual work-from-home workers are willing to work longer hours than they would in an office.
80% of work-from-home employees experience less work-related stress, allowing them to focus more on the tasks at hand.
77% of virtual workers report being more productive — even when sick. 6
Working from home leads to a 13% increase in performance. 7
Remote work results in 50% lower attrition.
Employees who have the option of working from home at least one time each month are 24% more likely to feel happy in their roles.

While the work from home vs. work from office model is a new concept to many US companies, allowing employees to telecommute may be one of the most effective ways to encourage productivity and focus at each level of an organization.

Even as U.S. workplaces open their doors once more, many employees are reluctant to give up the perks of a work-from-home arrangement.

If you’re a small business owner finding that your team is struggling to adapt to reopening, now is a great time to communicate with your team and find a remote or hybrid arrangement that works for everyone involved.

If you’re a freelancer , working from home is probably the norm, and it will only become more commonplace in the future. With that in mind, make sure you’re protecting your vocation with the right business insurance and, yes, go right ahead and keep on responding to those emails while sporting your favorite sweatpants.

Pew Research Center. How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has—and Hasn’t—Changed the Way Americans Work.
Pew Research Center. How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has – and Hasn’t – Changed the Way Americans Work.
Gallup. Majority of U.S. Workers Continue to Punch In Virtually.
HBR. Research: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from Home.
Global Workplace Analytics. Latest Work-At-Home/Telecommuting/Mobile Work/Remote Work Statistics.
SHRM. Study: Teleworkers More Productive—Even When Sick.
Email Analytics. 15 Working From Home Productivity Statistics.

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Work From Home vs Work From Office: Which is Better?

Cats vs Dogs, Cricket vs Football, Working out vs Netflix; everyone has their own preferences and reasons behind those preferences vary from person to person. The preference comparison that has taken the corporate world by storm, especially in 2022, is work from home vs work from office- which working environment brings out the maximum potential of the worker and the organization

This debate or group discussion has been around ever since the world started shifting towards digital technology as its primary mode of consuming, with proponents of both sides providing conflicting yet sensible arguments for their stance. Those who prefer work-from-home (WFH) setups argue that it gives their routines some much-needed flexibility, while supporters of the work-from-office school of thought propound that the entire point of an office environment is to create an atmosphere that encourages effort and promotes teamwork.

However, this discussion is no longer one that is open to deliberations at present. Thanks to the pandemic that gripped the world, work from home vs work from office seem like a redundant discussion as the former has become the norm for most companies. The question that is now being posed, is this- which method is going to be adopted moving forward

Work From Home vs Work From Office: Which One to Choose

This article attempts to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of both and give you a balanced perspective on what the future of work culture is going to look like.

Boost Your Productivity
Communicate Face-to-Face
The Right Networking
Boosts Your Mood
Understanding the Company Better
Better Time Management
Cost-effective

Rigid Organizational Rules
No Control over the Work Environment
Long Commute
No Comfy Blankets
May Experience more Work-Related Stress

Save Time on Commute
Save Money on Commute
Better Work-Life Balance
Reduce Carbon Footprint
Location Independence

Lack of Community and Teamwork
Burnout
Easily Distracted
No Organizational Growth
Toxic Productivity \
Lack of Proper Office Equipment

Work From Home vs Work From Office: Face Off Between The Two

Picture this: youve woken up at around 9am and have been employed in your current position for a couple of months now. Your work hours begin at 9:30, but the commute is going to take at least an hour. The next image that pops up in your mind is that of a disgruntled employer who is reevaluating his decision to hire you, isnt it

Working From Office: Advantages & Disadvantages

Despite the many merits of working from home, the fact remains that the office space is sacred. Well, let us continue to look at work from home vs work from office gd and know more.

Advantages of Working From An Office

Rather than simply providing an isolated space where employees contribute towards the growth of an organization, the importance of offices lie in the kind of output they generate:

1. Communication

Face-to-face communication is the clearest and most productive form of communication in a corporate setting. Its not only beneficial when planning for business, it also strengthens relationships and rapport with other employees. The kind of relationship-building that happens when you sit next to someone or bump into each other at the coffee machine cannot be found anywhere else. The chain of command, the daily tasks that you need to fulfill- they all fall into a seamless communication structure which identifies and corrects shortcomings almost as soon as they are detected and ensures that only the best output is generated.

2. Management

Every company has a definite structure which is indisputable, no matter the circumstances under which one works. Every employee is answerable to a higher authority and it is through meticulous coordination and feedback that the ideal output is created by an organization. This cycle is only possible when the manager is on the floor with the workers, keeping an eye on what is going on, spotting errors as soon as they are made, giving precise directions to a struggling employee and regulating the overall workflow. The moment things go digital, management becomes a hassle, and work is more often than not either subpar or delayed.

3. Office Space Needs

Working from home can cause a lack of business inventory or storage, leading to space constraints. Renting out office spaces can be beneficial for small businesses in order to grow their business. Especially, coworking spaces because, they offer varied office spaces at affordable prices. The small businesses can focus on scaling their business in manifolds, considering the easy availability of office inventory. The productivity also increases when you are in an office setup that heavily inspires innovation and creativity.

Disadvantages of Working From Office

While there are certain obvious reasons to keep going to your offices, there are obvious disadvantages as well.

1. Rigid Organizational Rules

In an office setup, you get to decide very little. Your work hours are fixed, your commute is fixed, and your scope of work is more or less predictable as well. Working from an office is all about following a strict office timetable. No matter your personal problems or that are circumstances working against you, come rain or sun, you must be at your desk every day before your superiors notice a delay.

The ever-mounting pressure only serves to weaken your mental and physical health, making you more susceptible to a burnout.

2. Work Environment

One of the key aspects of the work from home vs work from office debate is the kind of work environment the organization fosters. It is no surprise that to survive in a corporate setting, one needs to have skin as thick as hide. Your work environment has the power to make or break your productivity-streak and motivation.

Employees dont have much of a choice in or control over their work environment within an office setting. Whether it is an annoying co-worker or other logistical issues, you just have to go along with it. At home, one has the option to optimise their workspace as per their requirements and preferences.

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Working From Home: Advantages & Disadvantages

Let us discuss the Pros and Cons of Work From Home.

Advantages of Working From Home

There are many such scenarios where a work from home setup is beneficial for both the employer and the employee:

1. Reduced/No Commute

One of the major positives of working from home is the elimination of commute. On an average, people in India spend at least 2 hours in a day, traveling to and from work. This not only wastes time they could otherwise be spending productively, it also hampers work-life balance greatly.

If a person works a regular 9-to-5 (or 6) job and is spending 7% of their day in traffic, its natural for them to feel like they dont have a life outside of work. However, when your work can be done from the comfort of your couch, it doesnt seem as cumbersome as before.

2. Better Work-Life Balance

It is extremely important to realize that work is not the be-all-and-end-all of things. There is a life that you have outside work, but sitting in an office for almost half of your day makes that seem like a lie. Moreover, a rigid schedule packed with work can cause employees to burn out rather quickly.

Most employers who provide their employees with the option to work from home also give them the flexibility to choose their working hours, which means that workers can start and end their day as they choose, as long as their work is complete and leads to strong outcomes. This control over your work schedule is invaluable when it comes to attending to the needs of your personal life.

3. Saves Money and Reduces Carbon Footprint

Working from home cuts costs for both sides- the employee is not required to spend money on traveling, food and other miscellaneous costs they occur throughout a working day; meanwhile, corporations save big on energy spendings and other related expenses which would have been unavoidable in an up-and-running office setup.

While these steps are a boon for your wallet, they are also a blessing for the planet- reduced commute implies fewer vehicles on roads, which inadvertently contributes towards making our environment cleaner; a sore need of the hour.

Disadvantages of Working From Home

So there are some serious merits to working from home. However, it is not without its challenges:

1. Teamwork and Organizational Growth

By its very nature, working from home is a hindrance to teamwork. To make things easier for employees, work schedules are usually fragmented according to their job descriptions and as long as their daily quotas are met, things can flow smoothly. However, a single obstacle can set the entire team off-track.

Coordinating with multiple people over the phone or via video calls, while possible, is an inefficient way of tackling issues because it does not allow face-to-face interactions. It takes a lot of time to get ideas across for approval over a Zoom call where 10 other people are competing for screen time. Thus, Working from Home can dampen teamwork and lead to disarray.

2. Productivity Trap

Popular polls will tell you that a majority of people feel like they are much more productive when working from home. However, but this feeling is only translated into actions when you have a set routine- which is integral for maintaining a steady stream of output. While the trappings of home are comforting, that very aspect can turn out to be counter-productive.

Procrastination can blossom unbridled at home, or worse, you might find yourself overexerting yourself. Working by yourself can also cripple your creativity. Thus, working from home doesnt always guarantee results.

3. Lack Of Office Equipment

Nearly 33% of the people who work from home also dont have the necessary access to office equipment such as high-speed internet, fax/copier machine or a high-end laptop which also adds to their distress while working from home as they have a hard time replicating their work environment at home.

Work From Home vs Work From Office: Which is Better

The work from home vs work from office debate is one that perplexes even those who benefit from either school of thought, because the merits of the other are too lucrative to overlook. However, we believe the answer might lie in striking a balance between the two. The following paragraph would work the best for work from home vs work from office group discussion.

Dividing the working week into days where employees work from home and days where they have to report to the office can not only maintain the positives of a work-from-home environment, it can eliminate the stifling of creativity and flow of work in an organization. On days that employees visit the office, brainstorming and meetings can run asunder and these ideas can be translated into the finished output at home. This gives both employers and employees the opportunity to have a desirable work-life balance, and provides the ideal system of work optimizer for the future.

FAQs on Work From Home Vs Work From Office

The frequently asked questions on work from home or work from office are given below:

Is working from home more productive than working in an office It is very difficult to estimate employees productivity when they are working in different environments. However, many research studies have shown that people who work home are more productive than the people who work from Office. Hence, most of the people choose work from home to increase their productivty which comes with benefits such as enhanced flexibility, stress-free etc.,

Is work from home better than work from office Both work from home and work from office has its own advantages and disadvantages. If you wish to cut-down the commute time and increase productivity, then work from home is better. However, if you focus on better collabaration then working from office is better. Hence work from home vs work from office has its own set of pros and cons.

Why is working in office better Working from office is better, if you want to collabrate with your collegaues. Working from office allows their employees to collect or access the data as qucikly as they can.

What are the pros and cons of working in an office The pros of working in an office include the ability to collaborate with colleagues in person, access to resources and technology, and a shared sense of camaraderie. The cons include needing to commute, being distracted by office chatter, and having less flexibility in scheduling.

How do I do a group discussion on work from home vs work from office A great way to facilitate a group discussion on work from home versus work from office is to start by having participants list out the pros and cons of each option. Have them discuss the benefits and drawbacks with each other, then use a collaborative brainstorming session to come up with ideas on how to make the most of either option. You could also refer to relevant research and studies on the topic to provide more context for the discussion.

Top 9 Disadvantages Of Working From Home That Everyone Should Know
Top 11 Tips To Improve Work From Home Productivity

What the world thought of US debate

The first showdown between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was closely watched not only in the US but around the world.

The debate in Philadelphia featured some tense exchanges on foreign policy between the two presidential candidates.

From Beijing to Budapest, here's how the debate went down, according to BBC foreign correspondents.

Follow latest on the debate

Divider showing white stars on red and blue striped background

Mentions of Putin noted by Kremlin

By Steve Rosenberg, Russia editor, Moscow

Kamala Harris told Donald Trump that President Putin is “a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

The expression "to eat someone for lunch" (or breakfast, or any other meal) doesn’t exist in Russian. But one thing you will find in Moscow is the appetite for a US election result that benefits Russia.

The Kremlin will have noted (with pleasure) that in the debate Trump sidestepped the question about whether he wants Ukraine to win the war.

“I want the war to stop,” replied Trump.

By contrast, Harris spoke of Ukraine’s “righteous defence” and accused Vladimir Putin of having “his eyes on the rest of Europe”.

Later the Kremlin claimed to have been irked by all mentions of Putin in the debate.

“Putin’s name is used as one of the instruments for the internal battle in the US,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told me.

"We don’t like this and hope they will keep our president’s name out of this.”

Last week Putin claimed he was backing Harris in the election and praised her “infectious laugh.”

Later a Russian state TV anchor clarified that Putin had been “slightly ironic” in his comments.

The presenter was dismissive of Harris’ political skills and suggested she would be better off hosting a TV cooking show.

I wonder: would it feature “dictators” eating US presidential candidates “for lunch"…?

Who won the debate?
Fact-checking Harris and Trump

Concern in Kyiv over Trump comments

By Nick Beake, Europe correspondent, Kyiv

Donald Trump’s failure, when asked on the debate stage to say if he wanted Ukraine to win the war, may not have surprised people here but it adds to their worry about what a second Trump term would bring.

Trump has long boasted he could end in the conflict in 24 hours, a prospect many Ukrainians assume would mean an incredibly bad deal with Kyiv forced to give up huge swathes of the land Russia has seized over the past two and a half years.

In contrast, Ukrainians will have been reassured by Kamala Harris’s responses, with no sign she would deviate from the current position of staunch American support.

She took credit for the role she’s already played, arguing she shared important intelligence with President Zelensky in the days before the full-scale invasion.

She then claimed Trump’s position would have been fatal for Ukraine had he still been in the White House. “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”

Publicly, there has been a deafening silence from Ukraine’s current ministers and senior military in reaction to the debate. The figurative US electoral battle is one they need not weigh in to while they’re consumed by real fighting at home.

It’s President Zelensky himself who so far has gone furthest in articulating, albeit somewhat euphemistically, what a Trump victory would mean for Ukrainians.

Speaking to the BBC in July, he said it would mean “hard work, but we are hard workers”.

Abdul memes follow Trump Taliban remarks

By Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent

America’s longest war ended in August 2021 when it scrambled to pull out the last of its troops, and evacuate thousands of civilians, as the Taliban swept into Kabul with surprising speed.

That debacle made it into the debate and, not surprisingly, the issues were dodged, dismissed, distorted.

Harris veered away from the question “do you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?”.

As a correspondent who followed the chaotic pullout closely, I never heard that the vice-president was in the room when decisions were taken in those final fateful weeks. But she made it clear she agreed with President Biden’s decision to leave.

Trump boasted that he talked tough with “Abdul”, the “head of the Taliban” who is “still the head of the Taliban.”

He seemed to be referring to Abdul Ghani Baradar, who signed the withdrawal deal with the US. But he never headed the Taliban, and has been sidelined since the Taliban takeover.

The mention immediately prompted a wave of internet memes featuring “Abdul” with people named Abdul weighing in, and others asking “who is Abdul?”

Both contenders focused on the flawed deal with the Taliban. The truth is that the Trump team negotiated this exit plan; the Biden team hastily enacted it.

Trump said the deal was good because “we were getting out”.

There were no good ways to go. But the departure turned into a disaster and all sides are to blame.

Harris represents uncertainty for Beijing

By Laura Bicker, China correspondent, Beijing

Kamala Harris was an unknown quantity to leaders here and she still is, even after the debate.

She has no track record on China and on the debate stage she simply repeated her line that the US, not China, would win the competition for the 21st Century.

The vice-president represents something China does not like - uncertainty.

That is why President Xi recently used a visit by US officials to call for “stability” between the two superpowers, perhaps a message to the current vice-president.

The prevailing view among Chinese academics is that she will not stray too far from President Biden’s slow and steady diplomatic approach.

But on the debate stage she went on the attack and accused Donald Trump of “selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernise their military”.

Donald Trump has made it clear he plans has to impose 60% tariffs on Chinese goods.

This will add to the tariffs he imposed as president which started a trade war in 2018. China retaliated, and numerous studies suggest this caused economic pain for both sides.

This is the last thing China wants right now as it is trying to manufacture and export goods to rescue its economy.

For Chinese leaders, this debate will have done little to assuage beliefs that Trump represents something else they don’t like - unpredictability.

But in truth, there is little hope here that US policy on China will change significantly, no matter who sits in the White House.

Six highlights from Harris and Trump on stage
Undecided Americans impressed by Harris

White House race keenly watched in Middle East

By Paul Adams, international correspondent, Jerusalem

The two candidates did not stray much from their previously stated positions last night, even if Trump did add, with characteristic hyperbole, that Israel wouldn’t exist in two years if his opponent becomes president.

Here in the Middle East, the race for the White House is being keenly watched.

With the war in Gaza raging and a ceasefire deal still elusive, some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics suspect that Israel’s prime minister is deliberately stalling until after the election, in the hope that Trump will be more sympathetic to Israel than Harris.

There’s a whiff of history perhaps being about to repeat itself.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign team was suspected of urging Iran not to release American hostages held in Tehran until after he had beaten President Jimmy Carter, saying Reagan would give Iran a better deal.

Could something similar be afoot now? Certainly Netanyahu’s opponents believe he is now the chief obstacle to a ceasefire deal.

Harris has indicated that she might be tougher on Israel than Joe Biden, something Trump has seized on, saying last night that the vice-president “hates Israel”.

Palestinians, deeply sceptical about Donald Trump but dismayed by the Biden administration’s inability to stop the war in Gaza, are possibly inclined to see Harris as the lesser of two evils.

They’ve long since abandoned any notion of the US as an honest broker in the Middle East, but will have noticed that Harris, unlike Trump, says she’s committed to Palestinian statehood.

Praise for Orban makes waves in Hungary

By Nick Thorpe, Central Europe correspondent, Budapest

Donald Trump showered praise on the Hungarian prime minister.

"Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man. He's a tough person. Smart..."

Hungarian pro-government media picked up on the compliment. "Huge recognition!" ran the headline in Magyar Nemzet.

But government-critical news portal 444 quoted Tim Walz, running mate of Harris.

"He [Trump] was asked to name one world leader who was with him, and he said Orban. Dear God. That's all we need to know.’

Viktor Orban backed Trump for president in 2016 and is strongly backing him again in November.

The two men met for the second time this year at Trump’s home in Florida on 12 July, after Orban visited Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing in quick succession.

The Orban government is banking both on Trump’s victory and his ability to swiftly end the war in Ukraine.

"Things are changing. If Trump comes back, there will be peace. It will be established by him without the Europeans," Balazs Orban, Viktor Orban’s political director, told the BBC in July.

More on US election

SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
IMMIGRATION: Could Trump really deport a million migrants?
POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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Working from Home Vs. Working in an Office
In this comprehensive essay, we will analyze the comparison between working from home and working in an office. We will delve into the productivity levels associated with each setting and their impact on work performance. Additionally, we will explore how working from home can lead to fewer distractions, increased flexibility, and improved work ...
Working From Home vs. Working in an Office (Pros and Cons)
A work-from-home (WFH) job, or a remote position, allows the employee to complete their work tasks in a home office or other location. Employees might use a range of technological devices in their work, including a work phone, computer and internet modem. Here are some common WFH positions: Customer service associate. Copywriter.
The bright future of working from home
Those who took the offer were typically older married employees with kids. For many younger workers, the office is a core part of their social life, and like the Chinese employees, would happily commute in and out of work each day to see their colleagues. Indeed, surveys in the U.S. suggest up to one-third of us meet our future spouses at work.
The Realities of Remote Work
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 ...
Work From Home vs. Work From Office: Which Is Actually Better?
1. It's Easier to Procrastinate at Home. Although it's less stressful, working at home makes it easier to procrastinate since the working hours are not clearly defined, and you don't have a direct manager supervising you. For people who lack self-control and a good work ethic, working from home can invite laziness. 2.
Working from Home: Pros, Cons, and Strategies for Success: [Essay
The absence of office distractions and the ability to create a personalized work environment can enhance concentration and output. 3. Reduced Commuting Stress: Commuting to and from work can be stressful and time-consuming. Working from home eliminates the daily commute, reducing stress levels and providing employees with more time for ...
Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay: 11 Pros and Cons
Explore the pros and cons of working from home in this thought-provoking advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay. Discover the advantages of flexibility and increased productivity, alongside the challenges of isolation and blurred work-life boundaries. Gain valuable insights into the work-from-home phenomenon and make informed decisions about your own professional journey. Dive ...
Remote Working vs. the Office
Embed. Over the past few years, remote working has transformed millions of people's lives — giving them more time for family, more control over their schedules, and a better work-life balance ...
What Mix of WFH and Office Time Is Right for You?
Over the past year, many of us have found things to love about working from home like flexibility, the ability to focus, and no commute. Now that offices are starting re-open, you might start to ...
The Case for Remote Work
In 2005, Aetna started allowing its employees to transition to remote work. Today, 14,500 of Aetna's 35,000 employees have gone remote, allowing them to cut 2.7 million square feet of office space at $29 a square foot, for about $78 million in cost savings per year.
Why Working from Home Is Better
Galanti, Teresa, et al. Work from Home during the COVID-19 Outbreak: The Impact on Employees' Remote Work Productivity, Engagement, and Stress." Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, vol. 63, no. 7, 2021, p. e426, Web. Ipsen, Christine, et al. " Six Key Advantages and Disadvantages of Working from Home in Europe during COVID ...
Working in an Office Vs Working at Home
For some people, work at home is considered better than work at an office. Some people are happier working from home. As I weigh my options, I will be happier working in an office, surrounded with busy creative people. Many people find work boring, so finding your ideal workplace is an important aspect to keep in mind when applying for a job.
The Pros and Cons of Working From Home
For instance, many work-from-home positions are unaffected by normal business hours, making it easier to attend to life events like medical appointments. Work-from-home roles can be a huge benefit for parents who work unconventional schedules to accommodate their families. Related: 11 Online Jobs for Work Flexibility No office distractions
Working From Home VS Working In An Office
Studies have shown that people who work from home tend to be more productive, sometimes putting in 57 hours of work per week than those who work only at the office. Office workers generally put in 38 hours of work before feeling burned out. On the other hand, there may be various reasons for a higher work load for work-at-home employees.
Remote Vs. In-Person Work: Pros And Cons To Weigh As A ...
The pros and cons I've explored are by no means exhaustive. Other factors to consider include: • Work-Life Balance: In some ways, remote work encourages better work-life balance, like ...
Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?
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.
The future of remote work: An analysis of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and 9
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.
7 Benefits of Working From Home (and 7 Drawbacks)
Pro: More Time to Spend With Family. Office workers must kiss their loved ones goodbye each morning when heading off to work. In contrast, virtual employees can work down the hall from a work-from ...
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Office has no longer been the only work place since many people are considering working from home. Some may argue the majority of employees should change their work place from office to home. In my opinion, the benefits of working from home can surely surpass offset the drawbacks due to the following reasons: various reasons.
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Comparison: Work-Life Balance. Working from home allows for a better work-life balance, as employees can structure their work hours around personal commitments and avoid the stress of commuting. A study by FlexJobs found that 75% of remote workers reported having a better work-life balance, leading to improved mental and emotional well-being.
Work From Home vs. Office Pros & Cons
Working from home leads to a 13% increase in performance. 7. Remote work results in 50% lower attrition. Employees who have the option of working from home at least one time each month are 24% more likely to feel happy in their roles. While the work from home vs. work from office model is a new concept to many US companies, allowing employees ...
Are we really more productive when we work from home?
Others are adopting a hybrid model, where attendance in an office is expected, but not every day. A recent study of more than 30,000 US employees claimed that one day per week spent working from home could boost productivity by 4.8%. Time spent working rather than commuting to work was largely responsible for that estimate.
Work From Home vs Work From Office: Which is Better?
Both work from home and work from office has its own advantages and disadvantages. If you wish to cut-down the commute time and increase productivity, then work from home is better. However, if you focus on better collabaration then working from office is better. Hence work from home vs work from office has its own set of pros and cons.
What the world thought of Harris-Trump debate
By Steve Rosenberg, Russia editor, Moscow. Kamala Harris told Donald Trump that President Putin is "a dictator who would eat you for lunch." The expression "to eat someone for lunch" (or ...

The bright future of working from home

Mass working from home is here to stay

Why? Consider these three reasons

Investments in telecommuting technology

The end of stigma

Best practices in working from home post pandemic

Working from home should be part-time

Working from home should be a choice

Working from home should be flexible

Working from home is a privilege

There are two other impacts of working from home that should be addressed

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Work From Home vs. Work From Office: Which Is Actually Better?

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The Pros of Work From Home

1. More Flexibility and Freedom

2. No More Commute to Work

3. It's Better for the Environment

4. It Can Lower Your Expenses

The Cons of Work From Home

1. It's Easier to Procrastinate at Home

2. It Can Be More Distracting

3. It Can Get Lonely and Isolating

4. It Can Subject You to Bias During Appraisals

The Pros of Work From Office

1. Faster Communication With Your Team

2. It Teaches You Hard and Soft Skills

3. It Makes Planning Your Day Easier

4. It's Better for Career Growth

The Cons of Work From Office

1. Lack of Privacy

2. Encourages a Sedentary Lifestyle

3. More Stressful and Demanding

4. You Can't Work at Your Own Pace

More People Prefer Working From Home

Remote Working vs. the Office — Which is Better?

What Mix of WFH and Office Time Is Right for You?

Summary .

Partner Center

The Case for Remote Work

This is not a trend; it's a conscious shift

Productivity

Environment

Going remote

Hub & Spoke model

De facto remote

Opportunity or threat

The Death of the Popup and Rise of the Modal

Why Working From Home Is Better Essay

Introduction

Saves Money

Improved mental health

Facilitates Flexibility and Work Balance

Provides Comfort

Less Commuter Stress

Working in an Office Vs Working at Home

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