www.bloomberg.com Open in urlscan Pro
151.101.129.73  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Skip to content



Skip to content
Bloomberg the Company & Its ProductsThe Company & its ProductsBloomberg Terminal
Demo RequestBloomberg Anywhere Remote LoginBloomberg Anywhere LoginBloomberg
Customer SupportCustomer Support

Bloomberg Webinars: Access a broad range of analysis, research, insight & ideas.

MenuSearch
Bloomberg Businessweek
Sign InSign OutSubscribe



 * HOME


 * MARKETS


 * TECHNOLOGY


 * POLITICS


 * WEALTH


 * PURSUITS


 * OPINION


 * BUSINESSWEEK


 * NEW ECONOMY


 * EQUALITY


 * GREEN


 * CITYLAB

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


 * QUICKTAKE


 * BLOOMBERG TV+


 * PODCASTS


 * RADIO


 * BLOOMBERG LIVE

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


 * NEWSLETTERS


 * WATCHLIST


 * SUBSCRIBE


 * SIGN IN

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


 * SUBMIT A TIP


 * HELP CENTER


 * LICENSE

Read
 * Bloomberg New Economy
 * Future Finance
 * Wealth
 * Next China
 * Crypto
 * Checkout
 * Hyperdrive
 * Well Spent
 * Prognosis
 * Good Business
 * Billionaires
 * Graphics
 * Sponsored Content
 * Screentime

Watch
 * The David Rubenstein Show
 * The David Rubenstein Wealth Show
 * Art + Technology
 * Future GO

Special Reports
 * Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker
 * What Wall Street Expects for 2021
 * Where to Invest $10,000
 * 50 Companies to Watch
 * Where to Invest $1 Million

Follow
 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * Instagram
 * LinkedIn


Read
 * Economics
 * Deals
 * Odd Lots
 * The FIX | Fixed Income
 * ETFs
 * FX
 * Factor Investing
 * Alternative Investing
 * Markets Magazine

Watch
 * Daybreak
 * Surveillance
 * Markets
 * What'd You Miss
 * Real Yield
 * Charting Futures
 * Futures in Focus

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook

Data
 * Stocks
 * Currencies
 * Commodities
 * Rates & Bonds
 * Sectors
 * Economic Calendar

SUBSCRIBE
 * Five Things: U.S.
 * Five Things: Europe
 * Five Things: Asia
 * Evening Briefing

Listen
 * What Goes Up
 * Stephanomics
 * Odd Lots
 * Surveillance
 * P&L
 * Trillions


Read
 * Work Shifting
 * Code Wars
 * 5G Network

Special Reports
 * The Elon Musk Tracker
 * Tesla Model 3 Tracker

Watch
 * Bloomberg Technology TV
 * Studio 1.0

Subscribe
 * Fully Charged
 * Power On
 * Game On

Listen
 * Decrypted

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook


Read
 * Election 2020
 * Global Trade Tracker

Listen
 * Sound On
 * Bloomberg Law

Watch
 * Balance of Power

Subscribe
 * Balance of Power

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook


Read
 * Investing
 * Living
 * Opinion & Advice
 * Savings & Retirement
 * Taxes
 * Reinvention

Watch
 * Good Money
 * The David Rubenstein Wealth Show

Listen
 * The Paycheck

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Instagram


Read
 * Travel
 * Autos
 * Homes
 * Living
 * Culture
 * Style

Special Reports
 * Where to Go in 2021
 * London Property Prices
 * New York Property Prices

Watch
 * Made
 * Traveler
 * Invitation Only

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Instagram


Read
 * Editorials
 * Letters

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Instagram

Listen
 * Masters in Business

Subscribe
 * Bloomberg Opinion Today
 * Money Stuff
 * Ritholtz's Reads
 * Early Returns
 * Sparklines


Special Reports
 * Business of Equality
 * The Bloomberg 50
 * Best B-Schools
 * Small Business Survival Guide
 * Working From Home
 * 50 Companies to Watch

The Magazine
 * Subscribe
 * Manage

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Instagram


Watch
 * New Economy Conversation Series
 * 2020 Digital Program Highlights

Subscribe
 * Turning Points

Listen
 * Stephanomics

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * LinkedIn
 * WeChat


Read
 * Corporate Leadership
 * Capital
 * Society
 * Solutions

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Instagram


Read
 * Science & Energy
 * Climate Adaptation
 * Finance
 * Politics
 * Culture & Design

Special Reports
 * Data Dash

Subscribe
 * Green Daily

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Instagram


Read
 * Design
 * Culture
 * Transportation
 * Economy
 * Environment
 * Housing
 * Justice
 * Government

Subscribe
 * CityLab Daily
 * MapLab
 * Most Popular

Follow
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * Instagram
 * LinkedIn


Live
 * Watch Live TV

Original Series
 * Storylines
 * Moonshot
 * Hello World
 * Good Money
 * Game Changers
 * CityLab Solutions
 * Accelerate
 * See all series...

News Shows
 * Take Charge
 * Take a Break
 * Take the Lead
 * Geo

Follow
 * YouTube
 * Twitter
 * Instagram
 * Facebook


Watch Live TV
 * US
 * Europe
 * Asia
 * Australia
 * Schedule+Shows

Shows
 * Surveillance
 * Daybreak
 * Markets
 * Balance of Power
 * Bloomberg Technology
 * The David Rubenstein Show
 * What'd You Miss?
 * All Shows...

Follow
 * YouTube
 * Twitter
 * Facebook


Listen
 * What Goes Up
 * Stephanomics
 * Odd Lots
 * Foundering
 * Masters in Business
 * Surveillance
 * The Tape
 * Businessweek
 * The Pay Check
 * Prognosis
 * Travel Genius
 * Works for Me
 * Trillions
 * All Podcasts…
 * All Radio Shows…






Businessweek
B-schools


REMOTE-WORK EXPERTS ARE IN DEMAND AS RETURN TO OFFICE BEGINS ANEW

Business school professors who studied working from home long before it became
cool have become sought-after advisers to the C-suite.


Illustration: Larissa Hoff for Bloomberg Businessweek
By

Paul Keegan

+Follow
March 8, 2022, 1:00 PM GMTCorrectedMarch 11, 2022, 7:44 PM GMT


SHARE THIS ARTICLE






Copied
Follow the authors
+ Get alerts forPaul Keegan


When Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom did his first study on working
remotely in 2004, the field was an academic backwater. Less than 5% of all full
workdays took place at home, making the subject a low priority for business
schools and corporate leaders. Then came Covid-19. “In March 2020,” Bloom says,
“the thing just took off.” Two years into the pandemic, Bloom still gets two or
three calls a day from corporations, hospitals, schools, government agencies,
and universities looking for guidance.

As the omicron variant recedes, leaders everywhere are grappling with whether—or
how much—to make working from home a feature of their organizations. Should they
go fully remote and save on real estate but take a potential hit to productivity
or culture? Or demand that workers return full time to encourage teamwork but
risk losing talent to more flexible competitors? For many, the hybrid model is
most compelling but comes with its own vexing trade-offs.




The professors who study working from home are busy consulting with executives,
collecting data, running research projects, writing books, and feeding the
discoveries into their MBA courses, which means students are getting the latest
findings. “My inbox is exploding daily,” says Tsedal Neeley, professor of
business administration at Harvard Business School and author of Remote Work
Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. “Even more now because people are
realizing remote work is not going away and they are concerned about doing it
the right way.”



At least 70% of knowledge industry workers say they want a hybrid workplace,
Neeley says, citing employee survey data, so offering such arrangements is
becoming crucial to attracting and retaining talent as the trend of widespread
job-quitting known as the “Great Resignation” continues. And fully 20% of staff
are what she calls “remote natives” who’ve joined companies during the pandemic
and expect to continue working from home, even once Covid-19 becomes endemic.
That leads to a host of complex challenges: Should employees get to choose which
days they come to the office? How do you coordinate schedules so the right
people are in the same room at the same time? How do you ensure that managers
don’t play favorites when scheduling or discriminate against remote workers when
it comes to promotions and pay raises?

Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School, says
she wrote Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organisation and Make Hybrid
Work for Everyone to help companies tackle these questions, rushing to complete
it in less than a year. Gratton’s cover story in the May-June 2021 issue of
Harvard Business Review caused “a number of publishers to come to me and say,
‘Look, you need to say more about how to do this,’” she says. Her book lays out
a four-step process to help companies understand the challenges they are facing,
imagine new approaches, test those ideas, and execute them. “In my 30 years at
London Business School, I’ve never seen such an astounding opportunity to
reimagine work,” Gratton says. “And it may never come through again.”



Academics such as Gratton who say we’re experiencing, as she puts it, “the
greatest global shift in work for a century” appear to be more in demand than
skeptics like Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In articles, talks, and his book, The Future of
the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face,
Cappelli argues that while it’s clear most employees want to work remotely, it
may not always be in a company’s best interest to let them. That’s a tension
corporate America has yet to resolve.




Last year, tech companies such as Twitter Inc. and Facebook—now called Meta
Platforms Inc.—got big headlines by saying many employees can work remotely on a
permanent basis. But banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase
& Co. still plan to haul most of their people back to the office as soon as
possible. Salesforce.com Inc., meanwhile, talked about letting employees go
fully remote a year ago but seemed to backtrack in November with an article on
its website titled “Why Salesforce Is Bringing People Back Together In-Person,
Now,” by Brent Hyder, the company’s president and chief people officer. Which
way are most companies leaning today? “I think most are just ducking the issue
and hoping it goes away,” Cappelli says.

With such a wait-and-see approach, Cappelli’s phone isn’t exactly ringing off
the hook. “I’m ‘on the one hand and on the other,’ which is not great for
consulting,” he says in an email exchange. “People who want to do something want
consultants who will tell them that it is a good idea,” he says. “I had a cover
story in HBR last fall and heard nothing from it except from academics.”




Among the experts, one of the biggest debates about remote work concerns
productivity. Most employees say they’re more productive working from home,
surveys show, but employers are divided on the question. In a 2015 study, Bloom
showed that workers at a Chinese call center were 13% more productive when
working from home, but Cappelli cautions that it’s not a typical office
environment: “In the U.S., I haven’t seen any consistent evidence that
productivity is up or down.”



Such discussions are finding their way into classrooms. “Remote work is just
part of everything we teach now,” says Gratton. Her Future of Work program at
London Business School recently invited the head of technology at an Indian
consulting firm to speak about how tech is affecting the workplace, and the
classes are conducted—appropriately enough—partly in-person and partly virtual.
“I don’t think any of the business schools know where this is going to lead,”
she says, “but there’s a great deal of experimentation going on.”

Over the next few years, as the global experiment with remote work continues,
academics will be able to pivot from today’s surveys, theories, and predictions
to analyzing real-world data. That’s an exciting prospect for Bloom, who’s eager
to find out whether what he calls “choice or coordination” will prevail: Will
employees get to choose which days they come in each week? Or will the top brass
decide that people can work from home Monday and Friday, for example, but must
come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday? “My prediction is the coordination
battle will win out because when people come to the office they want to be with
their colleagues,” he says.

While these questions are being fiercely debated, Bloom is convinced that the
argument between in-person, all-remote, and hybrid has been settled. After
talking to more than 300 companies over the past two years, he has reached some
conclusions that confirm his decision to focus his energy on such a hot topic
with enormous implications for the world economy. Allowing working from home not
only increases productivity slightly, he contends, but markedly improves
employee retention rates, giving organizations all the motivation they need to
let employees log on. “That battle is over,” he says. “Hybrid won.”

(A previous version of the story had incorrect timing for Neeley's book in the
third paragraph. It was published in March 2021.)




SHARE THIS ARTICLE






Copied
Follow the authors
+ Get alerts forPaul Keegan

Have a confidential tip for our reporters?
Get in touch
Before it's here, it's on the
Bloomberg Terminal
Learn more


LIVE ON BLOOMBERG
Watch Live TVListen to Live Radio
Video Player is loading.
Play Video
Play
Unmute

Current Time 0:00
/
Duration 0:00
Loaded: 0%

0:00
Progress: 0%
Stream Type LIVE
Remaining Time -0:00
 
Playback Rate

1x
Chapters
 * Chapters

Captions
 * captions settings, opens captions settings dialog
 * captions off, selected

Fullscreen

This is a modal window.



Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.

TextColorWhiteBlackRedGreenBlueYellowMagentaCyanTransparencyOpaqueSemi-TransparentBackgroundColorBlackWhiteRedGreenBlueYellowMagentaCyanTransparencyOpaqueSemi-TransparentTransparentWindowColorBlackWhiteRedGreenBlueYellowMagentaCyanTransparencyTransparentSemi-TransparentOpaque
Font Size50%75%100%125%150%175%200%300%400%Text Edge
StyleNoneRaisedDepressedUniformDropshadowFont FamilyProportional
Sans-SerifMonospace Sans-SerifProportional SerifMonospace SerifCasualScriptSmall
Caps
Reset restore all settings to the default valuesDone
Close Modal Dialog

End of dialog window.


Play Again




Terms of Service Manage Cookies Trademarks Privacy Policy ©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
All Rights Reserved
Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help


Your monthly limit of free content is about to expire. Stay on top of historic
market volatility. Try 3 months for $8.75 $0.25 per week. Cancel anytime.
Claim This Offer
Sign In
Bloomberg Anywhere clients get free access