Is Hybrid the Future of Work: Evidence from A CHINESE EXPERIMENT

We are going to collect information on participants' creativity, efficiency, productivity, and happiness. We will also track participants' performance, attrition, promotion, and switches of WFH status in the longer term. With this information collected, we will check the longer-term equilibrium effect of this hybrid option, heterogeneous effect across different subgroups, and indirect effects.

In the first wave from a group of 1000+ employees, 628 volunteered to participate, of which 494 were qualified by having worked at the firm for 6 months, having broadband internet, and having their own workspace in their homes. From this qualified group, those with odd-numbered birthdays (day of birth ending in 1, 3, 5, etc.) were randomly selected to work at home every Wednesday and Friday. Those with even-numbered birthdays were required to continue working from the office and served as the comparison group. Both groups maintained the same hours, wage levels, type of work, and computer and communication equipment.

2021-08-09

2022-01-30

Impact on employee performance, productivity and promotion, Impact on employee satisfaction, Employee and company learning. Variations by employee type (e.g. gender, age, education, location, role, manager etc).

The experiment took place in Ctrip’s airfare and hotel booking call center in Shanghai, China. The experiment lasted roughly six months, mandatory mid-term and post-experiment surveys were conducted.

This selection of even birthdates into the treatment group was randomly determined by the Chairman, James Liang, by drawing a ping pong ball from an urn in a public ceremony one week prior to the experiment’s start date.

Individual level

No

N/A, no cluster

494 technical and managerial employees

Treatment:233 call center employees

Control: 261 call center employees

In the 2015 study we had 125 in treatment and control and picked up significant effects. In this wave we have roughly twice that number, and include all available volunteers. So since this is the largest possible sample, and about twice the prior sample, we have not run any formal power calcuations.

Working from home has become standard for employees with a university degree. The most common scheme, which has been adopted by around 100 million employees in Europe and North America, is a hybrid schedule, in which individuals spend a mix of days at home and at work each week1,2. However, the effects of hybrid working on employees and firms have been debated, and some executives argue that it damages productivity, innovation and career development3,4,5. Here we ran a six-month randomized control trial investigating the effects of hybrid working from home on 1,612 employees in a Chinese technology company in 2021–2022. We found that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by one-third. The reduction in quit rates was significant for non-managers, female employees and those with long commutes. Null equivalence tests showed that hybrid working did not affect performance grades over the next two years of reviews. We found no evidence for a difference in promotions over the next two years overall, or for any major employee subgroup. Finally, null equivalence tests showed that hybrid working had no effect on the lines of code written by computer-engineer employees. We also found that the 395 managers in the experiment revised their surveyed views about the effect of hybrid working on productivity, from a perceived negative effect (−2.6% on average) before the experiment to a perceived positive one (+1.0%) after the experiment. These results indicate that a hybrid schedule with two days a week working from home does not damage performance.

Bloom, N., Han, R. & Liang, J. Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature 630, 920–925 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2#data-availability