One Company A/B Tested Hybrid Work. Here's What They Found | Hacker News Reader

One Company A/B Tested Hybrid Work. Here's What They Found

hbr.org

16 pointsingve16 comments

This is based on a Chinese company. Not to dismiss their experience but the work ethic and culture is very different from US.

Most companies in China are already RTO + 996. One company loose the strap a bit to allow hybrid is a huge moral boost.

Also mandating a schedule is much easier in Asia than US. Not just for cultural reasons, but also the urbanization and public service availability in Asia metro areas makes it so much easier to manage personal schedules for employees.

"Here's What They Found" - I thought HN had a filter for clickbait titles.

It is an interesting experiment because they seem to have actually really tried to make hybrid work and… it worked. All it took was a little effort on the part of the people coordinating the schedules.

One study shouldn’t change your entire worldview. But going forward, I’m skeptical of the management competency of companies that can’t work out this type of scheduling.

In my opinion, the combination of team members working both remote and hybrid is the worst of all. Unless the manager is excellent which is rarely the case, it puts the burden of grunt but urgent tasks to people who are in proximity to the manager, hence bad for them. And you need huge zoom calls because of remote folks without the benefit of having the ability to turn down audio.

As long as those “grunts” get a better reward than their teammates, that would be… fair?

"...Recent research conducted in a real company showed that employees who worked from home three days a week experienced higher satisfaction and lower attrition rates compared with their colleagues who worked from the office. This reduction in turnover saved millions of dollars in recruiting and training costs, thereby increasing profits for the company..."

Execs feel bad about it so we won't be doing that.

They'll just require you to install "employee performance management" software on your laptop that will analyze how often you type on your keyboard, and keep the camera on to monitor how often you're gone from it. Win-win. Now you can be micromanaged and surveilled in your own home, and the company still gets to save money.

Make sure you keep a smile on that face for the camera! You wouldn't want to damage company culture, would you? Your work family is counting on you.

You might be understating this. Perhaps it’s more like “execs are existentially threatened by remote work”. If an exec delivers little to nothing but everyone in their employment is working hard as hell, that’s pretty good cover (it just just be a hard problem). If they deliver little and no one is working particularly hard, then they may be seen as weak.

The report also notes that while employees worked on average 1.5hrs/day less on home days, they made up for that with longer hours on office days and weekends. They attribute this to their "rigorous performance management system".

"...six-month experiment and subsequent performance reviews for the next two years, and found the two groups showed no differences in productivity, performance review grade, or promotion.

...Those working under the hybrid model had a higher satisfaction rate, and 35% lower attrition."

I'd love to see research into what the optimal numbers of days in the office is! 3 versus 5 days per week had no increase in productivity, so will 1 day per week in the office be better?

^ Thanks for saving me a clickbait click.

It's actually above average for a HBR article! A good summary of the actual research article.

Maybe for 1 day -- perhaps this is a case where homeopathy actually works, and spending half-an-hour in the office once provides the best results of all.

Most of the retired people I know would claim that zero days per week is the optimal number of days to spend in the office, per week

Clickbait titles <<<<<

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