Like any good economist, Nicholas Bloom envisions the world in charts and graphs. Asked to describe the post-pandemic future of working from home, he says it will look like a Nike swoosh: After a recent slight decline as employers called workers back to the workplace, the line is turning upward, and Bloom predicts it will keep rising as the advantages of WFH become more apparent.
Bloom, a British-born economics professor at Stanford University, has been studying work from home for more than a decade. It’s only one of his research interests—others include the impact of uncertainty on the economy, the measurement of management practices, and innovation—but when the pandemic hit, WFH became a riveting topic for millions of employees and companies. He and colleagues at other universities quickly launched the widely-cited monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, which polls more than 120,000 employees and employers.
In a recent Zoom interview from his home office, Bloom told Fortune how WFH, properly managed, can be good for creativity, the rules of effective hybrid models, and why the metaverse is going nowhere fast.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Fortune: As a practical matter, is the work-from-home debate settled?
The debate is never settled, but I think practically, yes. One metric is office swipes [of ID cards], and the Kastle Systems data is now flat throughout most of 2023. Office occupancy on average is half what it was pre-pandemic. Separate research shows that about one-third of work days are happening at home. So on average, North Americans have decided they are in the new normal.
Earlier this year, Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of the Citadel hedge fund, reported the highest profit any hedge fund had ever earned. He attributed that performance to having all his employees in the office full time. Could he be right?
Maybe—it’s hard to know with individual anecdotes. But aggregate data for the U.S. economy is not consistent with the view that work from home damages performance. If that were the case, the economy should be in a real funk, which it’s not. Having looked at a lot of studies, hybrid, at least where you’re home maybe one or two days a week, looks like it's consistent with flat or even slightly positive effects.
Ken Griffin is a one-person anecdote. Maybe somebody came up with a great trading strategy. Part of the weird thing about those types of statements is, employees already work from home and have done so for a long time. I doubt there's a single employee in that firm that doesn't do some work on evenings and the weekend.
Many managers argue that while people are productive working alone at home, the company becomes less innovative and creative over time. Does that argument stand up to the research?
The most creative mode seems to be for individuals spending time both in groups and working alone. In one study, researchers randomly generated three groups. One group had to sit together in a room for four hours, continuously coming up with new ideas. The members of the second group had to sit alone. The third group had to go back and forth alternating time with the group and time alone. The third group did the best. Having some time in groups and some time on your own seems to be the most constructive. That's really why hybrid seems to dominate.
Will employees sort themselves into two groups—those who are most ambitious and come into the office a lot, and those who are content just to do their jobs, maybe not get promoted, and come in rarely?
If you have teams, and some people work from home all the time and some come in, then yes, the folks that work from home all the time are going to do less well. I did a randomized controlled trial, and we found that people who are randomized into working from home four days a week were 50% less likely to get promoted.
That doesn’t sound good for the company. What’s a better way?
I would say pick hybrid, and team by team or at the company level just determine which days folks come in and make sure everyone is in. Then the activities are team meetings, presentations, lunches, etc.
Maintaining discipline is important. There is a big thing that economists call negative spillovers or network effects. Imagine if you have a group of eight people in a team, and all of us except me decided to come in on Tuesday. That has very big negative spillovers onto the other seven. If you want to have a meeting involving me, you've now got to get laptops open and go into a room with a screen and connect to me on Zoom. It's really annoying. You'll also hear people say, “We just didn't invite Nick. Instead, we went to the canteen, because then we can have lunch with our meeting.” It's really important that folks come in on the same day and there's pretty high compliance.
Two years ago there was a lot of talk about the metaverse and how we’d all attend meetings through our avatars. What are you hearing about it now?
I've spoken to more than 10,000 managers. I've done probably a couple hundred sessions where there are about 50 people in the room, and I talk to tons of people individually. I have not one single time ever heard about the metaverse. It's like a race to the bottom for which is less successful—metaverse or crypto? I've never heard about crypto in any business context, ever. It's assumed to be a dead thing except in the same sentence as “fraud” or “prison.” And the metaverse is just never mentioned. It's not a thing.
How do you work?
I'm in California, so first thing for me is a lot of calls with Europe and companies on the East Coast. From 8 a.m. until about noon is jammed with back-to-back Zoom calls because that time is really precious. Then typically lunch. Early afternoon, I'll go into the office to meet people in person for things I need to do in person, maybe seminars. I live on campus—I'm only seven or eight minutes by bike. And then I'll come back. I like to try and take my daughter to soccer or work at home at the end of the day.
So you're in the office several days a week?
I'm either in the office or traveling for seminars and talks. I would say 50% of my week is working from home, 10% is in my Stanford office, and 40% Is conferences.
