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“We found this [the] They performed best among the group that spent between 23 and 40 percent in the physical office.”
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Associates
Changes in the way we work are here to stay. A new report shows how Mass. must change with them.
Thank god it’s… Wednesday? Hybrid work is messing up the days as we know them.
A new study from Harvard Business School suggests that when it comes to hybrid work, as little as one or two days in the office with a flexible schedule yields the best results for employees and organizations alike.
The study, conducted over nine weeks in the summer of 2020, analyzed the work of people at an organization headquartered in Bangladesh, the study said.
During this time, different groups of employees were assigned different levels of homework and in the office – high homework, which represented about 0 to 23 percent of office time, medium, which represented 23 to 40 percent of office time and little work from home which, according to the study, means more than 40 percent of the time in the office.
“What we could do was use state-of-the-art machine methods to measure the novelty of their work products,” Prithwiraj Choudhury, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said in a recent interview with Boston.com. Technology has been able to measure some work products against others that are similar, such as: B. Strategy presentations compared to other strategy presentations.
“We found that this middle group, who spent between 23 percent and 40 percent in the physical office, performed best,” Choudhury said, “which equates to roughly one to two days a week in the office.”
The study found that workers not only produced more work products, but also showed “greater satisfaction” and “less isolation,” according to Choudhury.
“Intermediate hybrids, I think, offer flexibility for workers, but ensure that people don’t feel isolated,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean the hybrid schedule should be strict. It should be flexible, leaving it up to each team to decide when it will be in the office, the study says.
That could be a specific number of days per week, or maybe a specific week of the month, Choudhury said. The key is that people on the same team should be in the office at the same time – having separate hybrid schedules for people on the same team is “counterproductive”.
“My vision of Hybrid is flexible,” he said. “One that isn’t rigid, so I don’t like the three/two model [three days a week in the office, two days a week at home].”
More studies need to be done to confirm what this study found, Choudhury said.
“As long as a whole team can be together, they will be more effective,” he said. “That’s what we call flexible.”
When people are in the office, Choudhury says it should be a meaningful time, noting that offices should be revamped to encourage this.
“Going into the office gives you the opportunity to interact with colleagues and mentors and have meaningful social interactions,” he said.
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