Hidden Brain - Work 2.0: The One-Room Commute

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

If you’re working from home, you might be reveling in your daily commute to the dining room table. Or you might be saying, “Get me out of here.” In the final episode of our Work 2.0 series, economist Nicholas Bloom joins us from his spare bedroom to ponder whether working from home is actually working. If you like this show, please check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you'd like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org. 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Like millions of people around the world, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom has been working from home since March 2020. Instead of a university classroom, he now uses a spare bedroom. Sometimes, one of his four kids pops in while he does meetings over Zoom. He'll never forget this one time when he was in a very important call with some business executives trying to help them with a research project. About 20 minutes into the call, this happened. It was two of my kids starting their daily practice on the bagpokes.

practice on the bagpokes. I was thinking, oh no, no, now is not the time. Had to like say quickly to Evan and meet him, sorry, there's something going on in the background, mute myself and like run into the toilet. Ah, to take the rest of the meeting in there, because it was the only place that was quiet enough. And our house isn't that big, and you know, the soundproofing is just dreadful.

The toilet's about the only sound bunkered room, so I'm sure I'll be back in there again taking calls. Probably many calls, because Nick is an expert on the economic, cultural and social implications of working from home. Now, in an almost surreal twist, he's living his research day in and day out, just like many of us. So, he's working from home, working.

So many people said, you know, we thought we'd be great at this, we thought we could deal with it, I thought I was mentally strong, I didn't like many of my employees, but I realized after, you know, three or four months, maybe I didn't miss them. This week on Hidden Brain, the final installment in our work 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite show about the psychological challenges and the possibilities of working from home in the COVID era and beyond.

Before economist Nick Bloom became a professor at Stanford, he walked in London for a consulting company. He often worked from home and back then his co-workers made a lot of assumptions about what he did all day. I know there was endless joking about working from home, shurking from home, working remotely, remotely working. So, you know, they would wind me up and claim I was watching as old fashion black on my, you know, TV movies that were on during the day, I was watching the cricket being British, but I honestly, I promise you, I was working, but it didn't feel like other people thought that was true. You probably had the cricket in the background though, didn't you? Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I'm not a big fan of cricket unless it comes to revising for my exams. To the point the cricket became fascinating, because you know, it was like anything's fascinating compared to revising

The assumptions that people have long held about working from home you can see them reflected in our searches online Some time ago Nick looked at what you see when you search for the phrase working from home on the web You know, I gave a few talks. I have to say before COVID, I did a bit of, you know, research and talks and stuff over the years for quite a while. And one thing I used to explain to people is one good way to tell how negatively viewed working

from home was was just to go into Google or Bing and just search to an image search under the words, working from home. And if you do that, I screen shoted it for it and showed it in the TEDx talk in 2017 and you know I showed the top 15 hits that took you know the top two rows of images and they were basically naked people, cartoons, people juggling babies on their lap. They're honestly out of the 15, there are only two that were positive images, there were 13 that were just they they were like terrible. You know, the worst was the guy in the Chakuzi drinking champagne, which just it was so negatively viewed.

So, some years ago, and this is long before the COVID pandemic hit us, a new story broke about a certain company in Silicon Valley. Listen to this clip from NBC's Today Show. Discrentled employees leaked an internal memo from human resources that bands telecommuting, saying, some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and in prompt to team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. away and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and in prom to team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. So Nick tell me why Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayor wanted to cancel the company's policy to allow

employees to work from home. Sure. She took over in Chousine as the, ah, someone has to turn around the company. And she said not long into her tenure there. She discovered there's a whole group of people that were working from home. But many of them were just not logging in the entire day. There wasn't much assessment what was going on. It was clear, well, while some of them are doing really well, others were basically using it as a way to take an extended holiday. And you know, it's kind of intriguing when I spoke to her, she said, look, working

from home can be great, but you need a performance evaluation system. You need to make sure that the people at home are actually working rather than goofing off. And she said at that point, we didn't have an anyahoo. So I basically, you know, temporarily pause the working at home scheme until we got a performance system in and then,

you know, relaxed it back a bit. But yes, it generated a storm of media back in 2013. I still remember now. Yeah. So you've done research into whether Marissa Mayer was right in terms of the effects of working from home on productivity. But before we get to the science, I want to talk a moment about the history of how we got to these

attitudes about working from home. So long before COVID, people who didn't work in an office were seen as the exception. But what's interesting is that when you look down history, most people would have found it odd to work anywhere other than their homes. Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, what's happened now is made, you know, history so odd. So if you go back to, you know, 1750, just on the eve of the Industrial Revolution in the UK,

basically we all worked at home. We worked in the fields or occasionally a skilled craftsman, but no one is really working anywhere else than home. And then office work or factory work really started off with offices. So places like Manchester and the UK started to have industrial machinery. And of course, to do that, you needed scale buildings. And you know, people needed to start to commute. But I should point out back then you know in 1800 when you talk about commuting you're walking to the factory that was really not that far away.

The major offices started around 1900 when big companies had you know growing amounts of paperwork and they just have vast halls full of clerks that would come in and process piles of paper and you know, oddly enough, despite the complete change in technology over the next, you know, 120 years up until, you know, January of this year, we were still very much focused on coming into the office on a kind of nine to five schedule. And isn't it interesting that along the way, the cultural norms and psychological norms sort of evolved with these workplace arrangement so that people who work from home came to be seen as less ambitious or less employable, less talented maybe, and others became almost declassied to be working from home. Yeah, exactly.

It's one of those things. Economists might call it a generally clubrim effect, which means even if one firm figured out working from home was great, it was hard for them to change it alone because there's a negative stigma. No employee wants to have it maybe on their CV that they worked at home for years because other firms think it is bad.

And so yeah, exactly right. Just to be clear, the four things we need for working from home are internet, broadband, laptops and video calls. and all of them have been around since the mid 2000. So the last one to come out was video calls and that was really the dawn of Skype. So Skype comes out in 2003. It's me. I'm in Cal. It's kind of main streamed by 2005-6. Hello. So really for probably 15 years now, we could have effectively worked from home, but it was the whole social norms that up until now have held us back.

How are you? It's so typical of me to talk about myself, I'm sorry. And this is enormous inertia in the system because, you know, we've built entire cities around the idea that there's going to be this urban core where people work and suburbs where people live. We built highways and public transit systems to ferry people from residential neighborhoods to commercial neighborhoods. It's almost as if once that initial model separating the workplace from the home got fixed in people's minds, there was an inertia that got built up around it that became essentially

unstoppable. Yes, exactly. I mean, I think one big change post-COVID, there's gonna be driven both by working from home and also the other issue is social distancing. So I think in future, a lot of that real estate is probably gonna be converted into apartments and it's gonna be, you know, the price of it's gonna drop a lot

and it's gonna attract conversion into apartments. So we're gonna have much more mixed living modes whereby those skyscrapers aren't all offices and we don't all live out in the suburbs. Instead, there's more people living in their center on lower rents and there's less commuting because it's the only way we're going to be able to shape it. And of course, included in that less commuting

will be more working from home. When we come back, Nick Bloom tells us about his unusual experiment at a Chinese travel agency where half of the workers stayed in the office and half were allowed to work from home. We did a lot of interviews and I just said it's really depressing. Or they fell victim to one of the three great enemies of working from home, the bad, the fridge or the television. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Nick Bloom is a researcher at Stanford University. For years, he has studied the phenomenon of working from home and asked a deceptively

simple question. Are people more productive or less productive when they working from home and asked a deceptively simple question. Are people more productive or less productive when they work from home? Nick you were teaching a class at Stanford in 2010 and you had a student in the class from China and you got a chatting with him. He told you about a problem his company was having back in China. What was the problem? You know as backstop you know the situation was pretty weird. I was, uh, teaching a PhD at graduate economics class in Stanford. And I have about, you know, 15 to 20 students in the class. One of them I figured out relatively soon. Maybe, you know,

a third of the way into the course was James Lee Ang from talking to him who was the, uh, CEO and co-founder of this huge Chinese travel agent. And he said that they were growing really fast doing very well, but they were based at in Shanghai. And their challenge was office space in Shanghai was incredibly expensive. And so they wanted to figure out how to grow without sinking vast amounts of money into ever increasing size of expensive offices. And so they were thinking about a working from home program. So you decided to work with this Chinese company called C-Trip to find out whether working from home was good or bad in terms of productivity.

And you did more than just simply conduct a survey. You decided to conduct an experiment. Yes, you know, the great thing was because James is a PhD economics student. He was open to what's called doing a randomized control trial. So quite formally, they went to in C-Trip, they got two divisions hotel and airfare. There are about 1000 people in them and they asked them who wants to work from home. You know, amazingly, we're not interestingly, maybe as much as amazing, only a half of them volunteered. So it is to be clear. You know, a lot of people don't want to work from home.

So the volunteers tended to be slightly older, more like to have kids live further away. But then they took these 500 volunteers and had a formal randomization. So James, on C-trip TV, drew a ping pong ball out of an earn and it said even, so that meant people with even birthdays have you're born on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, tenth, et cetera, the month. You were in treatment sample, so you actually got to work from home

for four days a week for the next nine months. And if you're odd like me, I'm the fifth of me, you were the control group and you remained in the office for the next nine months. A few other notes about the experiment. For the workers who went home four days a week, they all came into the office on the fifth day. That was when they did things that were best to do in person, like team meetings and trainings. And managers were always in the office.

The main worry for C-Trip was the fear that all companies seemed to have, that the remote employees would get distracted and not be productive. But C-Trip had a plan to deal with that. If they had declines in productivity, they figured that those would be offset by the huge savings in rent. In fact, this calculation was one of the reasons they agreed to run the experiment in the first place. To see how many dollars they saved on rent versus how many dollars they might lose on productivity. And then the results came in.

So, you know, it was, the results were honestly amazing and this is why, you know, it was so valuable to have nine months because an issue you were thinking, this can't be true. What you saw was the working from home employees were 13% more productive than the people in the office. Just to be clear, that is an enormous uplift. That's almost a day extra week, simply

from having the same people and the same team doing the same job, which is answering telephone calls, dealing with customer complaints, taking bookings, et cetera, now working at home, rather than the office. bookings, etc. Now working at home rather than the office. And did they actually calculate a dollar figure in terms of increased productivity, not just from the increased productivity, but from the savings on rent? Yes, so they estimated they saved around $2,000 per employee per year from working from home. You know, Cedric was like, as you can imagine,

was incredibly positive about this, and at the end of the experiment announced they're rolling the scheme out to the entire company. So, now employees who really hated working from home, were they allowed to come back and start working out of the office? Yes, you know, a striking finding. Again, totally unexpected was, well, you know, there are two things, two elements. One is initially they offered to a thousand employees, only 500 wanted to work from home. So our view would have been, honestly, many more people have taken out, but a lot of people

do not want to work from home, you know. One reason is, you know, the people that want to come to the office are young and single, as we know, in the US about a third of people meet their spouse in the workplace. Something similar is true in China. The other thing is, after the end of the nine-month experiment, remembering everyone in the experiment and volunteered, around half of the people that won the lottery to work from home actually changed their minds and decided to come back in the office and the control group who'd all volunteered You know nine months ago it just lost the lottery

But at this point it were allowed to do whatever they want only a third of them actually ended up going home So there was a huge Move away actually after people have tried it out against working from home for out of five days a week Which again was very surprisingly thought you Thought employees are partly paid on performance. So since they're performing 13% more at home, their pay has gone up, but even so large numbers of them, more than half of them were voting in sense,

voting with their feet because they asked to actively come back into the office with all the commute costs and hassle that involved. Isn't there a real irony here, Nick, which is that the company thought that people were going to be less productive but in fact people turned out to be more productive and people thought they wanted to work from home but once they actually did they actually wanted to come back to work. Yes you know it comes

back to I think what we really need and what employees want on average is a mix. So C-trip at that point was only offering four out of five days a week at home. I think you know I've actually again caught up with C-trip very recently. If you'd moved to a system where they could have worked from home one or two days a week, that would have been far more popular. Now for logistical reasons they didn't offer that. But most employees, and we saw this in the experiment, I should say, for the first two or three months, they were really happy, they're very positive on it. But as time went on, we just got increasing reports and complaints about loneliness.

And it's very depressing being at home day in day out, working there. You're on your own. And so by the time it came to the end of nine months, many people were quite surprised, but they said, I can't hack this. We did a lot of interviews, by the way, a lot of focus group interviews, and they just said it's really depressing. Or they fell victim to one of the three great enemies

of working from home, the bed, the fridge, or the television. So something basically went wrong. And they said, look, save me, get me out of here. I want to come back to the office. I mean, it's quite astounding, but I'm sure many people can enter those. For me, I'm really missing my colleagues. I like being at home. I mean, I live with my wife and four kids, but it kind of gets isolating. I'd love to go back into the

office in at least for two, three days a week. And that's the same thing we saw in Cetra. So in other words, partly what you're seeing is that they might be benefits from working from home that are just, you know, regardless of who you send home, there are some advantages, certainly in terms of saving on office space, but it may be that the people who actually are best suited to working from home are the people who actually want to be working from home. So some amount of flexibility from the point of view of the employees might be part of the productivity equation. Yes, exactly. I mean, the two main things I took out of this and from more recent work I've been doing is the importance of choice and flexibility. So it turns out on choice, people

have just really different views and it's very hard to know, you know, what people's views are. Depends a lot on what their home's circumstances are like. Do they have space, a spare room? You know, do they want to be at home? Is there a apartment nice? And then on flexibility, it's actually really hard to tell. So in C-Trip, we just discovered in the focus groups, so many people said, you know, we thought we'd be great at this, we thought we could deal with it, I thought I was mentally strong or I didn't feel like, you know, I didn't like many of my employees. It's actually wanted to go home, but I realized after, you know, three or four months, maybe I did miss them.

It's like that old saying absence makes the heart grow fonder and it seemed to be true. You know, as hard as it is to imagine, I'm sure there are some people out there now thinking even that really annoying guy Tony in accounts maybe I miss him a bit etc. That seemed to be what we're seeing with with C-trip and China. And also maybe the champagne and the the Jacuzzi starts to get old after four months. You also had some interesting findings from the C-Trip experiment when it came to quitterates. Tell me what happened in terms of retaining employees what you found. Yeah, another striking finding was quitterates fell by half for the people that worked from home. So the firm collects a lot of surveys

and they reported in the survey so far happier. But, you know, I'm sometimes slightly skeptical. I don't know whether, you know, it's hard to know the firms were surveying a response to its firm, the employees to the firm. But, you know, the much more important thing is the voting with their feet. So C-trip has about a 50%

quik rate for its employees. It turns out that's almost identical to the average in the UK, US Australia, many countries, 50% about normal. So most people stay about two years in a job before moving on. For the working from home employees, their quik rates are from 50% down to 25%, which of course, the company is a huge upside because it avoided a large chunk of the pain of hiring and training and getting people out to speed just for them to then quit. So I'm wondering if one of the things that people forget when they think about you know the old negative stereotypes of working from home that people are easily distracted, they're going to be distracted by the fridge and the TV and the bed.

That they actually forget the workplace is also a source of distraction. The workplace is often, you know, there are multiple things going on. There are slack channels that tell you about the free food that's being given away on another floor of the building and you know, there's someone's birthday going on. It's not as if the workplace is a highly focused, concentrating environment either. If the workplace is a highly focused, concentrating environment either. No, exactly right. So just to explain, for the 13% higher productivity from working from home, about a third of that was the home-based employees who are more productive per minute. And that's entirely because home is on average actually less distracting. And from the interviews, there are some hilarious stories that come up.

My favorite was the woman that said you know when i'm in the office it's so distracting the woman in the cubicle next to me clips her toenails oh she takes out this you know this toenail clip us and she clips it under the table and she said under the desk she said she thinks i don't notice but i tell you i notice i notice it's disgusting you know there's that there are stories of world Cup sweepstakes, of there's a cake in the breakout room, some of these boyfriend and girlfriend of left, you know, you can imagine. So, you're exactly right, home is distracting, but the office is, it turns out to be significantly more distracting, and so actually, you can work more efficiently per minute, at least

in this experiment. So I understand with the C-Trep study, some people who were working from home wanted to come back, perhaps because they felt like they were losing out to colleagues who were in the office all the time. Maybe the colleagues were getting more face time with the bosses. So in some ways the experiment didn't do, it didn't do away with the social norm that working from home was inferior, it basically laid it out as a short-term experiment. Yes, the one dark side, I'd say, of working from home from the experiment was the drop in promotion rates for people working from home.

So if you control for performance, remember the people at home were sick, 13% were productive, they should have been promoted at a much faster rate. And it turns out they're promoted less rapidly. In fact, they're roughly their eventual promotion. It was roughly half for those at home versus at the office. So there's a huge drop in promotions. And when we asked them, it turned out looking into there's a couple of factors. One is you're working from home, you're you're forgotten about. And so that's a serious downside that you're in a team of 15. And let's say there's three of you working from home, the the rest in the office you can be passed over. The other thing that was tricky to how to deal with when you spoke to C-Trip, they said,

well look, part of being promoted is knowing your colleagues and knowing about the firm culture etc. and that does come from being in the office and having lunch and coffees around. So you know, it's a bit of a ban. Some of the extra productivities at home is because there's plenty less time chit-chatting over coffee but some of that chit-chat turns out to be pretty useful. What happens when hundreds of millions of people don't make a choice to work from home, but a global pandemic suddenly makes the choice for them. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the world. Millions of people have died and countless others have seen their lives disrupted. Virtually overnight, working from home in many countries became not an exception, not a perk, just the new normal. Nick, you've been preaching the virtues of working from home for years. I'm curious what this moment feels like. You don't really move the needle on that, and then suddenly thousands of companies and millions of people start doing it overnight.

Have you suffered whiplash? You know, it is a weird experience. I was doing something the other day looking at the frequency of the world working from home in US newspapers. So I looked at the top 50 US newspapers and it went up 12,000% between January and April 2020. So yeah, it's, I mean, I'm fascinated by it. I'm living it. It's very odd to be researching something that you and all your friends are living in. I, all my friends and relatives, etc., are going through exactly the same issue. I should say that in the US currently, only 40% of people are working from home. So 30% of people are not working.

And 30% of people are working on business premises, which are typically essential service workers. But for those of us that are working from home, in many ways, you're actually in the lucky minority that we're able to work and able to do this safely at home. Hmm. So, one of the things that's very interesting about the current shift for this two in five workers, this 40% of workers that are working from home, is that the changes happen so suddenly and is so widespread, that it seems to have changed norms overnight. So Zoom calls and emails and phone conversations are now the default. They no longer the second-class citizen in the workplace.

Yeah, exactly. It's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine that lives in London and he worked for US company and he's trying to set up a startup of the same company company subsidiary in South Africa. And he was saying, he up until, you know, now he was always on Zoom, but he was always, you know, or whatever teams. He was always the other one out in the sense

that everyone else is in the room and he was typically dialing in. He said suddenly, he felt on the level with everyone else that everyone was on Zoom. And I had a similar feedback, actually I was giving a presentation to one of the national labs in the US and somebody there was disabled.

And we're saying she was saying, you know, in some sense this has been a great level of for me because I struggled to get into the office and back. But now, you know, all on Zoom and being physically there really doesn't matter. So it has had some unusual effects, both positive and negative. And in fact, you know, I just won Final Anicked Out. I was talking to someone that starts a high tech runner. She founded a high tech company out in the Bay Area. She was born in India and came over

and started the company here. And she was saying, she notices on Zoom who speaks up is quite different from who does it in person. And she was saying, Americans are like, amazingly loud in meetings. And there's some cultural and gender differences. They're quite different when you're on video course. A number of people that previously didn't spoke up have now felt actually empowered to talk because they find it less intimidating on a video course. Very interesting. I understand you've completed a survey of nearly 2,000 Americans. Paint

me a picture of the people who report making a successful switch to working from home and the people who can't or don't. So you know one huge factor is clear education. So it's not that being educated makes you better working from home. It's that being educated means you're in the type of job that means you can probably work from home. So if we look at working from home jobs, they tend to you're in the type of job that means you can probably work from home. So, if we look at working from home jobs, they tend to be much more managerial professional. You can imagine that the kind of things that are typically done beforehand in the office

and so it can be easily shifted home. If you look at people with a high school degree or less, so those that left school, 16, 17, 18, their formal act to be in retail, maybe it's in construction, manufacturing, the types of things you need to be on site. So education has become an enormous divider actually in terms of who can work from home. The other couple of factors that we picked up on, again, kind of links to wealth and education is having functional internet. It's astounding, but only 65% of Americans in our survey report having internet connectivity good enough to run a video call, a high quality video call.

So for those of us that living in nice parts of cities, it seems totally standard. You have good internet, but a lot of poorer urban areas or rural areas, they have internet, but it flakes in and out, and so you can't really have video calls. The other thing is having space at home, so people have been able to make this a success, report having their own room that's not their bedroom so they can work quietly. In the survey data, only 49% of Americans have their own room that's not their bedroom, so most people are working from home in a room, you know, their husband or wife in the same room or kids running around, et cetera.

So I just want to be, you know, very clear, COVID working from home is not great. Post COVID, I think will be this Navanna where we're doing it, you know, two, one, two, three days a week. Our kids are back in school, we have proper equipment, we have a piece and a quarter of our own room because you know, our husband and wife

they're out of work and so we can get on with it. So what I hear you saying of course is that there is this massive worldwide experiment that is unfolding before our eyes. There's already some data starting to come in about its effects. I just read a paper by Lingfang Bao and colleagues. They analyze the effects of working from home arrangements as a result of COVID by examining productivity at BIDU, which is one of China's biggest IT companies, and they get mixed results. Some people report higher productivity, others, especially people working in big teams on complex or highly collaborative projects. They report lower productivity.

Does that surprise you at all? No, I think, you know, the stories we're getting out from talking to firms and from the data is, what I would call day-to-day things, which is kind of continuing activities we've always been doing, which is a bit like, well, the folks I was talking about in C-trip, they're basically making calls and taking bookings.

That seems to work pretty well. So that, you know, repeating what you've done before, nothing too innovative, nothing too unusual on you, and you know, the peace and quiet at home works quite well. So that, you know, repeating what you've done before, nothing too innovative, nothing too unusual, and you know, the peace and quiet at home works quite well. What appears to be more of a struggle is more creative activities, bigger team group activities. So I'd say that's more long run. It's kind of like what, as economists, you might call intangible investments. And it goes back to quips, you know, guys like Steve Jobs made, you know, oh, they're quote from Mr. May,

you've really got to be in the building and talking to others, you know, kicking back, you know, talking over the water cooler to come out with some of these ideas. So I think in the short run, productivity's actually looking surprisingly good. What I worry about is, you know, innovation and creativity. For example, you know, next year's new iPhone, will that

be that impressive because all the innovation and research is going into it right now. I presume it's much harder to do working from home. Right, and you mentioned Steve Jobs a second ago. This is almost a mantra in Silicon Valley, which is the chance encounters that happen when people work together, they bump into each other in the hallway and in the kitchens. Steve Jobs basically designed Apple to encourage chance encounters.

So really the question that you're asking is, what happens when you turn off that serendipity? Yeah, what's amazing is there's so much money invested by firms in this, you know, you think of the billions and billions of dollars that high tech firms, but also investment banks or professional service firms have spent on super fancy offices. They're trying to persuade people to come in.

So the amazing artworks, the incredible free food, the ping pong table, the, you know, the table football table, the astounding, you know, floor to ceiling glass, the incredible free food, the ping pong table, the table football table, the astounding floor to ceiling glass, the incredible gardens, all of that is to drag people into the office. Hi everyone, my name is Kevin and today we're going inside the multi-million dollar tree house conference room. Now, got a knot in your back, schedule a massage, looking for inspiration, attempt to talk. We have our bike room, our bike room holds 92 bikes. It's all

about encouraging our employees to reduce their carbon. First of all, you notice that you're getting a view and natural light, which is important. There's research that's shown how natural light in views help people focus and process information in a more effective way. I think it is important, you know, for my own experience, honestly, just of my self-interrespect, a lot of my, you know, best research pieces have come from discussions over lunch and here in conferences.

But I think it is really important, but I must say that, you know, the research based on this is not entirely conclusive, and there's certainly fantastic creations that happen by people working alone. You can come up with lots of examples of that too. I'm wondering, the picture you're painting here, if you asked me at the start of 2020, can 40% of the country work from home? I would have probably said no, it would be very hard, probably impossible. And clearly now that's been proven untrue, I think a large number of people

are making it work. But I think the picture that's emerging from this conversation is how complex the question actually is and how much it's connected to individual people's life situations. I mean, you know, I've gotten to spend more time with family over the last few months as I'm working, which has been wonderful. But I can also imagine that people may perhaps who might not want to spend large amounts of time with family. Maybe they don't have a happy family situation. Maybe they're single and they're living by themselves and it's extremely lonely. And so the idea that there's a one-size-fits-all rule that's going to mean

everyone working from home is more productive or everyone working from home is more unhappy, that simply breaks down, doesn't it? Exactly, so again you see this so much in the survey data, so just to give you one figure, we ask people post COVID, how many days would you want to work from home? And 20% of people say none, 20% of people do not want to work from home whatsoever, and they may be many of the types of people you mention, they have very small apartments or they don't have great family situations. Then there's 25% of people that want to work from home five days a week. They never want to go back to the office again.

And then the remaining 55% are a big spread. So this is something, having worked for years, all kinds of different parts of economics research. I can't think of an area I've seen in such differing views. So the average person, if there's such a person, wants to work from home typically two days a week, but that average hides enormous variation.

So I think for firms, choices, gonna be absolutely essential to get this right. I think for firms choices, going to be absolutely essential to get this right. You know, I recently came by this part in the news on CNBC about the real estate market in New York City. Take a listen, Nick. The big worry here and the big numbers was this rapid rise in empty apartments, the inventory of rental listings soaring 85% we now have a vacancy rate that is the highest in Manhattan on record. So Nick, beyond what happens to workers and companies, what do you think

the effects of COVID and working from home might be on cities and where we decide to live? So I have to say I think it's you know it's not good for cities. So just to be clear, there's plenty of people saying, well, cities have seen this all before. They always bounce back. There's been plenty of pandemics. That's true. But if you look, for example, they bounce back, well, they take a long time, and in the words of Keynes,

John Maynard Keynes in the long-run rule dead. So just as a... What? One anecdote. If you look at London, I was watching something on CNN with somebody saying, you know, what one anecdote, if you look at London, I was watching something on CNN with somebody saying, you know, of course, London recovered after the plague. That's true. But if you look at the data 10 years after the Great Plague, 30% of buildings were still

empty. So, you know, my prediction is prices will drop dramatically. It's not that skyscrapers are apartments remain empty. From the clip they are right now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see prices of say Manhattan, you know, apartment and office buildings falling by 30 to 50 percent. And that's the way you keep them off, keep them off. You know, people... And I'm not sure it's a bad thing because it's re-backed. It would take us back to say 2000, or rebalance a bit the country. Rural areas have been left behind and the center of cities have done incredibly well.

If we rewind that by 20 years back to 2000, you have just a more balanced national setup without such an affordability crisis in the center of cities. There's still much we don't know about what life will look like in a post-COVID era. Will we go back to the way we used to work in the old days, back when more people commuted to an office, and the definition of a workplace was a physical space that you shared with your colleagues, or will we permanently pivot to an era where remote work is more than norm? I ask Nick to predict which way our work practices would evolve, and by extension, our communities writ large. I'm pretty sure most of this will be permanent.

So, you know, I can give you... There are four reasons that are driving permanence. Firstly, this is turned out to be a great experience in the sense that 70% of companies have reported what convoem has turned out better than predicted great experience in the sense that 70% of companies have reported what Convorm has turned out better than predicted, so they're much more enthusiastic. Secondly, the stigma seems to have evaporated, so again in survey data, three quarters of people report. Their perception is a big drop in stigma. Thirdly investment, so we collected data and the average person in America has invested 12 hours and about a thousand

dollars setting up working from home. So, you know, to take me personally, I spent a while figuring out how all these, you know, zoom and teams and chime and everything works and I bought a proper webcam and a mic and, you know, tried to organize the room a bit. And then finally, social distancing. My prediction is just to put figures on it actually is before COVID, 5% of working days in America, or a full time at home, during COVID, it's about 40% so 40% of our working days are at home, post COVID from talking to firms and from our service, it looks something like 20%. So we're going to, you know, wind back a bit from where we are now because, you know, no one's going to be full time at home, or very few people, but we're well above what

we were before COVID. I'm wondering, Nick, if you're hiring an employee, maybe you are less interested is the employee in the same zip code as I am, or in the same city as I am. Maybe now if you're a company, you actually can hire more widely. Maybe you can actually look to rural areas or even other countries for labor in ways that you couldn't earlier. In other words, it actually might unleash a lot of people who previously could not find their way

to an expensive Manhattan job interview, now can actually be in the running for that job. No, exactly. I think this is going to be great for rebalance in the economy. So many of what I see the political troubles in the US and also my homeland, the UK are from this increasing, growing rural urban divide. And the rural parts of the country felt left behind, you know, felt forgotten about by urban elites, et cetera. Now, if suddenly we allow both people to move out of cities into the

countryside, but also jobs to move, so even if nobody moves, if employers can now hire people in rural areas more easily, that's going to rebalance things. And so you can imagine if we're working from home, let's say three days a week and only coming in the office two days a week, you can be recruiting people far out deep into rural areas. So if a Stanford professor like you can work at Stanford but pay rent in let's say Kansas or in, or in Wahaka, Mexico, why would someone like you choose to live in Palo Alto? Well, well, this comes back to, you know, I guess, inertia.

I mean, it's a good question. If, you know, imagine COVID lasts, you know, the pandemic horrifically lasted for five years. A lot of people be asking themselves that question, why am I living in such expensive areas? You know, it works for us living here, my kids are in local schools, and you know, we have friends locally, et cetera.

But I guess if it's lasted forever, and again, just to be clear, post pandemic, I see us going back into the office two, three days a week. But there are certain jobs, I think, it's become clear that they can just be done entirely remotely. And for those jobs, you may well see a lot of people moved, you might live in Hawaii, might live next to the beach, and then I code for know, code for Facebook.

And there's nothing wrong with that. And if that works out, actually, that's great. You may fly to Silicon Valley once every other month to meet in person and spend the rest of your time living out in Hawaii or, you know, living up in the ski slope. So I think we'll see a big increase in that. And in fact, if you look, if you look at the reports from real estate agents, they are talking about there's been an explosion of people wanting to buy what's called lifestyle properties. So, you know, beautiful runches deep at the countryside that, you know, you can buy a small man hat in the apartment or you can buy a 200 acre ranch at and wireming and if you can work remotely, you know, maybe you go for the

lot. But again, you have this divide, don't you, which is that this is speaking now to the people who are the wealthiest people who are able to think that way. And if you don't you, which is that this is speaking now to the people who are the wealthiest people who are able to think that way. And if you don't have the education, the technology, the support from an employer to do this, there's really going to be this bifurcating caste system. Yes, although I think in terms of moving people out to rural areas, you know, it pushes them both directions. You're exactly right. The people who can work from home are educated.

And so they gain a lot of the direct benefits. It is true though, if a lot of say wealthy New Yorkers move out into the countryside, when they're out there going to demand services, you know, restaurants and go out to gyms, et cetera, and you know, they're not up pay more tax revenue, they're improved local schools. And so that will indirectly spill over to, you know, people that are out there that maybe can't work from home, but will get some of the indirect benefits. So the inequality impacts a bit mixed. I think it will really reduce inequality.

If we can rebalance things a bit away from cities, it's not like, you know, I was born in London. I lived in London until I was 30. I'm basically a city person, but it's also clear that even for me, one of the reasons I left London and came out to the US is it was just too expensive to live in. And I think it will be better for society if cities were, you know, not so unbelievably expensive. So you could have a more mixed set of people lived in them. And there's more, you know, basically diversity across the US, rather than becoming so geographically segregated by income, which is what's been happening until recently. What's been your most embarrassing work from home moment these last few months?

Oh, my most embarrassing work. I mean, I tell you one, this is the classic early days of Zoom. I was on a video call, it was a Zoom call, and I screen shared with some couple of co-authors, and I've forgotten to turn off screen sharing, and at some point one of them is talking, and as you do was losing you know concentration and went to start doing some emails and was typing or reply and my co-author suddenly said hey Nick you do

realize you're still on screen share and you know he'd very politely taken a while thinking I might turn back but you know for the last five six minutes you must be maybe even ten minutes watching me type emails, clearly paying no attention. One of the things you have to realize when you are working for my home is the office norms just don't apply so it's completely reasonable if you're working for your home to have a cat walk across your camera or a baby crying in the background and one of my colleagues has just had a baby and you know that baby was often sitting in his lap during conference calls and he is cute and it is the way it is in the office it would seem weird but I like the fact that working

from home there's a new set of rules around what's reasonable. Economist Nick Bloom teaches at Stanford or to be more precise he teaches from his spare bedroom and sometimes from his bathroom when his kids are practicing the backbipes. Nick Blue, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks, it's been fantastic, thank you for having me. The concern is that they want to have a Kurdish excuse me my kids are here live television on cold air continues across the area tonight potential for some

frost and freeze for some of us warm up it's gonna take Maple David Cameron was talking about oh I'm really sorry that's my son arriving sorry Sorry Sorry Yes you can have tea with him I'm really sorry but yeah okay well that's we'll leave All right welcome back I'm gonna be back in studio on Monday so I thought I'd bring my daughter Lina with us It's no

Hey can you say it's gonna be sunny today? No it's gonna be sunny today. No, it's gonna be hot. Okay, good work. Lots of upper 80s and low 90s over the next 7 to 10 days. This didn't go as planned, Jackie. We recently checked back in with Nick Bloom to get his perspective on how working from home is evolved in the year since we first ran this episode. You might expect that with the COVID-19 pandemic more under control in the US, more employees will be returning to the office.

But some preliminary data suggests working from home is just as prevalent. According to Gallup, 45% of US employees worked at least part-time at home in the fall of 2021. Nick Bloom says there's one major reason for this. Right now, there's a hot labor market in the US. Because of the pandemic, many workers decided to quit their jobs or change career paths. So organizations are realizing that if they want to hire new employees and even keep the ones they have, they should offer at least two days per week of working from home. Some companies are choosing a hybrid model, like working from home on Mondays and Fridays, while others are offering one full month per year of walking from anywhere.

In other words, Nick predicts, walking from home seems to be here to stay. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Kristen Wong, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is someone who has made it possible for the Hidden Brain team to work from home successfully. His name is Yatbaraq Adafene, and he's a business expert with Apple in Washington, DC. When our show moved to independent production in 2020, we needed new computers.

Yet, as he's known, patiently walked me through the process of setting up a business account for our new company and ensured we got our computers on a tight turnaround. It helped that he's something of an audio file himself. Thank you, yeah. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. file himself. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. you