At home, at office

What hybrid workers should do where

Anew study from the University of Birmingham surveyed 597 managers and found that 51.8% of them agreed that working from home improves employee concentration, 59.5% agreed that it increases productivity, and 62.8% agreed that it increases motivation.

However, managers often struggle with hybrid work, especially in guiding employees what to do at home versus the office. Given that about three-quarters of all U.S. companies are in the process of adopting a hybrid work model, optimizing this mix of employee activities is critical both for the success of individual companies and the U.S. economy as a whole.

So what are the best practices in determining what tasks hybrid workers should work on from home?

One key filter to determine what to do where: To maximize productivity, hybrid work models have to minimize commuting time for employees. Coming to the office needs to be for a specific purpose that outweighs the significant costs — in time, money, and stress — involved in the commute.

A survey by Hubble asking what respondents liked about working from home showed that 79% of respondents named the lack of commute. According to a recent survey by Zebra, 35% of Americans would be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for a shorter commute.

Americans waste a lot of time commuting. U. S. Census data from 2019 shows that about 10% of Americans commuted over an hour each way, mainly those living in dense urban areas. On average, Americans commute a half-hour each way.

Moreover, commuting to work costs a lot of money. According to a Flexjobs analysis, employees can save up to $12,000 per year by working full-time remotely.

Peer-reviewed research found that longer commute times correlate with lower job satisfaction, increased strain, and poorer mental health. And happy workers are productive workers, as found by economists at the University of Warwick.

In fact, the large majority of the work that most employees do is more effectively done from home anyway, even if the commute wasn’t an issue. For instance, much of the work done by individual employees involves focused tasks that they do by themselves. Research shows that workers are more focused working at home, without the distractions of the office.

Another category of work that takes up a great deal of time for employees is asynchronous collaboration and communication. That might involve sending emails, editing a Google Doc or Mural board, or doing virtual asynchronous brainstorming. A McKinsey analysis shows that only email takes up an average of 28% of work time for knowledge workers. There’s no reason to commute to the office just to read and send emails.

A third major activity best done from home is virtual meetings. In a survey by the collaboration software company Slack, employees report spending two hours each day in meetings. Stuart Templeton, the head of Slack in the UK, said that employers risked turning their offices into “productivity killers” by having their staff come in just to do video calls; according to him, “making a two-hour commute to sit on video calls is a terrible use of the office.”

Of course, for those workers who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home office, it’s important for employers to provide an alternative workplace for these three tasks, either in an employer-owned office or a co-working space. Still, the large majority of employees prefer to work on such tasks at home. That means most hybrid employees should spend the substantial majority of their time working remotely.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the CEO of the future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and the best-selling author of “Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage” and other books. He lived in Little Rock for a year while on a research fellowship.