The Efficiency and Opportunities of Hybrid Work Experience

"Older workers not coming back to the office may depress younger workers' skill accumulation."

"This may be particularly important as young workers learn the most on the job."

Federal Reserve Bank of New York, University of Iowa, Harvard University economists

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The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic transformed much in the world seen as routinely socially and economically effective, nothing quite as much as a sudden entitlement among workers to claim the benefits of working from home. For several years office workers found nirvana in shedding the daily grind of morning and evening commutes to and from a workplace. Claims were made of efficiencies, of economic advantages, of worker satisfaction in a job performance that suffered no ills in workers completing their tasks remotely.

At the same time, those in the service industries who catered to workers who drove back and forth to office complexes daily continued to make their grind to their workplace. Workplaces that were faced with a downturn in clientele because of empty office buildings since workers were operating out of their homes faced a dilemma. Those are the workers whose resilience keep their industries going, until they no longer did, and people were laid off and they involuntarily worked from home, unemployed.

What more could office workers hope for, than being able to claim they were just as efficient, completed all their assigned duties on time and well, and because of a tight market for skilled workers, now refuse to report for duty in-office. And since it's such an employee-centric, anxious-employer environment with inflation running rampant those same workers feel entitled to salary increases. What's an employer to do?

Working right at the office, employees spend 25 percent more of their engaged time in activities related to career-development than do their counterparts working remotely; the conclusion of a team of economists analyzing working from home since the beginning of the pandemic. Those who arrive to work in-office, it seems, devote about 40 more minutes weekly to mentoring others; close to 25 minutes more in formal training and about 15 additional minutes weekly on professional development and learning activities. 

This is the conclusion that WFH Research reached; a group including economist Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University. Based on surveys of over 2,400 American adults able to work from home, the conclusions give quantitative support to CEOs like JPMorganChase & Co and Morgan Stanley who believe that workers, in particular younger staff, should be on-site frequently, to learn and develop, alongside more experienced colleagues.

Those in the vanguard of corporate campaigns to persuade workers back to offices more often, have been Wall Street banks. Their efforts have come up against the brick wall of demands by workers for flexibility in a tight labour market, resulting in a constantly changing morass of hybrid arrangements where close to half of employees who can work from home have a hybrid arrangement.

About a third of workers operate fully on-site, while 20 percent are fully remote, according to data from WFH Research. Workers "need a few days each week to mentor and be mentored", according to Jose Maria Barrero, a member of the research group from Mexico's ITAM business school, in support of the shift to hybrid work schedules.

Executives focus on the value of in-person mentoring and professional development, but have found little to support their arguments other than lame references to the power of "water cooler moments"; times when workers spontaneously connect, sharing ideas and advice. Now that the WFH data is available, as well as two new research papers they have something to lean on: The Power of Proximity argues that working in the same building "has an outsized effect on workers' on-the-job training".