![]() This piqued the interest of Bloom, whose work has long centred around the question of whether big successful companies could support home working and still be productive, and the two teamed up to find out.įirst, they divvied up 1,000 Ctrip employees who volunteered for the study into two teams, separated by birth dates. Liang mentioned to Bloom how expensive Shanghai real estate was, how the costs of maintaining company headquarters there were huge and that he was thinking of letting his staff work from home because of it. Now, six months into the global pandemic, an increasing number of companies are asking: should we work from home indefinitely? And if they do decide to make major organisational changes about remote work, could they see similar leaps in productivity?īloom’s experiment began when James Liang, CEO of Group (formerly called Ctrip) – the largest online travel agency in China, founded in 1999 – ended up in one of Bloom’s graduate classes at Stanford. Somewhat to Bloom’s surprise, the company’s staff became notably more productive by working from home four days a week. ![]() That process is already under way firms including Fujitsu and Twitter have already announced plans to make remote work a permanent option, even after the pandemic.Ī study Bloom did back in 2013 somewhat forecast this trend: in his experiment, Bloom worked with a Chinese company to study remote-work productivity. “One silver lining with the Covid pandemic: it's going to kickstart working from home fringe to a mainstream technology that is commonly used across the country,” he says. ![]() And he thinks the attitudes around working from home are finally changing. He’s made a career out of studying work practices, including remote work. I mean, almost none of them are positive images,” says Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University in California. “Have you punched into Google image search, ‘working from home’, and looked at the top 20 images? They're basically naked people, a guy drinking champagne in what looks like a jacuzzi. But even as remote work has normalised, it’s a recent development: doing your job from your couch was less mainstream before the coronavirus – and even stigmatised. Adapted by Bryan Lufkin.Īmid the Covid-19 crisis, working from home has become run of the mill for many. To listen to more episodes of BBC Sounds, click here. It was presented by Sangita Myska and produced by Sarah Shebbeare. This story is from Curing Our Positivity Problem, an episode of BBC Sounds.
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