A few months ago I was giving a talk about the future of work. When I quoted some standard examples of how productivity has risen with remote working, a polite scepticism crossed several faces in the audience. Afterwards, some executives revealed their despair. “I love my staff,” said one. “But they’re taking far longer to get things done at home.”

This is not a fashionable view. Some corporate CEOs genuinely feel that greater flexibility makes everyone stronger — and many tech companies are happy to let coders, for example, dictate their own terms. Elsewhere, with various companies facing lawsuits for having had the temerity to ask staff to come back to the office two days a week, CEOs are tiptoeing around the question of return, trying to tempt staff back with cocktail hours. But as the race for talent sweeps all before it, they are perhaps setting unrealistic expectations.  

After the talk, I looked again at the research on productivity. In the early days of Covid, working from home looked like a win-win. Studies of when people were logging on and off suggested that many were maintaining or even increasing hours. One 2020 survey of American office workers found respondents reporting that both managers and subordinates were more productive. But the picture has since become more nuanced. A study of 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian tech company found that the productivity of those working from home fell by up to a fifth: many were working longer hours, but output fell, partly because they were just having more meetings. Japan’s Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry suggests that working from home has reduced productivity by almost a third, in a nation which is not used to it. More recently, a small Cambridge study found that UK workers spent less time on paid work during the lockdowns.