New Developments in RTO Mandates Meet Enduring ResearchNew Developments in RTO Mandates Meet Enduring Research

Until this week, the biggest story in the ongoing debate on where knowledge workers should do their jobs came courtesy of J.P. Morgan: the finance giant had issued a return to a wholly onsite workweek as of March 2025, and employees reacted with such vehemence the company shut down any internal communications around the decision. Their dissent gained momentum, with workers now talking to the Communications Workers of America about forming a union.

However, with the presidential administration's day-one decision to require all federal workers to return to the office full-time, the debate has gained added importance for an estimated 1.06 million federal workers.

(As of Q3 2024, NPR reported that "54% of the 2.3 million civilians employed by the federal government work entirely in-person given the nature of their jobs. About 10%, or 228,000 employees, work entirely remotely.")

As more places begin to relitigate where people work, it's handy to review what researchers have discovered about the outcomes of either hybrid or fully-remote work.

Let's start with the work of Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, who has been studying remote work's impact on both worker and employer since the first big lockdown in 2020. The results are remarkably consistent:

2022: At the Federal Reserve Bank's "Future of New York" conference, Bloom presented the results of a recent survey of 7,787 American workers. The survey found that tech workers value working from home two to three days a week as much as an 11% pay increase. "Employers value working from home—they really like it, as it's a huge hiring and retention policy," Bloom said. "Why wouldn't you do something that makes them more productive and happier?"

2022: Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis found that people working remotely reported they're even more productive than they were at the beginning of the pandemic.

2023: WFH Research, co-founded by Stanford economist Bloom, found employee turnover and its associated costs were lower for companies with remote and hybrid work arrangements, and productivity increased by 3-5% in hybrid work environments.

2024: Bloom, James Liang and Ruobing Han conducted an A/B study in one company where some employees returned to the office five days a week and some had hybrid schedules. They found multiple benefits to hybrid work, including:

There is also research clearly demonstrating how remote and hybrid work benefits some workforce segments:

2022: The Work Foundation of at Lancaster University found that 85% of disabled workers reported being more productive working from home, a situation that helped ease the profound gap between disabled and non-disabled workers in the U.K. As Phys.org reported, "With only 52.7% of disabled people employed in the UK compared to 81% of non-disabled people, and the disability pay gap increasing from 11.7% in 2014 to 13.8% in 2021; the study emphasizes the significant barriers and disadvantages disabled people continue to face in the labor market."

2022: The Future Forum reports on the benefits of flexible work: "Flexibility continues to be most prized by those who have been underrepresented in knowledge work, including women, people of color, and working mothers. Thirty-eight percent of Black male employees and 33% of Black female employees would prefer a fully flexible schedule, compared to 25% of white female employees and 26% of white male employees."

2024: Bloomberg reported that people with disabilities entered the US workforce at record levels over the past three years. The site reported "the share of US disabled employees who were fully remote was 12.6% in the first quarter of 2024, compared with 10.6% of employees with no disability, according to the Economic Innovation Group.

Even if the priority in companies is not to hire a workforce that reflects the full makeup of the population, it would be hard to believe that a company wouldn't value productivity -- and again, the research has consistently shown that remote and flexible work boost productivity. In 2023, the Future Forum reported, "When compared to workers with no ability to shift their schedules, respondents with full schedule flexibility report 39% higher productivity and 64% greater ability to focus."

So as managers and employees continue their fifth year of wrangling where and when people work, keep an eye on the data. It's telling us unambiguously that there are bottom-line benefits to hybrid and remote work.