> "This groundbreaking study, involving 16,000 participants, was conducted by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom"

I clicked through to the study and it is 16,000 call center employees. This simply doesn't translate to a lot of other jobs.

If you are a call center employee, you're probably not doing a lot of collaborative work. Moreover, it's easy to track your time on the phone, so being at home doesn't necessarily make it easier for you to slack off.

Also, of note, the participants all volunteered for it. It's a strong assumption to assume that people who want to work from home being more productive will mean that everyone working from home will improve productivity.

In short, this article makes a lot of assumptions about how the data would generalize. A more accurate, but less click-baity title would be "Remote Work Can (And Does) Boost Employee Productivity For Certain Types of Workers".

Remote work seems to slow EVERYTHING down every time my teams have been fully (or near fully) remote. I expect the shortening of the work week to boost productivity, but I don't see remote work doing the same, at large.

Tough to fully answer this question without context, but a few thoughts which may be useful. I work at GitLab, the world's largest all-remote organization, and have 14 years of experience in remote settings. I penned the guides you'll see below.

Hybrid-remote environments are tough if you don't have leadership on the office side of the equation implementing remote-first practices, such that everything is optimized for remote-first. Otherwise, your remote staff are always a second tier and at a disadvantage. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/how-to-w...

It's possible that you're operating in Phase 1 of remote adaptation, which is imitating the design, structure, norms, ebbs and flows of an office environment. This is passable but not optimal. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/phases-o...

Many office norms become slower when you try to copy/paste into a virtual world, which sheds light on the reality that those norms aren't the ideal way to accomplish the work. Instead of looking through the lens of "why doesn't this process transfer well to the virtual world?," look through the lens of "how could we be a more transparent and efficient team if we didn't have the burdens of the office?" In a way, it's scarcity vs. abundance mindset. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/what-not...

Remote isn't for everything, and it isn't for everyone. It needs to be implemented well with intentional leaders, just the same as a colocated team needs intentional leadership to thrive. The conversation is often framed as us vs. them because that's the recipe for clicks, but it's a weak argument. Remote can work, colocated can work. You need great leadership, documented processes and culture, and company-wide trust in both instances.

How do you explain successful fully remote orgs such as Gitlab, Hashicorp, and Zapier (in no particular order, just off the top of my head)?

Fully remote orgs attract people who want to work remotely. I, for one, don't work as well at home as I do in the office, even with all the distractions. So I'd probably not take a gig at one of these companies.

You can't take a self-selected group of people and make broad generalizations about the entire population.

It's possible to succeed while being non optimal.

The mistake people and companies will inevitably make is believing that because, on net, having everyone work from home makes people more productive, it will make a specific person more productive.

In other words, companies may misinterpret this study as "everyone working from home" is the optimal solution.

But the optimal solution is some people working from home and some people not.

Agreed. I just looked at the study itself, and there's an important fact that the article does not mention. There were two test groups WFH and on-site. The WFH groups were volunteers, and their outcomes were better.

It's interesting that the net productivity of the on-site workers did not go up despite the removal of the self-selected WFH-curious population.

The study: https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...

This is great in that it shows that people who volunteer to work from home end up being more productive at home. However, knowing that you are part of a study that is measuring how effective people are at home and in the office and being someone who volunteered to work from home, there are clearly incentives for those assigned to work from home to work harder and for those assigned to work in the office to work less hard.

Except the people who worked in the office also volunteered to stay, so why wouldn't they work harder too so they don't have to start working at home when they don't want to?

Sorry, that is just pertaining to the first part of the study. After seeing those results they did indeed allow all who wanted to work from home and saw an increase in their productivity.

That is a really important detail I must say.