Study: One or two days in the office is the ‘sweet spot’ of hybrid work

A workspace inside Building 21 at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, US. ‘Intermediate hybrid work is plausibly the sweet spot, where workers enjoy flexibility and yet are not as isolated compared to peers who are predominantly working from home,’ said the paper co-authored by Choudhury. — Bloomberg

Just one or two days in the office is the ideal setup for hybrid work, according to a new study, as it provides workers with the flexibility they crave without the isolation of going fully remote.

The findings, in a paper from Harvard Business School, were based on an experiment in the summer of 2020 where 130 administrative workers were randomly assigned to one of three groups over nine weeks. Some spent less than 25% of their work days in the office, some were in more than 40% of the time, while a third “intermediate” cohort landed in the middle, translating to a day or two per week. That subset turned out more original work than the other groups, and “this difference was significant,” the authors wrote.