Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance

The experiment took place at Trip.com in Shanghai, China. In July 2021, Trip.com decided to evaluate hybrid WFH after seeing its popularity amongst US tech firms. The company surveyed 1,612 eligible engineers, marketing and finance employees in the Airfare and IT divisions about the option of hybrid WFH. They excluded interns and rookies who were in probation periods because on-site learning and mentoring are particularly important for those individuals. The results indicated that a hybrid schedule with two days a week working from home does not damage performance.

Source of the OER

Bloom, N., Han, R. & Liang, J. Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature 630, 920–925 (2024). Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2

Topic or subject area

The study presents the effect of hybrid WFH on employee performance. To assess that, four measures of performance were examined: six-monthly performance reviews and promotion outcomes for up to two years after the start of the experiment, detailed performance evaluations, and the lines of code written by the computer engineers.

Language(s) available

English

Target audience

Managers, HR specialists, employees

Purpose, Scope or Aim of the OER

Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. The article describes a six-month randomized control trial investigating the effects of hybrid working from home on 1,612 employees in a Chinese technology company in 2021–2022.
This paper addresses the gap in previous studies in two key ways. First, it uses a randomized control trial to examine the causal effect of a hybrid schedule in which employees are allowed to WFH two days per week. Second, it focuses on university-graduate employees in software engineering, marketing, accounting and finance, whose activities are mainly creative team tasks.

Step by step instructions for users

1. Download the freely available research report from the website: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2#Sec7

2. Read the study to ensure your full understanding of the effect on employees’ performance working on a hybrid schedule, in which individuals spend a mix of days at home and at work each week.

Link to the resource

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