MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump wants federal employees back in the office full-time. He signed an executive memorandum directing agency leaders to make that happen. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, though, more than half of federal employees already work on-site full-time. Only about 10% are fully remote, so the rest have some form of hybrid arrangement. We wondered what the research says about the costs and benefits of these different approaches so we called Raj Choudhury. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School who studies the future of work and he's with us now. Good morning, Professor.
RAJ CHOUDHURY: Good morning, Michel. Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: Thanks for coming. So you actually studied work arrangements at the U.S. patent office years before COVID made working from home more common. Give us the top line, did remote work there have an impact first for the workers, and then for the patent office itself?
CHOUDHURY: Correct. So we studied this around 2016 and '17. And the top line is that remote work at the patent office was a win-win. It was a win for the workers. They could move to locations that were cheaper, and they could have a better quality of life. And for the patent office, they saw an increase in productivity, about 4% - 4.4%, to be precise. And they were able to both hire patent examiners from the states in the south and the west of the country and retention rates went up. In fact, the patent office went on to win a best employer award, if I recollect, around 2018 or 2019.
MARTIN: And they offered this so early. They were early adopters, as it were, of this practice. And why did they do that? Because this work is so specialized that they were having trouble hiring and retaining talent, was that the reason?
CHOUDHURY: That was actually the reason. Because if you think about software patterns, for instance, the people who can do the job, they are mostly in California. And it's very hard for the patent office to compete with private technology firms and have people move to Alexandria, Virginia, given the salaries that the patent office pays. So I think remote work is a talent strategy, and it continues to remain a talent strategy.
MARTIN: So the argument is, and the criticism, and you've heard this both from people in the government people and the private sector, that remote work has made the government, in particular, less effective. For example, Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst released a report last year that blamed remote work for service backlogs and delays that are, quote, "harming the health, lives and aspirations of Americans," unquote. Does your research support that argument?
CHOUDHURY: No. What we have learned over the past decade is that there are ways to do everything that we can do in person, remotely. We can collaborate remotely. We can mentor remotely. We can onboard new employees remotely. It's just that organizations need to have a different set of management practices. And the last thing I'll say here is that no organization is fully remote. Even in the patent office, the patent examiners could live starting 2012 anywhere in the U.S., but they were required to occasionally come together for purposes of training and for purposes of mentoring.
MARTIN: Interesting. So would you say, based on your research, is there an optimal level of in-person work, or is that something that just has to be decided on a workplace-by-workplace - on a case-by-case basis?
CHOUDHURY: I think there is no one magic number. So in one experiment, we found about 25 to 40% days in person was optimal. But you are absolutely right, I think every team needs to figure out what's optimum for them. So I would say the right unit of analysis is the team. It's not the organization. It's not the individual. It's every team deciding how frequently to meet and where to meet.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, you've pointed out that the main benefit is - well, you say that there's a company benefit in terms of increase in productivity, at least in what you've found, and that for workers, it clearly affects retention and recruiting retention and work satisfaction. Conversely, if the research doesn't show that it actually damages productivity, could this be a strategy to get people to quit actually?
CHOUDHURY: Yeah, so I think the main reason to consider why remote work should stay in the federal agencies is the federal agencies, otherwise, will have it really difficult to compete with private firms to hire and retain talent. And I've written a new book. It's called "The World Is Your Office," where I document all the practices you need to support remote work.
MARTIN: That is Raj Choudhury. He's a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the future of work. Professor Choudhury, thanks so much for talking with us.
CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much, Michel, for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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