0:00

This is hidden brain I'm Shankar. Vedantam like millions of people around the world.

0:04

Stanford economists, Nicholas bloom has been working from home since March, 2020 instead of a university classroom.

0:12

He now uses a spare bedroom.

0:14

Sometimes one of his four kids pops in what he does meetings over zoom.

0:20

He'll never forget this one time when he was in a very important call with some business executives, trying to help them with a research project.

0:28

About 20 minutes into the call, this happened, It

0:37

was two of my kids talking that daily practice on the bagpipes.

0:41

I

0:41

was

0:41

thinking,

0:41

oh

0:41

no,

0:46

no. Now is not the time.

0:47

That's it like say quickly to having a meeting?

0:51

I'm sorry. There's something going on in the background, mute myself and like run into the toilet.

0:55

Ah, let's take the rest of the meeting in max.

0:58

It was the unplaced. It was quite enough.

1:00

And

1:00

our

1:00

house

1:00

is

1:00

not

1:00

big

1:00

in

1:04

Nina. The soundproofing is just dreadful.

1:06

The toilet's about the only sound bunkered room.

1:10

So I'm sure I'll be back in there again, taking calls Probably

1:13

many calls because Nick is an expert on the economic, cultural and social implications of working from home now in an almost surreal twist.

1:24

He's living his research day in and day out, just like many of us.

1:32

So is working from home working So

1:36

many people said, you know, we thought we'll be great at this.

1:39

We thought we could deal with it. I thought I was mentally strong.

1:41

I, you know, I didn't like Ben my employees, but I realized after, you know, three or four months, maybe I did miss them This

1:51

week on hidden brain, the final installment in our work, 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite show about the psychological challenges and the possibilities of working from home in the COVID era and beyond Support for hidden brand comes from bank of America.

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It's amazing because discover is accepted@ninetyninepercentofplacesintheunitedstatesthattakecreditcardslearnmoreatdiscover.com slash yes, 2021 Nelson report limitations apply before economists.

3:16

Nick bloom became a professor at Stanford.

3:18

He worked in London for a consulting company.

3:21

He often worked from home and back then his coworkers made a lot of assumptions about what he did all day.

3:29

I know there is, you know, endless, joking about working from home, working from home, you know, working remotely, remotely working.

3:36

So I, you know, that they would wind me up and claim.

3:40

I was watching those old fashioned black and white TV movies that were on during the day and watching the cricket being British.

3:45

But I honestly, I promise you I was working, but it didn't feel like other people thought that was True.

3:49

You probably had the cricket in the background though, didn't You?

3:53

Yeah. I mean, I have to say I'm not a big fan of cricket unless it comes to revising for my exams during this point, the cricket became fascinating because you know, it was like, anything's fascinating compared to revising The

4:06

assumptions that people have long held about working from home.

4:08

You can see them reflected in our searches online sometime ago.

4:13

Nick looked at what you see when you search for the phrase, working from home on the web.

4:20

You know, I gave a few talks. I have to say before, COVID I did a bit of, you know, research and talks and stuff over the years for quite a while.

4:28

And one thing I used to explain to people as one good way to tell how negatively viewed working from home was, was just to go into Google or Bing and just search, do an image search under the words, working from home.

4:41

And if you do that, I screenshotted it for it and showed it in a TEDxTalk in 2017.

4:45

And I showed the top 15 hits that took, you know, the top two rows of images.

4:50

And they were basically naked people, cartoons, people, juggling babies on their lap.

4:56

There honestly are the 15, there are only two that were positive images.

5:00

There were 13 that were just, they were like terrible.

5:02

The, you know, the worst was a guy in the jacuzzi drinking champagne.

5:05

It

5:05

just,

5:05

it

5:05

was

5:05

so

5:05

negatively

5:09

viewed.

5:15

So some years ago, and this is long before the COVID pandemic hit us.

5:18

A new story broke about a certain company in Silicon valley.

5:22

Listen to this clip from NBC's today, show Disgruntled

5:27

employees leaked an internal memo from human resources that band's telecommuting saying some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings.

5:40

Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.

5:45

So Nick tells me why Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer wanted to cancel the company's policy to allow employees to work from home.

5:52

Sure. She took over and she was seen as Theano ah, someone has to turn around the company and she said not long into her tenure there, she discovered there's a whole group of people that will working from home, but many of them are just not logging in the entire day.

6:05

There wasn't much assessment was going on.

6:08

It was clear. Well, well, some of them are doing really well.

6:11

Others were basically using it as a way to take an extended holiday.

6:14

And, you know, it's kind of intriguing when I spoke to her, she said, look, working from home can be great, but you need a performance evaluation system.

6:21

You need to make sure that the people at home are actually working rather than goofing off.

6:25

And you said at that point we didn't have an in Yahoo.

6:27

So I basically, you know, temporarily paused the working at home scheme until we got a performance system and, and, and, you know, relaxed it back a bit, but yet it generated a storm of media back in 2013.

6:40

I still remember now.

6:42

Yeah. So you've done research into whether Marissa Mayer was right in terms of the effects of working from home on productivity.

6:48

But before we get to the science, I want to talk a moment about the history of how we got to these attitudes about working from home.

6:55

So, so long before COVID people who didn't walk in an office were seen as the exception, but what's interesting is that when you look down history, most people would have found it odd to work anywhere other than their homes.

7:09

Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, what's happened now is made history so odd.

7:13

So if you go back to, you know, 1750, just on the Eve of the industrial revolution in the UK, basically we all worked at home.

7:22

We worked in the fields or occasionally a skilled craftsman, but no one is really working anywhere else than home.

7:27

And then office work or factory work really started off with offices.

7:31

So places like Manchester in the UK started to have industrial machinery.

7:36

And of course, to do that, you needed scale buildings and, you know, people needed to start to commute, but I should point out back then, you know, in 1800, when you talk about commuting, you're walking to the factory.

7:46

That was really not that far away.

7:47

The major offices started around 1900 when big companies had large growing amounts of paperwork and they just have vast halls full of clerks that were come in and process piles of paper.

8:00

And, you know, oddly enough, despite the complete change in technology over the next year, 120 years up until, you know, January of this year, we were still very much focused on AR coming into the office on a kind of nine to five schedule.

8:14

And, and isn't it interesting that along the way, it, the cultural norms and psychological norms sort of evolved with these workplace arrangements so that people who work from home came to be seen as, as less ambitious or less employable, less, less talented maybe in, in others became almost declassified to be working from home.

8:33

Yeah, exactly. It's one of those things you can almost, you know, economists might call it a generally clubroom effect, which means even if one firm figured out working from home has great ear, it's hard for them to change it alone because there's a negative stigma and you know, no employee wants to have it maybe on their CV that they worked at home for years.

8:49

Cause other firms think it is bad.

8:51

And so, yeah, exactly. Right.

8:53

I mean, just to be clear, the four things we need for working from home are internet broadband laptops and video calls.

9:01

And all of them have been around since the mid two thousands.

9:03

So the last one to come out with video calls and that was really the Dawn of Skype.

9:07

Hello, Can you hear me?

9:10

So Skype comes out in 2003.

9:11

It's

9:11

kind

9:11

of

9:11

mainstream

9:11

by

9:11

2005

9:16

six. Hello. Hey, so really for probably 15 years now we could have effectively worked from home, but it was the whole social norms that up until now have held us back.

9:27

How are you so typical of me to talk about myself, I'm sorry, And

9:33

this is enormous inertia in the system because you know, we've built entire cities around the idea that there's going to be this urban core, where people work and suburbs where people live.

9:42

We built highways and public transit systems to ferry people from residential neighborhoods to commercial neighborhoods.

9:47

You know, it's almost as if once that initial model separating the workplace from the home got fixed in people's minds, there was an inertia that got built up around it that became essentially unstoppable.

9:59

Yes, exactly. I mean, I think one big change post COVID, there's going to be driven both by working from home and also the other issue is social distancing.

10:06

So I think in future, a lot of that real estate is probably going to be converted into apartments and it's going to be, you know, the price of it's going to drop a lot and it's going to attract conversion into apartments.

10:17

So we're going to have much more mixed living modes whereby those skyscrapers, aren't all offices.

10:22

And we don't all live out in the suburbs instead.

10:24

You know, there's more people living in the center on lower rents and there's less commuting because it's the only way we're going to be able to shape it.

10:31

And of course included in that less commuting will be more working from home.

10:42

When we come back, Nick bloom tells us about his unusual experiment at a Chinese travel agency where half of the workers stayed in the office and half were allowed to work from home.

10:54

We do do a lot of interviews and they just said, it's really depressing.

10:56

Or they fell victim to one of the three great enemies of working from home, the bed, the fridge, or the television You're

11:08

listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar.

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13:23

This

13:23

is

13:23

hidden

13:23

brain

13:23

I'm

13:34

Shankar. Vedanta Nick bloom is a researcher at Stanford university.

13:38

For years. He has studied the phenomenon of working from home and asked a deceptively simple question.

13:44

Are people more productive or less productive when they work from home NICU, teaching a class at Stanford in 2010, and you had a student in the class from China and you got to chatting with him.

13:57

He told you about a problem.

13:58

His company was having back in China.

14:00

What was the problem?

14:01

You

14:01

know,

14:01

as

14:01

a

14:01

backstop,

14:01

you

14:01

know,

14:01

the

14:01

situation

14:01

is

14:01

pretty

14:07

weird. I was teaching a PhD, a graduate economics class in Stamford, and I have about 15 to 20 students in the class.

14:15

One of them I figured out relatively soon, maybe, you know, a third of the end of the course was James Liang from dogging them who is the CEO, and co-founder this huge Chinese travel agent.

14:26

And he said that they were growing really fast and very well, but they were based out in Shanghai.

14:31

And that challenge was office space in Shanghai was incredibly expensive.

14:36

And so the ones to figure out how to grow without sinking vast amounts of money into Everett, increasing size of expensive offices.

14:44

And so they were thinking about a working from home program.

14:48

So you decided to work with this Chinese company called Ctrip to find out whether working from home was good or bad in terms of productivity.

14:55

And you did more than just simply conduct a survey.

14:58

You decided to conduct an experiment.

15:00

Yes, Yes. You know, the great thing was because James is a pitch PhD, economics, Jean.

15:05

He was open to what's called doing a randomized control trial.

15:08

So quite formally, they went to in Ctrip, they got two divisions, hotel and airfare.

15:12

There were about a thousand people in them and they asked them who wants to work from home?

15:16

You know, amazingly, we're not interestingly, maybe as much as amazing, only half of them volunteered.

15:21

So just to be clear, you know, a lot of people don't want to work from home.

15:25

So the volunteers tended to be slightly older, more liked to have kids live further away.

15:29

But then they took these 500 volunteers and had a formal randomization.

15:33

So James on Ctrip TV drew a ping pong ball avenue.

15:38

And it said even does that meant people, even birthdays of you're born on the second four, six, eight, ten, et cetera, the month you were in the treatment sample.

15:46

So you actually got to work from home for four days a week for the next nine months.

15:50

And if you were odd like me, I'm the 5th of May you, you are the control group and you remained in the office for the next nine months.

16:00

A few other notes about the experiment for the workers who went on four days a week, they all came into the office on the fifth day.

16:06

That was when they did things that were best to do in person like team meetings and trainings and managers were always in the office.

16:14

The main worry for Ctrip was the fear that all companies seem to have, that the remote employees would get distracted and not be productive.

16:23

But Ctrip had a plan to deal with that.

16:26

If it had declines in productivity, they figured that those will be offset by the huge savings in rent.

16:34

In fact, this calculation was one of the reasons they agreed to run the experiment in the first place to see how many dollars they saved on rent versus how many dollars they might lose on productivity.

16:46

And

16:46

then

16:46

the

16:46

results

16:46

came

16:51

in. So, you know, it was, there was also honestly amazing.

16:55

And this is why, you know, it was so valuable to have nine months cause an issue you were thinking, this can't be true.

17:01

What you saw was the working from home employees were 13% more productive than the people in the office, just to be good.

17:09

That is an enormous uplift. That's almost a DaXtra a week simply from having the same people in the same team, doing the same job, which is answering telephone calls, dealing with customer complaints, taking bookings, et cetera.

17:20

Now, working at home rather than the office.

17:27

And did they actually calculate a dollar figure in terms of increased productivity?

17:31

Not, not just from the increased productivity, but from the savings on rent.

17:37

Yes. So they say estimated they saved around $2,000 per employee, per year from working from home.

17:44

And, you know, Cedric was like, as you can imagine, it was incredibly, incredibly positive about this at the end of the experiment announced they're rolling the ski Mount to the entire company.

17:57

So now employees who really hated working from home, what were they allowed to come back and start working out at the office?

18:05

Yes. A striking finding again, totally unexpected was, well, you know, there are two things, two elements there's one, one is initially they offered to a thousand employees, only 500 wanted to work from home.

18:15

So our view would have been honestly, many more people that have taken out, but a lot of people do not want to work from home.

18:21

You know, one reason is, you know, the people that want to come to the office are young and single, as we know in the U S about a third of people meet their spouse in the workplace.

18:29

You know, something similar is true in China.

18:31

The other thing is after the end of the nine months experiment, remembering everyone in the experiment and volunteered around half of the people that won the lottery to work from home, actually changed their minds and decided to come back into the office and the control group, who'd all volunteered, you know, nine months ago, it just lost the lottery.

18:49

But at this point we're allowed to do whatever they want.

18:51

Only a third of them actually ended up going home.

18:54

So there was a huge move away actually, after people had tried it out against working from home four out of five days a week, which again was very surprising.

19:03

We thought, you know, employees are partly paid on performance.

19:06

So since they're performing 13% more at home, their pay has gone up.

19:10

But even so large numbers of the more than half of them were voting in sense, you know, voting with their feet.

19:15

Cause I asked to actively come back into the office with all the commute costs and a hassle that involved Is

19:22

there, isn't there a real irony here, Nick, which is that the company thought that people were going to be less productive, but in fact, people turn out to be more productive and people thought they wanted to work from home, but once they actually did, they actually wanted to come back to work.

19:35

No, it comes back to, I think what we really need and what employees want on average is a mix.

19:41

So sea trip at that point was only offering four out five days a week at home.

19:45

I think, you know, I've actually, again, caught up with Ctrip very recently.

19:49

If you'd move to a system where they could have worked from home one or two days a week, that would have been far more popular now for logistical reasons.

19:56

They didn't offer that. But most employees and we saw this in the experiment, I should say for the first two or three months, they were really happy.

20:03

They're very positive on it.

20:06

But as time went on, we just got increasing reports and complaints about loneliness.

20:10

And this is very depressing being at home day in, day out, working now you're on your own.

20:15

And so by the time it came to the end of nine months, you know, many people were quite surprised, but they said, I CA I can't hack this.

20:23

I wanna, we did a lot of interviews by the way, a lot of focus group interviews.

20:25

And they just said, it's really depressing.

20:27

Or they fell victim to one of the three great enemies of working from home, the, the bed, the fridge or the television.

20:33

So something went wrong and they said, look, save me, get me out of here.

20:40

I want to come back to the office. I mean, it's quite astounding, but I'm sure many people can empathize.

20:44

You know, for me, I'm really missing colleagues.

20:47

I like being at home and I live with my wife and four kids, but it kind of gets cut, isolating.

20:52

I'd love to bet to go back into the office and at least for two, three days a week.

20:56

And that's the same thing we saw in Ctrip.

20:59

So in other words, partly what you're, what you're seeing is that they might be benefits from working from home that are just, you know, regardless of who you send home, there are some advantages, certainly in terms of saving an office space, but it may be that the people who actually are best suited to working from home are the people who actually want to be worked from home.

21:15

So some amount of flexibility from the point of view of the employees might be part of the productivity equation.

21:20

Yes, exactly. I mean the two big things I took out of this and from more recent work I've been doing is the importance of choice and flexibility.

21:27

So it turns out on choice.

21:28

People have just really different views and it's very hard to know, you know, what people's views are.

21:34

It depends a lot on what their home circumstances are like, do they have space, a spare room?

21:38

You know, do they want to be at home? Is their apartment nice?

21:40

And then on flexibility, it's actually really hard to tell.

21:44

So in Ctrip, we just discovered in the focus groups, so many people said, you know, we thought we'll be great at this.

21:50

We thought we could deal with it. I thought I was mentally strong.

21:52

I didn't feel like, you know, I didn't like many, my employees actually wanted to go home, but I realized after, you know, three or four months, maybe I did miss them.

22:01

It's like that old saying absence makes the heart grow fonder.

22:03

And it seemed to be true, but you know, as hard as it is to imagine, I'm sure there are some people out there now thinking even that really annoying guy, Tony and accounts, maybe I miss him a bit, et cetera.

22:13

And that seemed to be what we're seeing with, with Ctrip in China.

22:17

And also maybe the, the, the, the, the champagne and the jacuzzi starts to get old.

22:21

After four months.

22:22

You

22:22

also

22:22

had

22:22

some

22:22

interesting

22:22

findings

22:22

from

22:22

the

22:22

Ctrip

22:22

experiment

22:22

when

22:22

it

22:22

came

22:22

to

22:22

quit

22:35

rates. T tell me what happened in terms of retaining employees, what you found.

22:40

Yeah. Another striking finding was quit rates fell by half for the people that work from home.

22:45

So the firm collects a lot of surveys and they, you know, they reported in the survey so far happier, but I'm sometimes slightly skeptical.

22:53

I don't know whether, you know, it's hard to know the firms are serving response to it's from that the employees to the firm, but you know, the much more important thing is the voting with their feet.

23:02

So Ctrip has about a 50% quit rate for its employees that turns out that's almost identical to the average in the UK, us Australia, many countries, 50% about normal.

23:13

So most people stay about two years in a job before moving on for the working from home employees that quit rates hard from 50% down to 25%, which of course for the company was a huge upside because it avoided a, you know, a large chunk of the pain of hiring and training and getting people up to speed just for them to then quit.

23:33

So I'm wondering if one of the things that people forget when they, when they think about the, you know, the, the old negative stereotypes of working from home, that people are easily distracted.

23:42

They're going to be distracted by the fridge and the TV and the bed that they actually forget.

23:46

The workplace is also a source of distraction.

23:49

The workplace is often, you know, they're multiple things going on.

23:52

There are slack channels that tell you about the free food that's being given away on another floor of the building.

23:57

And, you know, there's, someone's birthday going on.

23:59

It's not as if the workplace is a highly focused concentrating environment either.

24:04

No, Exactly.

24:06

Right. So just to explain for the 13% higher productivity from working from home about a third of that was the home-based employees who are more productive per minute.

24:16

And that's entirely because home is on average, actually less distracting.

24:19

And from the interviews, you know, there are some hilarious stories that came up.

24:23

My favorite was the woman that said, you know, when I'm in the office, it's so distracting the woman in the cubicle next to me, clips, her toenails.

24:31

She

24:31

takes

24:31

out

24:31

this,

24:31

you

24:31

know,

24:31

these

24:31

toenail

24:31

clipper,

24:31

and

24:31

she

24:31

clips

24:31

it

24:31

under

24:31

the

24:37

table. And she said, under the desk, she said, she thinks I don't notice, but I tell you, I noticed, I noticed it's disgusting.

24:43

You know, there's that there are stories of world cups, sweepstakes of there's a cake in the breakout room.

24:49

Somebody's boyfriend and girlfriend have left.

24:51

You know, you can imagine, so home you're exactly right.

24:54

Home is distracting, but the office is turns out to be significantly more distracting.

24:58

And so actually you can work more efficiently per minute, at least in this experiment.

25:04

So I understand with the, with the Ctrip study, some people who were working from home wanted to come back, perhaps because they felt like they were losing out the colleagues or in the office all the time.

25:16

Maybe the colleagues were getting more FaceTime with the bosses.

25:19

So in some ways the experiment didn't do it, didn't do away with the social norm that working from home was inferior.

25:26

It basically laid it out as a short-term experiment.

25:29

Yes. So the one dark side I'd say of working from home from the experiment was the drop in promotion rates where people working from home.

25:36

So if you control for performance, remember the people at home, 30% more productive, they should have been promoted at a much faster rate.

25:43

And it turns out they were promoted less rapidly.

25:46

In fact, they're roughly that eventual promotion rate is roughly half for those at home versus at the office.

25:51

So there's a huge drop in promotions.

25:53

And when we asked them, it turned out, looking into there's a couple of factors.

25:56

One is you're working from home, you're you're forgotten about.

26:00

And so that's a serious downside that you're in a team of 15.

26:03

And that said, there's three of you working from home, the rest of the office.

26:06

You can be passed over.

26:07

The other thing that was tricky to how to deal with when you spoke to Ctrip, they said, well, look, part of being promoted is knowing your colleagues and knowing about the firm culture, et cetera.

26:17

And that does come from being in the office and having lunch and coffees around.

26:21

So, you know, it's, it's a bit of a band.

26:23

Some of the extra productivity is at home is because they're spending less time, chit chatting over coffee.

26:28

But some of that chit chat turns out to that should be pretty useful.

26:37

What happens when hundreds of millions of people don't make a choice to work from home, but a global pandemic suddenly makes the choice for them.

26:45

You're

26:45

listening

26:45

to

26:45

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28:39

This

28:39

is

28:39

hidden

28:39

brain

28:39

I'm

28:48

Shankar. Vedantam the COVID 19 pandemic has reshaped the world.

28:52

Millions of people have died and countless others have seen their lives disrupted virtually overnight.

28:58

Working from home in many countries, became not an exception, not a park, just the new normal Nick you've been preaching the virtues of working from home for years.

29:09

I'm curious what this moment feels like.

29:12

You don't really move the needle on that.

29:14

And then suddenly thousands of companies and millions of people start doing it overnight.

29:19

Have you suffered whiplash?

29:22

Oh yeah. I is a weird experience.

29:24

I have, I was doing something the other day, looking at the frequency of the word, working from home in us newspapers.

29:31

So I looked at the top 50 us newspapers and it went up 12000% between January and April, 2020.

29:39

So yeah, it's, I mean, I'm fascinated by it.

29:42

I'm living it. It's very old to be a w researching something that you and all your friends are living in.

29:47

I all my friends and relatives, et cetera, going through exactly the same issue.

29:51

I should say that in the U S currently only 40% of people are working from home.

29:57

So 30% of people are not working.

29:59

And 30% of people are working on business premises, which are typically essential service workers.

30:03

But for those of us that are working from home in many ways, we're actually in the lucky minority that we're able to work and able to do this safely at home.

30:12

So one of the things that's very interesting about the current sheriff for this two and five workers is 40% of workers that are working from home is that the change has happened so suddenly.

30:21

And it's so widespread that it seems to have changed norms overnight.

30:25

So zoom calls and emails and phone conversations are now the default.

30:29

They no longer the second class citizen in the workplace.

30:34

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine that lives in London and he worked for us company and he's trying to set up a startup of the same covenant subsidiary in South Africa.

30:46

And he was saying, he, up until now, he was always on zoom, but he was always, you know, whatever teams, he was always the odd one out in the sense that everyone else is in the room.

30:56

And he was typically dialing him.

30:57

And he said, suddenly he felt on a level with everyone else that everyone was on zoom.

31:01

And I had a similar feedback. Actually, I was giving a presentation to a, one of the national labs in the U S and somebody there was disabled and Mustang.

31:10

She was saying, you know, in some sense has been a great level of, for me, because I struggled to get into the office and back, but now, you know, we're all on zoom and being physically there really doesn't matter.

31:20

So I has had some unusual effects, both positive and negative.

31:24

And in fact, I just one final anecdote, I was talking to someone that starts a high-tech runs her.

31:29

She founded a high-tech company out in the bay area.

31:33

She, you know, she was born in India and came over and started the company here.

31:36

And she was saying, she notices on zoom, who speaks up is quite different from who does it in person.

31:41

And she was saying, you know, Americans are like amazingly loud in meetings.

31:46

And there's some cultural agenda differences that are quite different when you're on video calls.

31:50

A number of people that previously didn't spoke up have now felt actually empowered to talk because they find it less intimidating on a video call.

31:58

Very interesting you, I understand you've completed a survey of nearly 2000 Americans paint me a picture of the people who report making a successful switch to working from home and the people who can't or don't.

32:13

So, you know, one huge factor is clear education.

32:16

So it's not that being educated makes you better working from home.

32:21

It's that being educated means you're in the type of job that means you can probably work from home.

32:26

So if we look at working from home jobs, they tend to be much more manager or professional.

32:30

You can imagine, you know, they're the kind of things that are typically done beforehand in the office.

32:34

And so it can be easily shifted home.

32:37

If you look at say a, you know, people with a high school degree or less.

32:40

So those that left school, you know, 16, 17, 18 they're farmer liked to be in retail, you know, maybe, and you know, it's in construction, manufacturing, the types of things you need to be on site.

32:50

So education has become an enormous divider actually, in terms of who can work from home.

32:56

The other couple of factors that we picked up on again, kind of links to wealth and education is having functional internet.

33:04

You know, it's astounding, but only 65% of Americans in our survey report, having an internet connectivity, good enough to run a video called a high quality video call.

33:14

So, you know, for those of us that living in nice parts of cities, it seems totally standard.

33:19

You have good internet, but a lot of poor urban areas or rural areas, they have internet, but it flakes in and out.

33:26

And so you can't really have video calls.

33:27

The other thing is having space a home.

33:30

So people have been able to make this a success report, having that own room.

33:34

That's not their bedrooms. They can work quietly in the survey data.

33:37

Only 49% of Americans have their own room.

33:40

That's not their bedrooms, or most people are working from home in a room meeting their husband or wife in the same room or kids running around, et cetera.

33:48

So I just want to be very clear.

33:50

COVID working from home is not great post COVID, I think will be this Nirvana where we're doing it.

33:56

You know, 2, 1, 2, 3 days a week, our kids are back in school.

33:59

We have proper equipment. We have a piece in quad or our own room.

34:03

Cause you know, a husband and wife they're out of work and so we can get on with it.

34:07

So what I hear you saying of course is that there is this massive worldwide experiment that is unfolding before our eyes.

34:14

There's already some data starting to come in about its effects.

34:18

I just read a paper by link Fang, bow and colleagues, the, the analyze, the effects of working from home arrangements as a result of COVID by examining productivity at Baidu, which is one of China's biggest it companies and they get mixed results.

34:32

Some people report higher productivity, others, especially people working in big teams on complex or highly collaborative projects, they report lower productivity.

34:42

Does that surprise you at all?

34:44

No. I think, you know, the stories we're getting out from talking to firms and from the data is what I would call day-to-day things, which is kind of continuing activities.

34:53

We've all always been doing, which is a bit like what the folks I was talking about in Ctrip.

34:57

They're basically making calls and taking bookings that seems to work pretty well.

35:01

So that you're just, you know, repeating what you've done before.

35:04

Nothing too innovative, nothing too unusual or new.

35:07

And you know, the peace and quiet, our home works quite well.

35:10

What appears to be more of a struggle is more creative activities, bigger team group activities.

35:17

So I'd say that's more long run.

35:19

It's kind of like what as economist, you might call intangible investments and it goes back to quips.

35:23

You know, guys like Steve jobs made that, you know, oh, they had a quote from her saying, Hey, you really got to be in the building and talking to others, you know, kicking back, you know, talking over the water cooler to come out with some of these ideas.

35:35

So I think the short run productivity is actually looking surprisingly good.

35:40

What I worry about is innovation and creativity, for example, you know, next year's new iPhone.

35:46

Would that be that impressive because you know, all the innovation and research is going into it right now.

35:51

I presume it's much harder to do working from home.

36:00

Right. And, and this, and you mentioned Steve jobs a second ago.

36:03

You know, this is a, almost a mantra in Silicon valley, which is the chance and counters that happen when people work together, they bump into each other in the hallway.

36:11

And then the kitchens, you know, Steve jobs basically designed apple to encourage chance and counters.

36:18

So the, really the question that you're asking is what happens when you turn off that serendipity?

36:22

Yeah, What's

36:23

amazing is there's, you know, there's so much money invested by firms in this, you know, you think of the billions and billions of dollars that high-tech firms, but also investment banks or professional service firms have spent on super fancy offices.

36:38

They're trying to persuade people to come in.

36:40

So the amazing artworks, the incredible free food, the ping pong table, the, you know, the table football table of the astounding, you know, floor to ceiling glass, the incredible gardens, all of that is to drag people into the office.

36:54

Hi everyone. My name is Kevin. And today we're going inside the multimillion dollar tree house conference room, Got

37:02

a knot in your back. Schedule, a massage, looking for inspiration, attempt to talk with a real, We

37:09

have our bike room, our bike room holds 92 bikes.

37:12

It's all about encouraging our employees to reduce their carbon.

37:17

First of all, you notice that you're getting a view and natural light, which is important.

37:21

There's research, that's shown how natural light and views, help people focus and process information in a more effective way.

37:30

I think it is important, you know, for my own experience, honestly, just to myself, introspect, a lot of my, you know, best research pieces have come from discussions over lunch and conferences, but I think it is really important, but I must say the, you know, the research based on this is, is not entirely conclusive and there's certainly fantastic creations that have happened by people, honestly working alone.

37:52

You can come out and lots of examples of that too.

37:55

I'm wondering, I mean, the picture you're painting here.

37:57

If you asked me at the start of 2020 can, you know, can 40% of the country work from home?

38:02

I would say, I would have probably said no, it would be very hard, probably impossible.

38:05

And clearly now that's been proven on true.

38:08

I think a large number of people are making it, making it work.

38:11

But I think the picture that's emerging from this conversation is how complex the question actually is and how much it's connected to individual people's life situations.

38:20

I mean, you know, I, I've gotten to spend more time with family over the last few months as I'm working, which has been wonderful, but I can also imagine that people may, perhaps who might not want to spend large amounts of time with family.

38:32

Maybe they don't have a happy family situation maybe, or maybe they are, they're single and they're living by themselves and it's extremely lonely.

38:37

And so the idea that is a one size fits all rule, that's going to mean everyone working from home is more productive or everyone working from home is more unhappy.

38:46

That simply breaks down. Doesn't it?

38:49

Exactly. So again, you see this so much in the survey data.

38:52

So just to give you one figure, we ask people post COVID.

38:55

How many days would you want to work from home?

38:58

And 20% of people say none, 20% of people do not want to work for them whatsoever.

39:03

And they may be many of the types of people.

39:06

You mentioned the, you know, they have very small apartments or the, you know, they don't have great family situations.

39:10

Then there's, twenty-five percent of the people that want to work from home five days a week.

39:14

They'd never want to go back to the office again.

39:17

And then the remaining 55% or a big spread.

39:20

So this is something having, you know, worked for years and all kinds of different parts of economics research.

39:26

I can't think of an area I've seen this such differing views.

39:29

So the average is, you know, the average person there's such a person wants to work from home typically two days a week, but that average hides enormous variation.

39:39

So I think the firms choices going to be absolutely essential to get this right.

39:47

You know, I recently came by the spot in the news on CNBC about the real estate market in New York city.

39:54

Take a listen, Nick, The big worry here.

39:57

And the big numbers was this rapid rise in empty apartments, the inventory of rental listing soaring, 85%.

40:03

We now have a vacancy rate that is the highest in Manhattan on record.

40:11

So Nick beyond what happens to workers and companies, what do you think the effects of COVID and working from home might be on cities and, and where we decide to live.

40:20

So I have to say, I think it's, you know, it's not good for cities.

40:25

So just to be clear, there's plenty of people saying, well, cities have seen this all before they was bounced back.

40:30

There's been plenty of pandemics.

40:31

That's true.

40:32

But if you look for example, you know, they bounce back.

40:36

Well, they take a long time. And in the words of Keynes, John Maynard Keynes in the long run, we're all dead.

40:41

So just as a, you know what one Huntington, if you look at London, I was watching something on CNN with somebody saying, you know, of course, London recovered after the plagues.

40:51

That's true. But if you look at the data 10 years after the great plague, 30% of buildings were still empty.

40:57

So I, you know, my prediction is prices will drop dramatically.

41:02

If not, the skyscrapers on apartments will remain empty from the clip they are right now.

41:07

But I wouldn't be surprised to see prices of say Manhattan, apartments and office buildings falling by 30 to 50%.

41:14

And that's the way you keep them occupied, you know, people.

41:18

And I'm not sure it's a bad thing because it's rebuy.

41:21

It would take us back to say 2000 or rebalance a bit that the country rural areas have been left behind and the center of cities have done incredibly well.

41:30

If we rewind that by 20 back to 2000, you have just a more balanced national setup without such an affordability crisis in the center of cities.

41:46

There's still much, we don't know about what life will look like in a post COVID era.

41:49

We'll be go back to the way we used to work in the old days back when more people commuted to an office and the definition of a workplace was a physical space that you shared with your colleagues, or will we permanently pivot to an era where remote work is more than norm?

42:05

I asked Nick to predict which way our work practices would evolve.

42:09

And by extension our communities writ large, I'm pretty, Most

42:15

of this will be permanent. So, you know, I can give you the, there are four reasons that are driving permanents.

42:20

Firstly, this has turned out to be a great experience in the sense that 70% of companies reported work environments turned out better than predicted.

42:28

So they're much more enthusiastic.

42:29

Secondly, the stigma seems to evaporate it.

42:32

So again, in survey data, you know, three quarters of people report their perception is a big drop in stigma, thirdly investment.

42:40

So we collected data on the average person in America is invested 12 hours in about a thousand dollars setting up working from home.

42:48

So, you know, to thank me personally, I spent a while figuring out how all these, you know, doom and teams and chime and everything works.

42:56

And I bought a proper webcam and a mic and, you know, tried to organize the room a bit.

43:00

And then finally social distancing.

43:02

My prediction is just to put figures on actually it's before COVID 5% of working days in America was full-time at home during COVID it's about 40%.

43:12

So 40% are working days at home post COVID from talking to firms.

43:16

And from our service, it looks something like 20%.

43:17

So we're going to wind back a bit from where we are now because you know, no one's going to be full-time at home a very few people, but we'll well above what we were before.

43:26

COVID I'm

43:28

wondering, you know, Nick, if you're hiring an employee, maybe you are less interested is, is the employee in the same zip code as I am, or in the same city as I am.

43:37

Maybe now you are, if you're a company you actually can hire more widely.

43:41

Maybe you can actually look to rural areas or even other countries for, for labor in ways that you couldn't earlier.

43:47

In other words, it actually might unleash a lot of people who previously could not find their way to, you know, an expensive Manhattan job interview now can actually be in the running for that job.

43:58

No, exactly. I think this is going to be great for rebalancing the economy.

44:02

So many of our IC the political troubles in the U S and also my Homeland, the UK, or from this increasing growing rural urban divide in the rural parts of the country felt left behind, you know, felt forgotten about by urban leaks, et cetera.

44:17

Now, if suddenly we allow both people to move out of cities into the countryside, but also jobs to move.

44:23

So even if nobody moves, even employers can now hire people in rural areas, more easily, that's going to rebalance things.

44:30

And you can, if we're working from home, let's say three days a week, and only coming in the office two days a week, you can be recruiting people far out, deep into rural areas.

44:48

So if a, if a Stanford professor, like you can work at Stanford, but pay, you know, rent in, let's say Kansas, or in, or in Wahaca, Mexico, why would someone like you choose to live in Palo Alto?

45:02

Well, this comes back to you now, I guess inertia.

45:05

I mean, it's a good question. If, you know, imagine COVID lawsuits, you know, they are pandemic, horrifically lost it for five years.

45:12

A lot of people will be asking themselves that question.

45:15

Why am I living in such expensive areas?

45:18

You know, it works for us living here.

45:20

My kids are in local schools and we have friends locally, et cetera.

45:23

But I guess if it lasted forever and again, just to be clear post pandemic, I see us going back into the office two, three days a week, but there are certain jobs.

45:33

I think it's become clear that they can just be done entirely remotely.

45:37

And for those jobs, you may well see a lot of people moved, you know, to, you know, you might live in Hawaii, you might live next to the beach and then code for Facebook.

45:45

And there's nothing wrong with that.

45:47

And if that works out, actually, that's great. And you may fly to Silicon valley once every other month to meet in person and spend the rest of your time living out in Hawaii or living up in the ski slope.

45:56

So I think we'll see a big increase in that.

45:59

And in fact, if you look, if you look at the reports from real estate agents, they are talking about, there's been an explosion of people wanting to buy what's called lifestyle properties.

46:08

So, you know, beautiful ranches deep out in the countryside, you know, you can buy a small Manhattan apartment or you can buy a 200 acre ranch out in Wyoming.

46:17

And if you can work remotely, you know, maybe you go for the lat, But

46:20

again, you have this divide don't you, which is that this is speaking now to the people who are the wealthiest people who are able to think that way.

46:27

And if you don't, if you don't have the, the education and the technology, the support from an employer to do this, there's really going to be this bifurcating cast system.

46:36

Yes. Although I think in terms of moving people out to rural areas, it pushes in both directions.

46:42

You're exactly right. The people who can work from home are educated.

46:45

And so they gain a lot of the direct benefits.

46:47

It is true though, if a lot of say, wealthy, new Yorkers, move out into the countryside.

46:51

When they're out, they're going to demand services, you know, restaurants and go out to gyms, et cetera, and no doubt pay more tax revenue there improve local schools.

47:00

And so that will indirectly spill over to, you know, people that are out there that maybe can't work from home, but we'll get some of the indirect benefits.

47:06

So the inequality impacts a bit mixed.

47:09

I think it will really reduce inequality, Rican, rebalance things a bit away from cities.

47:14

It's not like, you know, I was born in London.

47:16

I lived in London till I was 30.

47:18

I'm a, basically a city person, but it's also clear that even for me, one of the reasons I left London and came out to the U S is, it was just too expensive to live in.

47:26

And I think it will be better for society of cities where, you know, not so unbelievably expensive.

47:31

So you could have a more mixed set of people lived in them.

47:34

And there's more, you know, basically diversity across the U S rather than becoming so geographically segregated by income, which is what's been happening until recently.

47:44

What's been your most embarrassing work from home moment.

47:46

These last few months, My

47:50

most embarrassing, what I tell you, one, this is the classic early days of zoom.

47:54

I was on a, a video call.

47:57

It was a zoom call. And I screen shared with some, a couple of co-authors and I'd forgotten to turn off screen-sharing.

48:04

And at some point, one of them is talking and I were, you know, as you do was losing, you know, concentration.

48:09

I went to start doing some emails and was typing of apply.

48:11

And my coauthor suddenly said, Hey, Nick, you do realize you're still on Skype and chat.

48:17

And you know, he'd very politely taken awhile thinking I might turn back, but here, you know, for the last five, six minutes, he must have been maybe even 10 minutes watching me type emails out, clearly paying no attention.

48:27

One

48:27

of

48:27

the

48:27

things

48:27

you

48:27

have

48:27

to

48:27

realize

48:27

when

48:27

you

48:27

are

48:27

working

48:27

from

48:27

home

48:27

is

48:27

the

48:27

office

48:27

norms

48:27

just

48:27

don't

48:34

apply. So it's completely reasonable.

48:36

If you're working from home to have a cat walk across your camera or a baby crying in the background.

48:41

And one of my colleagues had just had a baby.

48:44

And you know, that baby is often sitting in his lap during conference calls and Esq.

48:47

And it is the way it is in the office.

48:50

It would seem weird, but I liked the fact that working from home, there's a new set of rules around what's reasonable.

48:59

The economist, Nick bloom, teachers at Stanford ought to be more precise.

49:03

He teaches from his spare bedroom and sometimes from his bathroom when his kids are practicing the bagpipes, Nick blue, thank you for joining me today on hidden.

49:14

Right? Thanks has been fantastic.

49:15

Thank you for having me.

49:23

Their concern is that they want to have a Kurdish.

49:26

Excuse me. My said, my kids are here.

49:28

Live television, Cold

49:30

air continues across the area tonight.

49:32

Potential for some frost and freeze for some of us.

49:35

We'll warm up. It's going to take Maple.

49:42

David Cameron was talking about, oh, I'm really sorry.

49:45

That's my son arriving. Sorry.

49:47

Rehabed sorry. Hold on one second.

49:50

Sorry. Yes, yes.

49:52

I'm

49:52

very

49:52

sorry

49:52

about

49:55

that.

49:57

All right. Welcome back. I'm going to be back in studio on Monday.

49:59

So I thought every, my daughter, Alina with us, no.

50:02

Can you say it's going to be sunny today?

50:04

No, it's going to be hot.

50:07

Okay, good work.

50:09

Lots of upper eighties and low nineties over the next seven to 10 days.

50:13

This didn't go as planned. Jackie.

50:25

We recently checked back in with Nick bloom to get us perspective on how working from home has evolved in the years.

50:30

Since we first round this episode, you might expect that with the COVID-19 pandemic more under control in the U S more employees will be returning to the office.

50:39

But some preliminary data suggest working from home is just as prevalent.

50:44

According to Gallup, 45% of us employees worked at least part-time at home in the fall of 2021.

50:52

Nick

50:52

bloom

50:52

says

50:52

there's

50:52

one

50:52

major

50:52

reason

50:52

for

50:52

this

50:52

right

50:58

now. There's a hot labor market in the U S because of the pandemic.

51:02

Many workers decided to quit their jobs or change career paths.

51:06

So organizations are realizing that if they want to hire new employees and even keep the ones they have, they should offer at least two days per week of working from home.

51:16

Some companies are choosing a hybrid model like working from home on Mondays and Fridays while others are offering one full month per year of working from anywhere.

51:26

In other words, Nick predicts working from home seems to be here to stay Hidden.

51:56

Brain is produced by hidden brain media.

51:57

Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Corel, Ryan Katz, Kristin Wong, autumn bonds, and Andrew Chadwick.

52:06

Tara Boyer is our executive producer.

52:08

I'm hidden brain's executive editor.

52:11

Our

52:11

unsung

52:11

hero

52:11

today

52:11

is

52:11

someone

52:11

who

52:11

has

52:11

made

52:11

it

52:11

possible

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for

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the

52:11

hidden

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brain

52:11

team

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to

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work

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from

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home

52:18

successfully. His name is and he's a business expert with apple in Washington, DC.

52:24

When I show move to independent production in 2020, we needed new computers.

52:29

Yet, as he's known patiently walked me through the process of setting up a business account for our new company and ensured we got our computers on a tight turnaround.

52:38

It helped that he's something of an audio file himself.

52:41

Thank you yet.

52:43

For more hidden brain, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

52:47

You can find [email protected].

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That's

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This is hidden brain I'm Shankar. Vedantam like millions of people around the world. Stanford economists, Nicholas bloom has been working from home since March, 2020 instead of a university classroom. He now uses a spare bedroom. Sometimes one of his four kids pops in what he does meetings over zoom. He'll never forget this one time when he was in a very important call with some business executives, trying to help them with a research project. About 20 minutes into the call, this happened, It was two of my kids talking that daily practice on the bagpipes. I was thinking, oh no, no. Now is not the time. That's it like say quickly to having a meeting? I'm sorry. There's something going on in the background, mute myself and like run into the toilet. Ah, let's take the rest of the meeting in max. It was the unplaced. It was quite enough. And our house is not big in Nina. The soundproofing is just dreadful. The toilet's about the only sound bunkered room. So I'm sure I'll be back in there again, taking calls Probably many calls because Nick is an expert on the economic, cultural and social implications of working from home now in an almost surreal twist. He's living his research day in and day out, just like many of us. So is working from home working So many people said, you know, we thought we'll be great at this. We thought we could deal with it. I thought I was mentally strong. I, you know, I didn't like Ben my employees, but I realized after, you know, three or four months, maybe I did miss them This week on hidden brain, the final installment in our work, 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite show about the psychological challenges and the possibilities of working from home in the COVID era and beyond Support for hidden brand comes from bank of America. When it comes to budgeting, sometimes a small habit can make a big difference. Even something as simple as planning out your shopping list can help you stay in control of your spending. Find more resources that can make a big impact on your budget from bank of America at better money, habits.com, bank of America and a member FTSE Support for hidden brain comes from discover. Discover matches all the cashback you earn on your credit card at the end of your first year. It's amazing because discover is accepted@ninetyninepercentofplacesintheunitedstatesthattakecreditcardslearnmoreatdiscover.com slash yes, 2021 Nelson report limitations apply before economists. Nick bloom became a professor at Stanford. He worked in London for a consulting company. He often worked from home and back then his coworkers made a lot of assumptions about what he did all day. I know there is, you know, endless, joking about working from home, working from home, you know, working remotely, remotely working. So I, you know, that they would wind me up and claim. I was watching those old fashioned black and white TV movies that were on during the day and watching the cricket being British. But I honestly, I promise you I was working, but it didn't feel like other people thought that was True. You probably had the cricket in the background though, didn't You? Yeah. I mean, I have to say I'm not a big fan of cricket unless it comes to revising for my exams during this point, the cricket became fascinating because you know, it was like, anything's fascinating compared to revising The assumptions that people have long held about working from home. You can see them reflected in our searches online sometime ago. Nick looked at what you see when you search for the phrase, working from home on the web. You know, I gave a few talks. I have to say before, COVID I did a bit of, you know, research and talks and stuff over the years for quite a while. And one thing I used to explain to people as one good way to tell how negatively viewed working from home was, was just to go into Google or Bing and just search, do an image search under the words, working from home. And if you do that, I screenshotted it for it and showed it in a TEDxTalk in 2017. And I showed the top 15 hits that took, you know, the top two rows of images. And they were basically naked people, cartoons, people, juggling babies on their lap. There honestly are the 15, there are only two that were positive images. There were 13 that were just, they were like terrible. The, you know, the worst was a guy in the jacuzzi drinking champagne. It just, it was so negatively viewed. So some years ago, and this is long before the COVID pandemic hit us. A new story broke about a certain company in Silicon valley. Listen to this clip from NBC's today, show Disgruntled employees leaked an internal memo from human resources that band's telecommuting saying some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. So Nick tells me why Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer wanted to cancel the company's policy to allow employees to work from home. Sure. She took over and she was seen as Theano ah, someone has to turn around the company and she said not long into her tenure there, she discovered there's a whole group of people that will working from home, but many of them are just not logging in the entire day. There wasn't much assessment was going on. It was clear. Well, well, some of them are doing really well. Others were basically using it as a way to take an extended holiday. And, you know, it's kind of intriguing when I spoke to her, she said, look, working from home can be great, but you need a performance evaluation system. You need to make sure that the people at home are actually working rather than goofing off. And you said at that point we didn't have an in Yahoo. So I basically, you know, temporarily paused the working at home scheme until we got a performance system and, and, and, you know, relaxed it back a bit, but yet it generated a storm of media back in 2013. I still remember now. Yeah. So you've done research into whether Marissa Mayer was right in terms of the effects of working from home on productivity. But before we get to the science, I want to talk a moment about the history of how we got to these attitudes about working from home. So, so long before COVID people who didn't walk in an office were seen as the exception, but what's interesting is that when you look down history, most people would have found it odd to work anywhere other than their homes. Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, what's happened now is made history so odd. So if you go back to, you know, 1750, just on the Eve of the industrial revolution in the UK, basically we all worked at home. We worked in the fields or occasionally a skilled craftsman, but no one is really working anywhere else than home. And then office work or factory work really started off with offices. So places like Manchester in the UK started to have industrial machinery. And of course, to do that, you needed scale buildings and, you know, people needed to start to commute, but I should point out back then, you know, in 1800, when you talk about commuting, you're walking to the factory. That was really not that far away. The major offices started around 1900 when big companies had large growing amounts of paperwork and they just have vast halls full of clerks that were come in and process piles of paper. And, you know, oddly enough, despite the complete change in technology over the next year, 120 years up until, you know, January of this year, we were still very much focused on AR coming into the office on a kind of nine to five schedule. And, and isn't it interesting that along the way, it, the cultural norms and psychological norms sort of evolved with these workplace arrangements so that people who work from home came to be seen as, as less ambitious or less employable, less, less talented maybe in, in others became almost declassified to be working from home. Yeah, exactly. It's one of those things you can almost, you know, economists might call it a generally clubroom effect, which means even if one firm figured out working from home has great ear, it's hard for them to change it alone because there's a negative stigma and you know, no employee wants to have it maybe on their CV that they worked at home for years. Cause other firms think it is bad. And so, yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, just to be clear, the four things we need for working from home are internet broadband laptops and video calls. And all of them have been around since the mid two thousands. So the last one to come out with video calls and that was really the Dawn of Skype. Hello, Can you hear me? So Skype comes out in 2003. It's kind of mainstream by 2005 six. Hello. Hey, so really for probably 15 years now we could have effectively worked from home, but it was the whole social norms that up until now have held us back. How are you so typical of me to talk about myself, I'm sorry, And this is enormous inertia in the system because you know, we've built entire cities around the idea that there's going to be this urban core, where people work and suburbs where people live. We built highways and public transit systems to ferry people from residential neighborhoods to commercial neighborhoods. You know, it's almost as if once that initial model separating the workplace from the home got fixed in people's minds, there was an inertia that got built up around it that became essentially unstoppable. Yes, exactly. I mean, I think one big change post COVID, there's going to be driven both by working from home and also the other issue is social distancing. So I think in future, a lot of that real estate is probably going to be converted into apartments and it's going to be, you know, the price of it's going to drop a lot and it's going to attract conversion into apartments. So we're going to have much more mixed living modes whereby those skyscrapers, aren't all offices. And we don't all live out in the suburbs instead. You know, there's more people living in the center on lower rents and there's less commuting because it's the only way we're going to be able to shape it. And of course included in that less commuting will be more working from home. When we come back, Nick bloom tells us about his unusual experiment at a Chinese travel agency where half of the workers stayed in the office and half were allowed to work from home. We do do a lot of interviews and they just said, it's really depressing. Or they fell victim to one of the three great enemies of working from home, the bed, the fridge, or the television You're listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar. Vedantam Support for hidden brain comes from Scribd with script, you get instant access to millions of e-books audio books, magazines, and more with script. 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And you can start communicating in under 48 hours. Therapists have a broad range of expertise and the service is even available for clients worldwide. Plus it's easy and free to change counselors if needed visit better help.com/hidden and joined the more than 2 million people who have received help from one of better helps experienced professionals. Hidden brain is sponsored by better health and listeners get 10% off their first month of online [email protected] slash hidden. That's better. H E L p.com/hidden. This is hidden brain I'm Shankar. Vedanta Nick bloom is a researcher at Stanford university. For years. He has studied the phenomenon of working from home and asked a deceptively simple question. Are people more productive or less productive when they work from home NICU, teaching a class at Stanford in 2010, and you had a student in the class from China and you got to chatting with him. He told you about a problem. His company was having back in China. What was the problem? You know, as a backstop, you know, the situation is pretty weird. I was teaching a PhD, a graduate economics class in Stamford, and I have about 15 to 20 students in the class. One of them I figured out relatively soon, maybe, you know, a third of the end of the course was James Liang from dogging them who is the CEO, and co-founder this huge Chinese travel agent. And he said that they were growing really fast and very well, but they were based out in Shanghai. And that challenge was office space in Shanghai was incredibly expensive. And so the ones to figure out how to grow without sinking vast amounts of money into Everett, increasing size of expensive offices. And so they were thinking about a working from home program. So you decided to work with this Chinese company called Ctrip to find out whether working from home was good or bad in terms of productivity. And you did more than just simply conduct a survey. You decided to conduct an experiment. Yes, Yes. You know, the great thing was because James is a pitch PhD, economics, Jean. He was open to what's called doing a randomized control trial. So quite formally, they went to in Ctrip, they got two divisions, hotel and airfare. There were about a thousand people in them and they asked them who wants to work from home? You know, amazingly, we're not interestingly, maybe as much as amazing, only half of them volunteered. So just to be clear, you know, a lot of people don't want to work from home. So the volunteers tended to be slightly older, more liked to have kids live further away. But then they took these 500 volunteers and had a formal randomization. So James on Ctrip TV drew a ping pong ball avenue. And it said even does that meant people, even birthdays of you're born on the second four, six, eight, ten, et cetera, the month you were in the treatment sample. So you actually got to work from home for four days a week for the next nine months. And if you were odd like me, I'm the 5th of May you, you are the control group and you remained in the office for the next nine months. A few other notes about the experiment for the workers who went on four days a week, they all came into the office on the fifth day. That was when they did things that were best to do in person like team meetings and trainings and managers were always in the office. The main worry for Ctrip was the fear that all companies seem to have, that the remote employees would get distracted and not be productive. But Ctrip had a plan to deal with that. If it had declines in productivity, they figured that those will be offset by the huge savings in rent. In fact, this calculation was one of the reasons they agreed to run the experiment in the first place to see how many dollars they saved on rent versus how many dollars they might lose on productivity. And then the results came in. So, you know, it was, there was also honestly amazing. And this is why, you know, it was so valuable to have nine months cause an issue you were thinking, this can't be true. What you saw was the working from home employees were 13% more productive than the people in the office, just to be good. That is an enormous uplift. That's almost a DaXtra a week simply from having the same people in the same team, doing the same job, which is answering telephone calls, dealing with customer complaints, taking bookings, et cetera. Now, working at home rather than the office. And did they actually calculate a dollar figure in terms of increased productivity? Not, not just from the increased productivity, but from the savings on rent. Yes. So they say estimated they saved around $2,000 per employee, per year from working from home. And, you know, Cedric was like, as you can imagine, it was incredibly, incredibly positive about this at the end of the experiment announced they're rolling the ski Mount to the entire company. So now employees who really hated working from home, what were they allowed to come back and start working out at the office? Yes. A striking finding again, totally unexpected was, well, you know, there are two things, two elements there's one, one is initially they offered to a thousand employees, only 500 wanted to work from home. So our view would have been honestly, many more people that have taken out, but a lot of people do not want to work from home. You know, one reason is, you know, the people that want to come to the office are young and single, as we know in the U S about a third of people meet their spouse in the workplace. You know, something similar is true in China. The other thing is after the end of the nine months experiment, remembering everyone in the experiment and volunteered around half of the people that won the lottery to work from home, actually changed their minds and decided to come back into the office and the control group, who'd all volunteered, you know, nine months ago, it just lost the lottery. But at this point we're allowed to do whatever they want. Only a third of them actually ended up going home. So there was a huge move away actually, after people had tried it out against working from home four out of five days a week, which again was very surprising. We thought, you know, employees are partly paid on performance. So since they're performing 13% more at home, their pay has gone up. But even so large numbers of the more than half of them were voting in sense, you know, voting with their feet. Cause I asked to actively come back into the office with all the commute costs and a hassle that involved Is there, isn't there a real irony here, Nick, which is that the company thought that people were going to be less productive, but in fact, people turn out to be more productive and people thought they wanted to work from home, but once they actually did, they actually wanted to come back to work. No, it comes back to, I think what we really need and what employees want on average is a mix. So sea trip at that point was only offering four out five days a week at home. I think, you know, I've actually, again, caught up with Ctrip very recently. If you'd move to a system where they could have worked from home one or two days a week, that would have been far more popular now for logistical reasons. They didn't offer that. But most employees and we saw this in the experiment, I should say for the first two or three months, they were really happy. They're very positive on it. But as time went on, we just got increasing reports and complaints about loneliness. And this is very depressing being at home day in, day out, working now you're on your own. And so by the time it came to the end of nine months, you know, many people were quite surprised, but they said, I CA I can't hack this. I wanna, we did a lot of interviews by the way, a lot of focus group interviews. And they just said, it's really depressing. Or they fell victim to one of the three great enemies of working from home, the, the bed, the fridge or the television. So something went wrong and they said, look, save me, get me out of here. I want to come back to the office. I mean, it's quite astounding, but I'm sure many people can empathize. You know, for me, I'm really missing colleagues. I like being at home and I live with my wife and four kids, but it kind of gets cut, isolating. I'd love to bet to go back into the office and at least for two, three days a week. And that's the same thing we saw in Ctrip. So in other words, partly what you're, what you're seeing is that they might be benefits from working from home that are just, you know, regardless of who you send home, there are some advantages, certainly in terms of saving an office space, but it may be that the people who actually are best suited to working from home are the people who actually want to be worked from home. So some amount of flexibility from the point of view of the employees might be part of the productivity equation. Yes, exactly. I mean the two big things I took out of this and from more recent work I've been doing is the importance of choice and flexibility. So it turns out on choice. People have just really different views and it's very hard to know, you know, what people's views are. It depends a lot on what their home circumstances are like, do they have space, a spare room? You know, do they want to be at home? Is their apartment nice? And then on flexibility, it's actually really hard to tell. So in Ctrip, we just discovered in the focus groups, so many people said, you know, we thought we'll be great at this. We thought we could deal with it. I thought I was mentally strong. I didn't feel like, you know, I didn't like many, my employees actually wanted to go home, but I realized after, you know, three or four months, maybe I did miss them. It's like that old saying absence makes the heart grow fonder. And it seemed to be true, but you know, as hard as it is to imagine, I'm sure there are some people out there now thinking even that really annoying guy, Tony and accounts, maybe I miss him a bit, et cetera. And that seemed to be what we're seeing with, with Ctrip in China. And also maybe the, the, the, the, the champagne and the jacuzzi starts to get old. After four months. You also had some interesting findings from the Ctrip experiment when it came to quit rates. T tell me what happened in terms of retaining employees, what you found. Yeah. Another striking finding was quit rates fell by half for the people that work from home. So the firm collects a lot of surveys and they, you know, they reported in the survey so far happier, but I'm sometimes slightly skeptical. I don't know whether, you know, it's hard to know the firms are serving response to it's from that the employees to the firm, but you know, the much more important thing is the voting with their feet. So Ctrip has about a 50% quit rate for its employees that turns out that's almost identical to the average in the UK, us Australia, many countries, 50% about normal. So most people stay about two years in a job before moving on for the working from home employees that quit rates hard from 50% down to 25%, which of course for the company was a huge upside because it avoided a, you know, a large chunk of the pain of hiring and training and getting people up to speed just for them to then quit. So I'm wondering if one of the things that people forget when they, when they think about the, you know, the, the old negative stereotypes of working from home, that people are easily distracted. They're going to be distracted by the fridge and the TV and the bed that they actually forget. The workplace is also a source of distraction. The workplace is often, you know, they're multiple things going on. There are slack channels that tell you about the free food that's being given away on another floor of the building. And, you know, there's, someone's birthday going on. It's not as if the workplace is a highly focused concentrating environment either. No, Exactly. Right. So just to explain for the 13% higher productivity from working from home about a third of that was the home-based employees who are more productive per minute. And that's entirely because home is on average, actually less distracting. And from the interviews, you know, there are some hilarious stories that came up. My favorite was the woman that said, you know, when I'm in the office, it's so distracting the woman in the cubicle next to me, clips, her toenails. She takes out this, you know, these toenail clipper, and she clips it under the table. And she said, under the desk, she said, she thinks I don't notice, but I tell you, I noticed, I noticed it's disgusting. You know, there's that there are stories of world cups, sweepstakes of there's a cake in the breakout room. Somebody's boyfriend and girlfriend have left. You know, you can imagine, so home you're exactly right. Home is distracting, but the office is turns out to be significantly more distracting. And so actually you can work more efficiently per minute, at least in this experiment. So I understand with the, with the Ctrip study, some people who were working from home wanted to come back, perhaps because they felt like they were losing out the colleagues or in the office all the time. Maybe the colleagues were getting more FaceTime with the bosses. So in some ways the experiment didn't do it, didn't do away with the social norm that working from home was inferior. It basically laid it out as a short-term experiment. Yes. So the one dark side I'd say of working from home from the experiment was the drop in promotion rates where people working from home. So if you control for performance, remember the people at home, 30% more productive, they should have been promoted at a much faster rate. And it turns out they were promoted less rapidly. In fact, they're roughly that eventual promotion rate is roughly half for those at home versus at the office. So there's a huge drop in promotions. And when we asked them, it turned out, looking into there's a couple of factors. One is you're working from home, you're you're forgotten about. And so that's a serious downside that you're in a team of 15. And that said, there's three of you working from home, the rest of the office. You can be passed over. The other thing that was tricky to how to deal with when you spoke to Ctrip, they said, well, look, part of being promoted is knowing your colleagues and knowing about the firm culture, et cetera. And that does come from being in the office and having lunch and coffees around. So, you know, it's, it's a bit of a band. Some of the extra productivity is at home is because they're spending less time, chit chatting over coffee. But some of that chit chat turns out to that should be pretty useful. What happens when hundreds of millions of people don't make a choice to work from home, but a global pandemic suddenly makes the choice for them. You're listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar, Vedanta Support for head and brand comes from staples. Staples helps small businesses, print bake the print advisors at staples, sweat the details and quality of every project. That's what they call that print. Big promise. They're committed to getting your print job right, every time to treating your small business, like a big deal and making it come to life and to giving you expert guidance from start to finish, and now get 20% off signs, banners, and posters. When you spend $75 or more at staples offer ends. January 1st Support for hidden brand comes from Chirico. Kiwi co creates. Cool hands-on projects designed to expose kids to concepts. Since team science, technology, engineering, art, and math, your holiday gift search ends here. Chirico is the one-stop shop for kids of every interest and age. Kids can discover the engineering and mechanics behind everyday objects. The science and chemistry of cooking and more each monthly create is designed by experts and tested by kids. This holiday don't just teach kids how to buy, teach them how to build, give them a gift of a hands-on holiday with a key Rico subscription, and celebrate a love for hands-on learning all your long, get 50% off your first month plus free shipping on any create line with code brain. That's 50% off your first [email protected] promo code brain. This is hidden brain I'm Shankar. Vedantam the COVID 19 pandemic has reshaped the world. Millions of people have died and countless others have seen their lives disrupted virtually overnight. Working from home in many countries, became not an exception, not a park, just the new normal Nick you've been preaching the virtues of working from home for years. I'm curious what this moment feels like. You don't really move the needle on that. And then suddenly thousands of companies and millions of people start doing it overnight. Have you suffered whiplash? Oh yeah. I is a weird experience. I have, I was doing something the other day, looking at the frequency of the word, working from home in us newspapers. So I looked at the top 50 us newspapers and it went up 12000% between January and April, 2020. So yeah, it's, I mean, I'm fascinated by it. I'm living it. It's very old to be a w researching something that you and all your friends are living in. I all my friends and relatives, et cetera, going through exactly the same issue. I should say that in the U S currently only 40% of people are working from home. So 30% of people are not working. And 30% of people are working on business premises, which are typically essential service workers. But for those of us that are working from home in many ways, we're actually in the lucky minority that we're able to work and able to do this safely at home. So one of the things that's very interesting about the current sheriff for this two and five workers is 40% of workers that are working from home is that the change has happened so suddenly. And it's so widespread that it seems to have changed norms overnight. So zoom calls and emails and phone conversations are now the default. They no longer the second class citizen in the workplace. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine that lives in London and he worked for us company and he's trying to set up a startup of the same covenant subsidiary in South Africa. And he was saying, he, up until now, he was always on zoom, but he was always, you know, whatever teams, he was always the odd one out in the sense that everyone else is in the room. And he was typically dialing him. And he said, suddenly he felt on a level with everyone else that everyone was on zoom. And I had a similar feedback. Actually, I was giving a presentation to a, one of the national labs in the U S and somebody there was disabled and Mustang. She was saying, you know, in some sense has been a great level of, for me, because I struggled to get into the office and back, but now, you know, we're all on zoom and being physically there really doesn't matter. So I has had some unusual effects, both positive and negative. And in fact, I just one final anecdote, I was talking to someone that starts a high-tech runs her. She founded a high-tech company out in the bay area. She, you know, she was born in India and came over and started the company here. And she was saying, she notices on zoom, who speaks up is quite different from who does it in person. And she was saying, you know, Americans are like amazingly loud in meetings. And there's some cultural agenda differences that are quite different when you're on video calls. A number of people that previously didn't spoke up have now felt actually empowered to talk because they find it less intimidating on a video call. Very interesting you, I understand you've completed a survey of nearly 2000 Americans paint me a picture of the people who report making a successful switch to working from home and the people who can't or don't. So, you know, one huge factor is clear education. So it's not that being educated makes you better working from home. It's that being educated means you're in the type of job that means you can probably work from home. So if we look at working from home jobs, they tend to be much more manager or professional. You can imagine, you know, they're the kind of things that are typically done beforehand in the office. And so it can be easily shifted home. If you look at say a, you know, people with a high school degree or less. So those that left school, you know, 16, 17, 18 they're farmer liked to be in retail, you know, maybe, and you know, it's in construction, manufacturing, the types of things you need to be on site. So education has become an enormous divider actually, in terms of who can work from home. The other couple of factors that we picked up on again, kind of links to wealth and education is having functional internet. You know, it's astounding, but only 65% of Americans in our survey report, having an internet connectivity, good enough to run a video called a high quality video call. So, you know, for those of us that living in nice parts of cities, it seems totally standard. You have good internet, but a lot of poor urban areas or rural areas, they have internet, but it flakes in and out. And so you can't really have video calls. The other thing is having space a home. So people have been able to make this a success report, having that own room. That's not their bedrooms. They can work quietly in the survey data. Only 49% of Americans have their own room. That's not their bedrooms, or most people are working from home in a room meeting their husband or wife in the same room or kids running around, et cetera. So I just want to be very clear. COVID working from home is not great post COVID, I think will be this Nirvana where we're doing it. You know, 2, 1, 2, 3 days a week, our kids are back in school. We have proper equipment. We have a piece in quad or our own room. Cause you know, a husband and wife they're out of work and so we can get on with it. So what I hear you saying of course is that there is this massive worldwide experiment that is unfolding before our eyes. There's already some data starting to come in about its effects. I just read a paper by link Fang, bow and colleagues, the, the analyze, the effects of working from home arrangements as a result of COVID by examining productivity at Baidu, which is one of China's biggest it companies and they get mixed results. Some people report higher productivity, others, especially people working in big teams on complex or highly collaborative projects, they report lower productivity. Does that surprise you at all? No. I think, you know, the stories we're getting out from talking to firms and from the data is what I would call day-to-day things, which is kind of continuing activities. We've all always been doing, which is a bit like what the folks I was talking about in Ctrip. They're basically making calls and taking bookings that seems to work pretty well. So that you're just, you know, repeating what you've done before. Nothing too innovative, nothing too unusual or new. And you know, the peace and quiet, our home works quite well. What appears to be more of a struggle is more creative activities, bigger team group activities. So I'd say that's more long run. It's kind of like what as economist, you might call intangible investments and it goes back to quips. You know, guys like Steve jobs made that, you know, oh, they had a quote from her saying, Hey, you really got to be in the building and talking to others, you know, kicking back, you know, talking over the water cooler to come out with some of these ideas. So I think the short run productivity is actually looking surprisingly good. What I worry about is innovation and creativity, for example, you know, next year's new iPhone. Would that be that impressive because you know, all the innovation and research is going into it right now. I presume it's much harder to do working from home. Right. And, and this, and you mentioned Steve jobs a second ago. You know, this is a, almost a mantra in Silicon valley, which is the chance and counters that happen when people work together, they bump into each other in the hallway. And then the kitchens, you know, Steve jobs basically designed apple to encourage chance and counters. So the, really the question that you're asking is what happens when you turn off that serendipity? Yeah, What's amazing is there's, you know, there's so much money invested by firms in this, you know, you think of the billions and billions of dollars that high-tech firms, but also investment banks or professional service firms have spent on super fancy offices. They're trying to persuade people to come in. So the amazing artworks, the incredible free food, the ping pong table, the, you know, the table football table of the astounding, you know, floor to ceiling glass, the incredible gardens, all of that is to drag people into the office. Hi everyone. My name is Kevin. And today we're going inside the multimillion dollar tree house conference room, Got a knot in your back. Schedule, a massage, looking for inspiration, attempt to talk with a real, We have our bike room, our bike room holds 92 bikes. It's all about encouraging our employees to reduce their carbon. First of all, you notice that you're getting a view and natural light, which is important. There's research, that's shown how natural light and views, help people focus and process information in a more effective way. I think it is important, you know, for my own experience, honestly, just to myself, introspect, a lot of my, you know, best research pieces have come from discussions over lunch and conferences, but I think it is really important, but I must say the, you know, the research based on this is, is not entirely conclusive and there's certainly fantastic creations that have happened by people, honestly working alone. You can come out and lots of examples of that too. I'm wondering, I mean, the picture you're painting here. If you asked me at the start of 2020 can, you know, can 40% of the country work from home? I would say, I would have probably said no, it would be very hard, probably impossible. And clearly now that's been proven on true. I think a large number of people are making it, making it work. But I think the picture that's emerging from this conversation is how complex the question actually is and how much it's connected to individual people's life situations. I mean, you know, I, I've gotten to spend more time with family over the last few months as I'm working, which has been wonderful, but I can also imagine that people may, perhaps who might not want to spend large amounts of time with family. Maybe they don't have a happy family situation maybe, or maybe they are, they're single and they're living by themselves and it's extremely lonely. And so the idea that is a one size fits all rule, that's going to mean everyone working from home is more productive or everyone working from home is more unhappy. That simply breaks down. Doesn't it? Exactly. So again, you see this so much in the survey data. So just to give you one figure, we ask people post COVID. How many days would you want to work from home? And 20% of people say none, 20% of people do not want to work for them whatsoever. And they may be many of the types of people. You mentioned the, you know, they have very small apartments or the, you know, they don't have great family situations. Then there's, twenty-five percent of the people that want to work from home five days a week. They'd never want to go back to the office again. And then the remaining 55% or a big spread. So this is something having, you know, worked for years and all kinds of different parts of economics research. I can't think of an area I've seen this such differing views. So the average is, you know, the average person there's such a person wants to work from home typically two days a week, but that average hides enormous variation. So I think the firms choices going to be absolutely essential to get this right. You know, I recently came by the spot in the news on CNBC about the real estate market in New York city. Take a listen, Nick, The big worry here. And the big numbers was this rapid rise in empty apartments, the inventory of rental listing soaring, 85%. We now have a vacancy rate that is the highest in Manhattan on record. So Nick beyond what happens to workers and companies, what do you think the effects of COVID and working from home might be on cities and, and where we decide to live. So I have to say, I think it's, you know, it's not good for cities. So just to be clear, there's plenty of people saying, well, cities have seen this all before they was bounced back. There's been plenty of pandemics. That's true. But if you look for example, you know, they bounce back. Well, they take a long time. And in the words of Keynes, John Maynard Keynes in the long run, we're all dead. So just as a, you know what one Huntington, if you look at London, I was watching something on CNN with somebody saying, you know, of course, London recovered after the plagues. That's true. But if you look at the data 10 years after the great plague, 30% of buildings were still empty. So I, you know, my prediction is prices will drop dramatically. If not, the skyscrapers on apartments will remain empty from the clip they are right now. But I wouldn't be surprised to see prices of say Manhattan, apartments and office buildings falling by 30 to 50%. And that's the way you keep them occupied, you know, people. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing because it's rebuy. It would take us back to say 2000 or rebalance a bit that the country rural areas have been left behind and the center of cities have done incredibly well. If we rewind that by 20 back to 2000, you have just a more balanced national setup without such an affordability crisis in the center of cities. There's still much, we don't know about what life will look like in a post COVID era. We'll be go back to the way we used to work in the old days back when more people commuted to an office and the definition of a workplace was a physical space that you shared with your colleagues, or will we permanently pivot to an era where remote work is more than norm? I asked Nick to predict which way our work practices would evolve. And by extension our communities writ large, I'm pretty, Most of this will be permanent. So, you know, I can give you the, there are four reasons that are driving permanents. Firstly, this has turned out to be a great experience in the sense that 70% of companies reported work environments turned out better than predicted. So they're much more enthusiastic. Secondly, the stigma seems to evaporate it. So again, in survey data, you know, three quarters of people report their perception is a big drop in stigma, thirdly investment. So we collected data on the average person in America is invested 12 hours in about a thousand dollars setting up working from home. So, you know, to thank me personally, I spent a while figuring out how all these, you know, doom and teams and chime and everything works. And I bought a proper webcam and a mic and, you know, tried to organize the room a bit. And then finally social distancing. My prediction is just to put figures on actually it's before COVID 5% of working days in America was full-time at home during COVID it's about 40%. So 40% are working days at home post COVID from talking to firms. And from our service, it looks something like 20%. So we're going to wind back a bit from where we are now because you know, no one's going to be full-time at home a very few people, but we'll well above what we were before. COVID I'm wondering, you know, Nick, if you're hiring an employee, maybe you are less interested is, is the employee in the same zip code as I am, or in the same city as I am. Maybe now you are, if you're a company you actually can hire more widely. Maybe you can actually look to rural areas or even other countries for, for labor in ways that you couldn't earlier. In other words, it actually might unleash a lot of people who previously could not find their way to, you know, an expensive Manhattan job interview now can actually be in the running for that job. No, exactly. I think this is going to be great for rebalancing the economy. So many of our IC the political troubles in the U S and also my Homeland, the UK, or from this increasing growing rural urban divide in the rural parts of the country felt left behind, you know, felt forgotten about by urban leaks, et cetera. Now, if suddenly we allow both people to move out of cities into the countryside, but also jobs to move. So even if nobody moves, even employers can now hire people in rural areas, more easily, that's going to rebalance things. And you can, if we're working from home, let's say three days a week, and only coming in the office two days a week, you can be recruiting people far out, deep into rural areas. So if a, if a Stanford professor, like you can work at Stanford, but pay, you know, rent in, let's say Kansas, or in, or in Wahaca, Mexico, why would someone like you choose to live in Palo Alto? Well, this comes back to you now, I guess inertia. I mean, it's a good question. If, you know, imagine COVID lawsuits, you know, they are pandemic, horrifically lost it for five years. A lot of people will be asking themselves that question. Why am I living in such expensive areas? You know, it works for us living here. My kids are in local schools and we have friends locally, et cetera. But I guess if it lasted forever and again, just to be clear post pandemic, I see us going back into the office two, three days a week, but there are certain jobs. I think it's become clear that they can just be done entirely remotely. And for those jobs, you may well see a lot of people moved, you know, to, you know, you might live in Hawaii, you might live next to the beach and then code for Facebook. And there's nothing wrong with that. And if that works out, actually, that's great. And you may fly to Silicon valley once every other month to meet in person and spend the rest of your time living out in Hawaii or living up in the ski slope. So I think we'll see a big increase in that. And in fact, if you look, if you look at the reports from real estate agents, they are talking about, there's been an explosion of people wanting to buy what's called lifestyle properties. So, you know, beautiful ranches deep out in the countryside, you know, you can buy a small Manhattan apartment or you can buy a 200 acre ranch out in Wyoming. And if you can work remotely, you know, maybe you go for the lat, But again, you have this divide don't you, which is that this is speaking now to the people who are the wealthiest people who are able to think that way. And if you don't, if you don't have the, the education and the technology, the support from an employer to do this, there's really going to be this bifurcating cast system. Yes. Although I think in terms of moving people out to rural areas, it pushes in both directions. You're exactly right. The people who can work from home are educated. And so they gain a lot of the direct benefits. It is true though, if a lot of say, wealthy, new Yorkers, move out into the countryside. When they're out, they're going to demand services, you know, restaurants and go out to gyms, et cetera, and no doubt pay more tax revenue there improve local schools. And so that will indirectly spill over to, you know, people that are out there that maybe can't work from home, but we'll get some of the indirect benefits. So the inequality impacts a bit mixed. I think it will really reduce inequality, Rican, rebalance things a bit away from cities. It's not like, you know, I was born in London. I lived in London till I was 30. I'm a, basically a city person, but it's also clear that even for me, one of the reasons I left London and came out to the U S is, it was just too expensive to live in. And I think it will be better for society of cities where, you know, not so unbelievably expensive. So you could have a more mixed set of people lived in them. And there's more, you know, basically diversity across the U S rather than becoming so geographically segregated by income, which is what's been happening until recently. What's been your most embarrassing work from home moment. These last few months, My most embarrassing, what I tell you, one, this is the classic early days of zoom. I was on a, a video call. It was a zoom call. And I screen shared with some, a couple of co-authors and I'd forgotten to turn off screen-sharing. And at some point, one of them is talking and I were, you know, as you do was losing, you know, concentration. I went to start doing some emails and was typing of apply. And my coauthor suddenly said, Hey, Nick, you do realize you're still on Skype and chat. And you know, he'd very politely taken awhile thinking I might turn back, but here, you know, for the last five, six minutes, he must have been maybe even 10 minutes watching me type emails out, clearly paying no attention. One of the things you have to realize when you are working from home is the office norms just don't apply. So it's completely reasonable. If you're working from home to have a cat walk across your camera or a baby crying in the background. And one of my colleagues had just had a baby. And you know, that baby is often sitting in his lap during conference calls and Esq. And it is the way it is in the office. It would seem weird, but I liked the fact that working from home, there's a new set of rules around what's reasonable. The economist, Nick bloom, teachers at Stanford ought to be more precise. He teaches from his spare bedroom and sometimes from his bathroom when his kids are practicing the bagpipes, Nick blue, thank you for joining me today on hidden. Right? Thanks has been fantastic. Thank you for having me. Their concern is that they want to have a Kurdish. Excuse me. My said, my kids are here. Live television, Cold air continues across the area tonight. Potential for some frost and freeze for some of us. We'll warm up. It's going to take Maple. David Cameron was talking about, oh, I'm really sorry. That's my son arriving. Sorry. Rehabed sorry. Hold on one second. Sorry. Yes, yes. I'm very sorry about that. All right. Welcome back. I'm going to be back in studio on Monday. So I thought every, my daughter, Alina with us, no. Can you say it's going to be sunny today? No, it's going to be hot. Okay, good work. Lots of upper eighties and low nineties over the next seven to 10 days. This didn't go as planned. Jackie. We recently checked back in with Nick bloom to get us perspective on how working from home has evolved in the years. Since we first round this episode, you might expect that with the COVID-19 pandemic more under control in the U S more employees will be returning to the office. But some preliminary data suggest working from home is just as prevalent. According to Gallup, 45% of us employees worked at least part-time at home in the fall of 2021. Nick bloom says there's one major reason for this right now. There's a hot labor market in the U S because of the pandemic. Many workers decided to quit their jobs or change career paths. So organizations are realizing that if they want to hire new employees and even keep the ones they have, they should offer at least two days per week of working from home. Some companies are choosing a hybrid model like working from home on Mondays and Fridays while others are offering one full month per year of working from anywhere. In other words, Nick predicts working from home seems to be here to stay Hidden. Brain is produced by hidden brain media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Corel, Ryan Katz, Kristin Wong, autumn bonds, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyer is our executive producer. I'm hidden brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is someone who has made it possible for the hidden brain team to work from home DC. When I show move to independent production in 2020, we needed new computers. Yet, as he's known patiently walked me through the process of setting up a business account for our new company and ensured we got our computers on a tight turnaround. It helped that he's something of an audio file himself. Thank you yet. For more hidden brain, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You can find [email protected]. That's N E w S dot hidden brain.org. If you enjoyed our work 2.0 series, please do share it with friends, family members. And of course your coworkers I'm Shankar. Vedantam SU.