The open questions of hybrid working

At first, the question was how quickly people would get back to the office. Hybrid working has much to recommend it: flexibility for employees, periods of concentration at home, bursts of co-operation in the office. A new paper from Raj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Kyle Schirmann of Harvard Business School and Christos Makridis of Columbia Business School describes an experiment in which workers at BRAC, a huge non-profit organisation in Bangladesh, were randomly assigned to three groups, each spending different amounts of time working from home. An emerging consensus holds that there should be agreed “anchor days” on which people come in; since the idea is to spend time together, as many people as possible should be there. One of the great worries about hybrid working is that it can encourage “proximity bias”, the phenomenon whereby bosses prefer employees with whom they have more face-to-face contact.