rss-bridge 2021-11-29T21:00:00+00:00

Work 2.0: The One-Room Commute

If you’re working from home, you might be reveling in your daily commute to the dining room table. Or you might be saying, “Get me out of here.” In the final episode of our Work 2.0 series, economist Nicholas Bloom joins us from his spare bedroom to ponder whether working from home is actually working.

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Work 2.0: The One-Room Commute

/ November 29, 2021

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Like millions of people around the world, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom has been working from home since March. Instead of a university classroom, he now uses a spare bedroom. Sometimes one of his four kids pops in while he does meetings over Zoom. He'll never forget this one time back in May. He was on a very important call with some business executives, trying to help them with a research project. About 20 minutes into the call, this happened.Nicholas Bloom: It was two of my kids starting their daily practice on the bag pipes. I was thinking, "Oh no, now is not the time." I had to say quickly to everyone in the meeting, "I'm sorry, there's something going on in the background," mute myself and run into the toilet to take the rest of the meeting in there because it was the only place that was quiet enough. Our house isn't that big and the soundproofing is just dreadful. The toilets about the only sound bunkered room so I'm sure I'll be back in there again taking calls.Shankar Vedantam: 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 the rest of us. Is working from home working?Nicholas Bloom: So many people said, "We thought we'd be great at this. We thought we could deal with it. I thought I was mentally strong. I didn't like many of my employees, but I realized after three or four months, maybe I did miss them."Shankar Vedantam: The psychological challenges and the possibilities of working from home, this week on Hidden Brain.Shankar Vedantam: Before economist 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.Nicholas Bloom: I know there is endless joking about working from home, shirking from home. Working remotely, remotely working. They would wind me up and claim I was watching those old-fashioned black and white TV movies that run during the day, or watching the cricket being British. Honestly, I promise you, I was working but it didn't feel like other people thought that was true.Shankar Vedantam: You probably had the cricket in the background though, didn't you?Nicholas Bloom: Yeah, I have to say, I'm not a big fan of cricket unless it comes to revising for my exams during which point the cricket became fascinating. Anything's fascinating compared to revising.Shankar Vedantam: The assumptions that people have long held about working from home, you can see them reflected in our searches online. Some time ago Nick looked at what you see when you search for the phrase, "Working from home," on the web.Nicholas Bloom: I gave a few talks, I have to say, before COVID I did a bit of research and talks and stuff over the years for quite a while. One thing I used to explain to people is one good way to tell how negatively viewed working from home was, was just to go into Google or Bing and do an image search under the words, "Working from home." If you do that, I screen shotted it and showed it in a TEDx talk in 2017. I showed the top 15 hits, the top two rows of images, and they were basically naked people, cartoons, people juggling babies on their lap.Nicholas Bloom: Out of the 15, there were only two that were positive images. There were 13 that were just terrible. The worst was a guy in a jacuzzi drinking champagne, which was... it was so negatively viewed.Shankar Vedantam: Some years ago, and this was long before the COVID pandemic hit us, a news story broke about a certain company in Silicon Valley. Listen to this clip from NBC's Today Show.Speaker 3: Disgruntled employees linked an internal memo from human resources that bans 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."Shankar Vedantam: So Nick, tell me why Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wanted to cancel the company's policy to allow employees to work from home.Nicholas Bloom: Sure. She took over and she was seen as someone to turn around the company. She said, not long into her tenure there, she discovered there's a whole group of people that were working from home. Many of them were just not logging in the entire day, there wasn't much assessment that was going on. It was clear that while some of them were doing really well, others were basically using it as a way to take an extended holiday. 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. At that point we didn't have one in Yahoo so I basically temporarily paused the working at home scheme until we got a performance system and then relaxed it back a bit."Nicholas Bloom: It generated a storm of media back in 2013. I still remember now.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. You've done research into whether Marissa Mayer was right in terms of the effects of working from home on productivity. 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. Long before COVID, people who didn't work in an office were seen as the exception. What's interesting is when you look down history, most people would have found it odd to work anywhere other than their homes.Nicholas Bloom: Yeah, you're exactly right. What's happened now has made history so odd. If you go back to 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. Then office work or factory work really started off with offices, places like Manchester in the UK started to have industrial machinery and of course to do that, you needed scale, buildings, and people needed to start to commute.Nicholas Bloom: I should point out, back then in 1800 when you talk about commuting, you were walking to the factory that was really not that far away. The major offices started around 1900, when big companies had growing amounts of paperwork and they just had vast halls full of clerks that would come in and process piles of paper. Oddly enough, despite the complete change in technology over the next 120 years, up until January of this year we were still very much focused on coming into the office on a 9-5 schedule.Shankar Vedantam: Isn't it interesting that along the way, 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 less ambitious, or less employable, less talented maybe. It became almost declasse to be working from home.Nicholas Bloom: Yeah, exactly. It's one of those things, economists might call it a general equilibrium effect which means even if one firm figured out working from home was great, it was hard for them to change it alone because there's a negative stigma. No employee wants to have it on their CV that they worked at home for years because other firms think

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