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INTRODUCTION

In recent years, more people have been working from home, or splitting their time between the office and home. In this episode, Pippa and Phil talk about hybrid work with Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University.

TRANSCRIPT

Pippa
Is working from home here to stay?

Nick Bloom
The big upside to hybrid is employees really like it, so the numbers look like they value it about the same as five percent more pay.

Phil
In today's episode, we're talking about one of the biggest changes to the way we work: working from home.

Pippa
Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work, our podcast to help you improve your business English. I'm Pippa.

Phil
And I'm Phil. We're back with a new series for you. Over the next few weeks, we'll be talking about the big trends shaping the world of work.

Pippa
Yes, we'll be helping you understand how modern workplaces are changing and talking about some of the language you'll need to make sense of the future. We'll have episodes on AI, networking, how office design affects the way we work, and this first episode is all about working from home.

Phil
You can find a transcript for this episode to read along to on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

Pippa
So, Phil, at BBC Learning English we work some days in the office, some days at home. Which do you prefer?

Phil
Actually, you know what? I really like the mix because I like coming in and working with colleagues and seeing them and collaborating. And then sometimes I also like staying at home and working in a more focused way at home. So actually doing both of them is good for me.

Pippa
Yeah. I think overall I prefer working from home, but I think if I did it five days a week, I'd probably be bored and I'd want to talk to people more. And sometimes it is quicker in the office, if you want to sort something out, to just chat to someone next to you, rather than having to email them or send them a message when you'd be working from home. So yeah, I guess I also like the mix.

And since the Covid pandemic, it's been quite common for office workers to split their time between the home and the office like we do. And we call this hybrid work.

Phil
Yes, but we've also recently seen some CEOs and some big companies saying that their office workers need to come back into the office full time and to stop working from home.

So do people get enough work done at home? Is hybrid work the future? Or will we all end up back in the office?

Pippa
Well, they're big questions Phil and I think people have a lot of opinions about these questions. So to answer them, I spoke to Nick Bloom, who's a professor of economics at Stanford University in the US.

Hi, Nick. How are you?

Nick Bloom
Great. Thanks for having me on, Pippa.

Pippa
Nick has been researching working from home for more than 20 years, so he's been thinking about this for a long time and a long time before the Covid pandemic, when lots of us suddenly made the shift to working from home.

Phil
So, Pippa, we're hybrid workers, sometimes in the office, sometimes not. Of course, some people's jobs can't be done at home, but what's the picture around the world?

Pippa
Well, that's exactly what I asked Nick first.

Nick Bloom
So before Covid running up to 2019, work from home happened, but it was very rare. So for example, in Europe, in the US you're looking at typically one day a month for the average person. And in the rest of the world it was less. So pretty, pretty, pretty rare. During Covid most graduates, people with, you know, university degrees, were working from home actually at the peak of the pandemic lockdown. So it went to about fifty percent of working days, an amazingly high number, quite incredible.

That was 2020. That fell back down. Now in late 2025, it's stabilised at about one quarter of working days. So now we're in a situation where roughly half of people work from home roughly half of the time. So that means a quarter of total days are work from home. And that's true throughout much of Europe, most of North America. If you look in Asia, Africa, Latin, South America, Latin America, Work from home levels are lower. They're maybe ten, fifteen percent of days, but they're still far above where they were pre-pandemic.

Pippa
Yeah. And what is the research telling us in terms of how that shift to more of a hybrid working pattern is impacting work in terms of productivity, creativity? Because we hear a lot of headlines. But what is what is the evidence showing us, I suppose?

Nick Bloom
The evidence seems to be, that hybrid, so coming in three days a week is about enough for productivity. So, you know, I have a paper in Nature. There's a lot of studies out there showing that, look, if you're in three days a week, for example, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and everyone comes in, that is enough face-to-face time to develop mentoring, building culture, good for innovation, good communication. And those other two days, Monday, Friday, is actually helpful for employees to quietly work at home, to avoid commuting, to get some what's called 'deep work'. So it looks like it has no effect on productivity. It's not better, but it's not worse.

The big upside to hybrid is employees really like it, so the numbers look like they value it about the same as five percent more pay. And what does that do to you? Well, for example, in one study I ran in Tripp.com, a huge multinational out in China, we saw that quit rates fell by one third.

And so what overall we're seeing now is many, many companies for professionals and managers are going for hybrid because it's very profitable. And the reason it's profitable is it leaves productivity untouched but reduces costs because it reduces worker turnover.

Pippa
And so why do you think, given that it seems like it's kind of not impacting productivity and it seems like people love it, employees love it, why do you think some businesses are still keen to kind of get their workers back into the office? Why do you think we've kind of seen a lot about that in recent years?

Nick Bloom
So fact one is badly organised hybrid. Badly run hybrid is you tell people they have to come in three days, but you don't select the days and you don't enforce it. And it means you're in on Monday and there's only four of your teammates in there. And you have to have a meeting and you have to get on Zoom, or you're in on Wednesday and there's only six people there, and you still have to get on Zoom, and people complain and say it isn't working. And the CEO eventually says, "I've had enough. That's it. Right, you're all in every day. This thing isn't working."

Problem two is a cheap layoff, and the thinking is, look, if you make people come back to the office five days a week, maybe five, ten percent of employees are going to quit because they don't want to do it. And that's a free way to reduce headcount. Now, you know, clearly there's a downside to that, which is you don't get to choose who leaves. And often who leaves are some of the best employees. If I was to ask you to list five or six companies that are forcing employees back to the office, my guess is most of them are actually reducing headcount.

Phil
This is all really interesting. This shift to hybrid working is a massive change to the way that we work. So has Nick found that people have changed the way they're working to fit into this hybrid way? And have they changed the way they communicate at work because of this shift?

Pippa
Yeah. Nick mentioned one of the reasons people want their employees to come back to the office is badly managed hybrid. So this is people coming into the office and not being able to collaborate. And then they're at home and they're not getting that time to work quietly that can help make sure that they're staying productive at home. And so I wanted to ask about what companies might need to do to manage hybrid well, rather than manage it badly.

I wonder, just to your point about sort of badly organised hybrid. But I wonder how you feel it's impacted, I guess, the way we communicate and the way we manage our time at work and understanding what work is being done and how? Because we're used to being in an office and being able to communicate really freely.

Nick Bloom
The big management innovation or the big management practice that needs to happen for hybrid, even for hybrid, and certainly for fully remote, is measuring output. So, Pippa, if you're my boss and I'm in the office with you five days a week, you can just sit and watch me at my desk so you can kind of see. Is Nick working? Now that isn't perfect management. It's input management. You don't know what I'm actually producing, but it's, it's OK. It's five out of ten.

If I am working from home, you don't have that.You can't see me. You have no idea what... I might be in my bed asleep. I might be playing football with my friends. You just don't know. So for employees that are work from home, you need to have what's called output management. You need to say, "Nick, I'm now going to evaluate what you're doing. You know, I don't care precisely how many minutes you work each hour." But you need to, for me, for example, if you need to get your teaching, you need to do research, you need to do university service, need to make some sales, whatever my job is.

Pippa
Yeah. And, where do you think this will go in the next sort of ten years and further into the future? Will we be more remote, more hybrid? Will we end up full circle back in the office again? What do you think kind of the future of this space is?

Nick Bloom
So just to be clear, work from home is going to look like a Nike swoosh. It dropped a lot from 2020 to '21. It fell. It's then been flat for '23, '24, '25 and then '26, '27 onwards, it's slowly going to grow. Why is that? So, older CEOs, particularly older men, tend to be more focussed on the office. If you look at younger leaders, particularly younger female leaders, they're more balanced in terms of hybrid. As time goes on, those younger leaders are going to run bigger and bigger companies than the older CEOs in my age group are going to retire. So that's fact one.

Fact two is leases. It's kind of boring. But it turns out when companies have office space, they usually don't own it. Instead, they sign what's called a lease. Typically those last 10 to 15 years. And as they end, companies think, ooh, you know, we're now hybrid. We probably don't need as much space. And they use it as an opportunity to reduce space and increase work from home.

And then the third factor I think is the most important in the long run, is simply better technology. Looking ahead, there's things like massive screens, holograms, virtual reality. So the technology, if we go to say 2030, it's going to be so much better. We're not all going to be using, you know, taking Zoom calls on little cell phones. We're probably going to be using massive screens and be people using holograms, using headsets. So yes, by 2030, work from home would definitely be more common and higher levels than it is in 2025.

Pippa
It was so interesting talking to Nick. I think lots of people have opinions about working from home, whether it's good, whether people are actually working when they're working at home. And so looking at it on this large scale across lots of companies and lots of countries and how it's affecting productivity, I think that's really helpful.

Phil
Yeah. So what I thought was really interesting is this idea of input and output management that actually you can't just look at someone and see what they're doing. What he says you really need to focus on are what people are actually producing. And I think that could have an interesting impact on the way that we talk about work and the way that we think about work.

Pippa
Yeah. And I was also thinking, when talking to Nick about this split between the office and home, is how this might impact language learners. Because it's a big shift if you're working in your second language to be in the office for a few days a week, talking a lot, having a lot of meetings, a lot of collaboration.

But also if you're working from home and you need to kind of reach out to somebody, have a phone call or a video call, we know that people can find those quite stressful in their second language.

Phil
Well, yes of course. And if you do want tips for remote meetings, do look at our Office English series, which you can find on our website, bbclearningenglish.com. And we have lots of episodes looking at different things that you might need to do for hybrid working or remote communication.

Pippa
Thanks for listening to this episode. You can find more programmes to help you with your English at work on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

Phil
Next time we'll be talking about how to network and develop your career online. Bye for now.

Pippa
Bye!

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