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Gleb Tsipursky
Gleb Tsipursky

Eye on Asia | Remote working is good for productivity, so why don’t bosses believe the data?

  • As demand for remote and hybrid working grows, managers need to be retrained to stop focusing on employee presence and learn to trust the actual data
  • In China, remote work can help address the pernicious 996 culture and counter the burnout that leads to young people ‘lying flat’

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, peer-reviewed research showed that remote work improved productivity. Photo: Getty Images
Gleb Tsipursky
Do bosses trust employees to be productive when working remotely? Not according to a Citrix survey of 900 business leaders and 1,800 knowledge workers – those who can do their job remotely.
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Half of all business leaders believe that, when employees are working “out of sight”, they don’t work as hard. Yet this belief contradicts the facts.

Already, before Covid-19, we had peer-reviewed research showing that remote work improved productivity at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, Nasdaq-listed Chinese travel agency. It randomly assigned call centre employees to work from home or the office. Working from home resulted in a 13 per cent performance increase and a 50 per cent lower attrition rate.

A more recent study from the Covid-19 era with random assignment of employees either to fully office-centric work or to some days worked remotely by Trip.com, China’s largest travel company, found that the hybrid workers had 35 per cent less attrition and that lines of code written increased by 8 per cent.

A study using employee monitoring software confirmed that the shift to remote work during the pandemic improved productivity by 5 per cent. More recent research from Stanford University showed that remote work efficiency increased throughout the pandemic, with workers reporting 5 per cent greater efficiency from home than in the office in May 2020, rising to 9 per cent in May this year. That’s because we learned how to be better at remote working.

03:29

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And, really, are workers all that productive in the office? Studies show that in-office employees actually only work between about a third and 40 per cent of the time, and spend the rest of the time on non-work activities such as surfing the web.
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