# Adam Grant on hybrid working - **Episode:** [107](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/107.md) (2024-06-18) - **Type:** news-roundup - **Tags:** adam-grant, hybrid-work, leadership - **Time:** 6:34–11:00 (start 394s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/107?t=394](https://truthliesandwork.com/107?t=394) --- [6:34] Al Elliott: Well, Adam Grant [6:36] Leanne Elliott: Oh yeah [6:36] Al Elliott: The Adam Grant, the guy who, if you're listening, Adam, get on the pod. We've, we've been, we want you on the pod anyway. So Adam Grant is the, like the grandfather of all workplace culture. He tweeted the other day, he said, managers, keep your people, let them work from home 2 days a week. And before you yawn and go, yeah, yeah, we've talked about this. Specifically here we're talking about is 2 days a week. He quoted this experiment with 1,600 people. Over 2 years, and they were randomly assigned hybrid work. And what this study found was it was increased satisfaction, reduced quitting, especially for women and long commuters, and there was zero downside of it. I will link to the tweet in the show notes, but this is basically the report by a guy called Nicholas Bloom, someone else called— now I'm going to read this— Ruobing Han. I'm so sorry if I butchered that. And James Liang. And there is an abstract, which from what I've understood from Leanne is basically a summary. But even that was a bit too verbose for me. So the couple of things I picked out was here we ran a 6-month randomized control trial investigating the effects of hybrid working from home on 1,612 employees in a Chinese technology company in 2021. I love how scientists don't go, oh, we did 60— like marketers will go, oh, we did, we did like almost 2,000 people. They were like, no, 1,612 [7:54] Leanne Elliott: Mm-hmm [7:55] Al Elliott: We found that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by 1/3. The reduction in quit rates was significant for non-managers, female employees, and those with long commutes. If you're a manager, hold on, I've got something for you. Hybrid working did not affect performance over the next 2 years. We found no evidence for a difference in promotions over the next 2 years. And if you're a coder, hybrid working had no effect on the lines of code written by computer engineer employees. Interesting. I wonder if they were forest bathing at the time. 395 managers in the experiment revised their surveyed views about the effect of hybrid working from a perceived negative effect, -2.6%, to a perceived positive effect, 1%. Basically what it's saying is hybrid work might work for some of us full-time, and it might not work for some of us at all. But this study is telling us that in this particular situation, 2 days a week was the magic number. 2 days a week working from home, and it did not damage performance, reduced quit rates, and just basically made everyone a little bit happier, which I think we all kind of— I think I'm guessing most of us knew that. But, um, I don't know, that 2 days a week is kind of a magic thing [9:05] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, it does seem to be, isn't it? 2 or 3 days a week seems to be the magic number. And I guess it's just somewhere in the middle, isn't it? Um, it's interesting, the research that's coming out now on hybrid working. And I think we talked about some a couple of weeks ago as well that showed a similar thing, that it had no impact on on performance, um, negative or positive really. Um, it's just where you work, isn't it? It's context. And I think this is where hopefully the research is going to really emphasize it doesn't really matter if your employees are in office or at home. It's about the environment you create for them, the culture you create for them that's going to motivate their performance. Nice to see that managers starting to change their mind. I understand that lack of control, how you've always done it, and you can be a bit, a bit, um, uncertain. You can feel a bit insecure in your ability to lead. Um, but yeah, I think it's good, and I think it's no surprise, is it? Female employees, those with commutes, people with other aspects of their lives to balance. It gives them a bit more flexibility, a bit more time back, and therefore makes them more productive. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. Longitudinal study, always nice as well, over 2 years. So yeah, long may this flow of hybrid research continue. We always said, didn't they, that hybrid was a great experiment following the pandemic, and we're starting to see the results of this experiment now. And I think hybrid is going to be here to stay [10:21] Al Elliott: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And again, we don't often quote Bezos and Amazon here in the same sentence as workplace culture, but they do have a great way of looking at decisions, what they call one-way doors and two-way doors. Hybrid, if you're a manager or a leader, hybrid's a two-way door. You can just start it and say, right, we're going to trial this for 6 weeks and see how it goes. And you can always roll it back as long as you speak to Leanne if you're going to do this, by the way, because Leanne will tell you exactly how to set this up so that it doesn't blow up in your face, but it isn't a one-way door. So it's definitely something which I think if you're not trying, you should try 2 days a week and see what difference it makes. Lee, what else have you seen this week?