Professor of Economics Nicolas Bloom presenting on remote work at RFDC.
At the opening session of the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference November 13, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom presented on the impact and future of remote work.
“I’ve been working on this for 20 years. I have to say, no one was that engaged before the pandemic could be up to March 2020,” said Bloom. “Obviously things have been very different.”
Bloom started his panel explaining that remote work isn’t going anywhere. While the spike from the pandemic has reduced, the number of remote or hybrid workers has stabilized. In other words, a full return to work simply isn’t going to happen.
As for why, Bloom provided a few different reasons, though the two main ones are happiness (both worker and employer) and productivity. The happiness comes from a few factors, the most prominent of which is lack of commute.
“The second most hated activity during the day is work,” said Bloom. “The most hated thing throughout the day was commuting people hate commuting even more than they hate work.”
For the employer, employee retention is the benefit of remote work. Bloom’s research shows that a few days of hybrid is equivalent to an 8 percent pay raise on average for workers. While employees do enjoy coming to work for socializing, the data shows that giving the option to work from home at least a couple days a week has immediate effects.
One piece of data Bloom showed was those with hybrid were less likely to quit by wide margin. He proposed that companies able to provide hybrid work should do so for the benefits, especially since the work is not impacted either way being a “net zero,” Bloom said.
He also highlighted that companies with hybrid should keep a schedule in order to allow workers to get the socialization they crave while providing opportunities to socialize.
“The thing that pisses people off more than anything else is coming to the office and spending all day on Zoom,” said Bloom. “Like, “Why am I committed Why am I come in you know committed for 30 minutes each region to sit in a cube of zoom all day?” just really angers people.”
The impact on the economy is already visible. Instead of going out to lunch, remote workers go to dinner. Restaurants on transit hubs are the most affected, as transit is down by 30 to 50 percent. Bloom advised that restauranters adapt to the new status quo and embrace the positives where they can.