https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/study-return-office
"If you had any doubt about how important the issue of hybrid vs. in-office
work is in the United States and internationally, you need look no further than
the interest Mark Ma’s research on the subject has gotten.
Ma, an associate professor of business administration for Pitt Business, and
Yuye Ding, a Ph.D. student in Katz Graduate School of Business, looked at
Standard and Poor’s 500 firms — the largest companies listed on U.S. stock
exchanges — that had implemented return to work mandates, forcing employees to
be in the office five days a week.
The results showed that while many of the companies said they were bringing
employees back to the office to improve the bottom line, there were no
significant changes in financial performance or firm values after the mandates
were implemented. But there was a sharp decrease in employees’ job
satisfaction.
“Before the pandemic, you wake up in the morning and you automatically assumed
that you should go into the office to work,” Ma said. “Now you know that
there’s another option. You can work as efficiently as in the office. People
know that this is viable and that the environment has a lot of benefits.”
At Pitt, hybrid work seems here to stay. Human Resources said that of the
approximately 8,000 staff working at the University, 5,277 have flexible work
agreements as of January 2024. About 13 percent of Pitt staff work fully remote
and 52 percent work hybrid schedules.
Ma's research was posted in January, and since then the paper has been
downloaded more than 17,000 times from the Social Science Research Network
website and has been featured in news articles around the world — from the
Washington Post,
NPR,
Forbes and
Business Insider to the
BBC, the
Australian Financial Times and many more.
As a professor, Ma said he always hopes his research gets attention and has an
impact in making society better, “but I didn’t expect that it would get so much
attention all around the world,” he said. “That means this is something that
people all around the world care about.”"
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "Glassdoor has gone fully remote after
realizing that remote jobs posted on their site got 50 percent more applicants
and ones with better qualifications."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
