Maybe you should try reading the article with an open mind rather than manufacturing reasons to ignore it.

I had an open mind, but critical thinking occasionally requires criticism. Maybe you should read an article’s sources rather than accept claims from a business mag at face value.

But if you want to stop squabbling and talk evidence, let’s examine each specific claim on the basis of the evidence supporting it.

The Forbes article makes several specific claims and references:

1. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that remote working might not be as productive as once thought. Workers who were randomly assigned to work from home full time were 18% less productive than in-office employees, either taking longer to complete tasks or getting less done.

   • Now does a study that takes a fully in office company, and randomly assigns some employees to work from home, say that a fully remote company is less productive than a in-office company? No. It says that when you have random employees work from home in an environment not suited for it it doesn’t go well.

2. In another study, Stanford scientists at the Institute for Economic Policy Research found that remote work productivity depends on the mode of remote work. Fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work.

• Now let’s look at how the Stanford scientists arrived at that. From page 18 of the linked working paper:

Fully Remote Work. Several studies find that fully remote work yields lower productivity than on-site work. Emanuel and Harrington (2023) analyze data from a Fortune 500 firm that, before the pandemic, operated call centers with both remote and on-site employees in the same jobs. In response to the pandemic, the firm shifted all employees in these jobs to fully remote work. Productivity among formerly onsite employees fell 4 percent relative to that of already-remote employees. Emanuel and Harrington also find evidence that the closure of phys-ical call centers reduced call quality, especially among less experienced employees. These findings are noteworthy, in part, because they involve a firm with prior experience in managing fully remote call-center workers. Presumably then, the firm had already adapted its systems and practices to manage fully remote workers.

Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth (2023) study productivity outcomes for skilled professionals at a large Indian technology services company. In March 2020, the company abruptly shifted all employees to fully remote work in response to the pandemic. Immediately after the shift, average worktime rose by 1.5 hours per day and output fell slightly according to their primary performance measure. They esti-mate that the shift to remote work lowered average labor productivity (output per hour worked) by 8 to 19 percent. They also provide evidence that greater communication and coordination costs drove much of the measured productivity drop. In particular, time spent on meetings and coordination activities rose, crowding out time devoted to a concentrated focus on work tasks.

• Do you think the experience of an Indian Call Center suddenly going remote because of the pandemic, and an Indian IT company suddenly going remote because of the pandemic is somehow indicative and generalizable to every company operating in normal times?

• Now go and read trough the section on hybrid work and note that it says upfront that studies have found an increase in productivity or no gains in productivity. Then read through and notice how not a single study compares hybrid or in office companies to fully remote companies. All of them deal with studying the jarring transition of an in office company transitioning to partially remote, and none of the studies anywhere listed come close to broad economy wide or even market wide analyses of real world productivity in the long run.

So you want to talk evidence, that is the entirety of the evidence behind your claims that hybrid work is on a broad basis more productive, and it’s basically a bunch of pandemic studies on Indian and Bangladeshi call centers. It certainly does not support the Forbes articles’ general claim that Fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work., that is a gross mischaracterization at best, if not an outright lie, and shows you the journalistic standards of somewhere like Forbes.