Long before the pandemic, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom was already studying the most effective stay-at-home policies.
His parents worked remotely for the UK government when he was young, leading to a long-standing interest in the subject. And in the year Thanks to a handful of studies he did in the early 2000s, Blue has been an expert on the subject for decades when workers around the world switched to Zoom and Slack in March 2020.
Bloom told CNBC’s Make It, “I was going to be so sarcastic and say, ‘I have this crystal ball.'” “I was lucky, to be honest,” he says of his chosen research specialty.
But his “lucky” research focus also makes for some unique insights. Since the outbreak began, Bloom said he has spoken with 10 to 20 managers each week about their businesses and work-from-home policies.
So, armed with decades worth of research and thousands of pandemic-era interviews, what’s one prediction Bloom says would be “terrifying” about 2022 if it turns out to be wrong?
Earlier in the year, Bloom predicted that by the end of 2022, the typical organization would have “everyone working three days a week in the office, typically Tuesday through Thursday, and from home Monday and Friday.”
Bloom noted that a year later and further research showed that this prediction was easy to predict by the end of 2021.
“In a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel like a forecast. I feel like I’m talking to a lot of companies and gathering information,” Bloom says. “Given the amount of data I have, if I’m wrong, it’s going to be terrible.”
There is one pandemic-era forecast that Bloom thinks missed the mark.
In the year In 2020, Bloom published a report on the state of working from home. In it, he advocated for workers’ choice regarding which days of the week they work in the office.
Now, he’s changed his tune a bit.
“If you survey people, the main reason they come in is to see their colleagues,” he says. “They don’t go in for bags or a ping-pong table or anything.”
With that in mind, Bloom now advocates for workers who work in the office on the same days.
“Studies show that when employees come into the office to work together on the same day, for example, Tuesday through Thursday, and at home on Monday and Friday to focus on deep work, productivity increases by 3% to 5%,” Blue wrote. In a recent research brief.
Overall, though, Bloom sees the 2020 report as “mostly accurate,” noting that it’s “a very difficult thing to predict” given the general sentiment at the time, which is more “a” than working from home. It’s going to flash in the pan.”
Given the accuracy of his predictions thus far, you can only wonder what Blue has in mind for the coming years.
Although many companies are flocking to call their employees to the office, he thinks that working from home will only continue to grow. “In the long term, if you look five, 10 years from now, we’ll be moving from home to work more than we are now,” he says.
In particular, Blow’s conversations with Microsoft, Google, startups, and venture capital firms about their investments in research and developing new ventures from the Home Technology track are big trends.
Bloom noted that the growth of working from home has historically been driven by new technology, and since the pandemic, “the pace of technological progress” has only served to increase the longevity of remote work.
“If you can come up with new software, a gadget, a hologram … anything that improves working from home, now you have a big market and you can make a lot of money,” he says.
“There’s a popular saying that people underestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term,” Bloom added. “I think that mistake is going to be repeated five times, because the right technology change for remote work has taken place.”
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