The Economist April 9th 2022 Business 59W
hite-collar workerstend to like
hybrid working. Research by Nich
olas Bloom of Stanford University sug
gests that, on average, employees reckon
the blend of inperson and remote work
is a perk equivalent to an 8% pay in
crease. The biggest attraction of days
spent working from home is the absence
of a commute. Other benefits include not
having to get ready for the office: the
proportion of people wearing a fresh set
of clothes drops by 20 percentage points
when they are not commuting.
Executives have been keener to get
people back into the office fulltime, so
that employees can bond with peers,
absorb the corporate culture and appreci
ate the awesome power of laundry. But
even sceptics have accepted that hybrid
working will be part of the postpandem
ic future: in his annual letter to share
holders this week, Jamie Dimon, the boss
of JPMorgan Chase, said he thought that
about 40% of the bank’s staff would be
hybrid. The job now is to make sure that
hybridisation works as well as it can for
both employees and employers. That
depends on one ingredient above all:
clarity. Things function best when every
one knows what is expected.
Start with the shape of the hybrid
week. One of the great theoretical attrac
tions of hybrid working to employees is
that they get to choose what days they
come in. But the point of inperson
working is to spend time collaborating
and bonding with their colleagues: that
is much more likely to happen if compa
nies are clear about who they want in the
office on which days of the week.
Clarity also maximises the benefits of
workfromhome days. If office time is
best spent in a whirlwind of collab
orative brainstorming and socialising,
home days are logically the time whensolo and focused work should get done.
That requires bosses to do what comes
unnaturally to them, by resisting the
temptation to interrupt at will.
It is easier to do that if expectations are
clear. Anne Raimondi of Asana, a work
management platform, says the firm
expects people to come in on Mondays,
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has a “no
meetings” day on Wednesday. If a manag
er wants to have a meeting that day, they
have to “recontract” with their team and
explain why it is needed.
By the same token, being explicit when
a reply is needed on an email saves every
one scurrying around in a desperate bid to
answer the boss first. Defining what kinds
of work can be done asynchronously and
what requires everyone to get together is a
recipe for fewer, better meetings. Encour
aging a set of donotdisturb protocols
makes it less likely that employees will be
bothered unnecessarily.
Clear protocols also make hybrid meet
ings go better. Harry’s, a shaving firm that
has published its guidelines for hybrid
working, expects each attendee to havetheir own screen and promises not to
keep discussing the matter at hand once
remote colleagues have left the meeting
(though commenting on who is wearing
the same clothes as they did yesterday is
presumably fine).
Some of this will be deeply alarming
to managers who worry about slippery
slopes. First you give people space to
focus at home, and soon enough you
cannot contact anyone because they
have changed their settings on Slack and
are bingewatching “Bridgerton”.
There are three answers to such wor
ries. First, expectations are firmly in the
gift of managers. Asana’s nomeetings
day does not extend to meetings with
customers, for example.
Second, burnout is as much of a risk
as slacking. New research from Microsoft
finds evidence for what it calls a “triple
peak day”. As well as the usual large
crests in activity in the early morning
and after lunch, around 30% of employ
ees at the tech giant also experience a
smaller, third bump in work in the late
evening. That may be a sign of people
getting work done when it suits them—
or of the workday extending relentlessly
into every waking hour. Setting expecta
tions, over things like how quickly noti
fications need to get a response, can help
determine which one it is.
Last, good performance is not defined
by employees’ locations at specific times
of the day but by what they achieve—
what Mr Bloom calls “managing outputs,
not inputs”. If bosses can articulate what
counts as productive activity, and evalu
ate it regularly, it matters less whether
employees are at headquarters or stink
ing out the spare bedroom. Managers
may have concerns about hybrid work
ing, but it is pretty clear what will make
it successful. Clear expectations are the secret to making hybrid work a successBartlebyThe value of clarity
Market sentiment was boosted by the
csrc’s decision to cut a clause in securities
rules that “onsite inspections will be do
minated by domestic regulators or depend
on the conclusions of inspections by do
mestic regulators.” The Chinese stocks
have recouped most of the losses sustained
after the sec’s warning. Still, investors re
main wary. The shares trade far below their
prices a year ago, and they have performed
worse than either Chinese tech firms listed
in Hong Kong or American tech stocks
overall (see chart on previous page).
One reason is growing concern over
geopolitical friction between China and
the West. This, reckons Deutsche Bank,
“has permanently impaired” valuations of
Chinese stocks in America. It is also un
clear how China’s newfound fondness for
informationsharing will work in practice.
The csrcproposes setting up a “crossbor
der regulatory cooperation mechanism”
to conduct the inspections. This may fall
short of American demands for indepen
dent reviews. The csrc also retains the
power to approve foreign inspections. In
vestors may distrust its assurances that it
would only rarely deny such approval because of the sensitivity of the material.
And doubts persist about how much
protection American oversight would ac
tually afford investors. Chinese regulators
with full access to accounts have failed to
spot many a fraud. Chinese executives sel
dom face punishment in their home coun
try for defrauding American shareholders,
says Soren Aandahl of Blue Orca Capital, a
Texan shortseller which has uncovered
mischief at some Chinese firms. Until that
changes, an incentive to fiddle withthe
numbers will remain. After all, booksdon’t
get uncooked merely by being opened.n