Surely they are going to cancel.

I remember that thought as we entered the week of March 9, 2020. Our daughter was scheduled to swim in the Kentucky state championship on the coming Friday as the amorphous specter of Covid-19 began to reveal its true form.

Tuesday came and went; no word.

Thousands crammed into a hot, humid natatorium for hours on end? What could be worse?

Today’s Monday-morning quarterbacks forget that nothing was clear in those early days. There was only uncertainty, anxious waiting, and outright fear. Yet despite the lack of data, it seemed fairly obvious that a crowded indoor natatorium was an ideal way to spread a virus.

Redefining March Madness

On Wednesday that week, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. The first round match-ups in the NCAA Men’s Big Ten Tournament went on as planned, but the murmurs were growing louder.

Later that day, the Big Ten announced that remaining games would be played without fans. The next morning they canceled the tournament altogether. Dominos began falling rapidly. The state meet was called off hours later.

Life changed dramatically for all of us after that week. Along with many other adaptations, it was the week we began learning how to work and learn from home.

Reemergence

Now, on the other side of the pandemic, we are still working to stand all those dominos back up. As we do so, we are faced with the opportunity–and the challenge–of deciding where to put them, in which order, and whether some should be left where they lay.

As for workplace dominoes, options abound. Some have returned to pre-pandemic in-office schedules. Others have not returned at all, adopting full work-from-home models for some or all employees. Many have implemented a hybrid model, and many others are still figuring it out.

Opinions and speculation regarding how to do this are far more abundant than facts and data, but this week saw an interesting dose of the latter published in the the journal Nature. It came in the form of a study led by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford titled Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance.

Reader Beware

Not all scientific research is created equal. As more and more study results metastasize into misleading click-bait headlines upon repeated exposure to attention-optimizing algorithms, we would all do well to be a little more scrupulous about the quality of information we consume.

However, this particular study meets the criteria for a healthy information diet. It was large, and it was reasonably long. It was a randomized controlled trial, and it was published in a highly-regarded, peer-reviewed journal.

It is tempting to address all the very important nuances of this study, and of scientific studies in general. The challenge in doing so is that it requires essentially recapitulating the entire study and/or writing a textbook. I don't want to write that, and I'm quite sure you don't want to read it. Thus, read on with one global caveat:

To really understand a scientific study, you must get into the details, and you must understand what the terms mean.

Warning delivered, let's move on to the results.

What did the study find?

Productivity was unaffected.

Hybrid work did not increase productivity, but–importantly–it did not have a negative impact on productivity either. It was neutral.

Hybrid work reduces attrition.

Control group attrition was 7.2 percent over the study duration. Attrition in the hybrid work group was 4.8 percent, a reduction of 33 percent over the six month study period.

Employees like it.

Consistent with the reduced quit-rates, workers reported increased job satisfaction.

Simple Solutions to Complex Problems

A large, well-designed randomized controlled trial showed that employees love hybrid work, it reduces turnover, and does not hurt productivity. Case closed: We should all implement hybrid work policies wherever possible.

If only leadership were that simple…

The results of this study are interesting and useful, but social scientists themselves will be the first to tell you that social science is messy because their subject matter–humans–is inherently messy, and very, very complex.

Reality Check

Stepping back from the specifics of hybrid work, there are bigger, more broadly applicable ideas to glean from this example.

Purely data-driven decision making is a nonexistent ideal.

Purely data-driven decision-making on complex issues is typically not practical, or even possible. Rather, we should strive to make decisions that are data-informed.

This study does not definitively demonstrate that hybrid work is the best option for everyone. That study will never be done. It is not possible, precisely because the issue is so complex.

It does, however, provide a reasonable basis to challenge objections that hybrid work ruins productivity, and it does support what most of us already knew intuitively: many people really like having a hybrid work option.

Context and details matter.

The subject company in this study was Trip.com, a travel website based in Shanghai. The test subjects were highly-educated Chinese computer scientists and accountants, mostly in their thirties, sixty-five percent of whom were male. That matters. Even within the study there were striking differences, including the fact that hybrid work reduced attrition quite a bit more for women than men.

Another important detail: Did hybrid work make a bigger difference for those with longer commutes? Yes, but not much.

We can’t stop there though. When you dig deeper you find that the authors compared commutes of more than ninety minutes to those less than ninety minutes, in other words, miserable commutes versus really miserable commutes! If the comparison was two-hour commutes through terrible traffic versus those living within walking distance, the result might have been quite different.

Every company, every employee, and every situation is different. That is a fundamental reality of leadership. Context and details matter.

How is as important as what.

In almost all communications, whether a request to your spouse to help clean up the kitchen, or a communication to your employees about remote work policies, how you say it matters at least as much as what you are saying.

People can handle really difficult news and even decisions they strongly disagree with when they are delivered clearly and compassionately, and they feel their voices are heard. Tone, timing, choice of words, nonverbals, and medium (phone, email, in person, etc.) make or break a message, as do authenticity and transparency. All of this must happen inside a trusting relationship, which must be built and maintained over time.

If you are perceived as a heartless jerk, you will be met with resistance even if you are announcing bonuses. But if you get the “how” consistently right, you will have much more freedom on the “what.”

You can’t please everyone.

A difficult reality for leaders is that, in any organization large enough, there will be some number of people upset with you no matter what you do. Some people are perpetually dissatisfied and mad at the world, often reasons that are legitimate but unrelated to their current situation. Should their feedback be dismissed out of hand? No. But it should be taken with a grain of salt, understanding that with some people, you just can’t get it right, and it’s (mostly) not about you.

In leadership, as in social science, there are no simple answers, because after all, what is leadership but a real time, open-ended social science experiment?!

Until next time,
Greg