Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan speaks with Boston Globe reporter Katie Johnson about the impact of return-to-office mandates on employers and employees. “If Friday and Monday are strong preferences [to work remotely], you’re really risking alienating more people,” says Kochan. “You can expect they’re going to lose some of their talent to employers that have more favorable hybrid arrangements.”
In a new working paper, researchers at MIT and UCLA examined a group of newly hired data entry workers in India and found that “workers randomly assigned to work from home full-time are 18% less productive than those in the office,” reports Jo Constantz for Bloomberg. As Constantz notes, “The new research underscores the challenges inherent in productivity research. Since the workers in the trial were newly hired, their outcomes may differ from employees who switch to fully remote only after first spending significant time on-site.”
Prof. Manish Raghavan speaks with The Washington Post reporter Danielle Abril about the risk of AI bias in employers’ recruitment behavior. “For example, AI could appear to be biased in matching mostly Harvard graduates to some jobs when those graduates may just have a higher likelihood to match certain requirements,” explains Abril. “Humans already struggle with implicit biases, often favoring people like themselves, and that could get replicated through AI.”
Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan writes for The Hill about the need for a new social contract that reflects the expectations of today’s workforce, including sizable wage increases due to inflation and a voice in the use of AI and generative technology. “Either labor and management negotiate a new social contract that is more responsive to what workers want and need today, or we will experience intensified conflicts that further divide our country,” writes Kochan.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Erin Kelly shares her research on the impact of remote work. “The challenge is setting boundaries and feeling it’s acceptable to set them, and that requires deliberate company policies,” writes Kelly.
A study co-authored by Senior Lecturer Donald Sull found that the top factor in employee retention is corporate environment, reports Ellen Rosen for The New York Times. Sull says that a toxic work culture was “10 times more predictive of having a higher-than-industry-average attrition rate than compensation.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have found that “managers educated at business schools were more likely to favor shareholders over employees,” writes University of London Prof. André Spicer for the Financial Times. The researchers found that “employees working for companies run by a business school-educated manager earned, on average, 6 percent less in the US and 3 percent less in Denmark,” writes Spicer.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Freakonomics Radio host Stephen Dubner about his research exploring how having a boss who attended business school can impact a business. “The main findings are actually very simple,” says Acemoglu. “As soon as you have a business school manager, you see a relative decline in wages and labor share.”
Researchers from the Sloan School of Management have found that toxic work culture is the driving force behind many employees leaving their jobs, reports James Reid for Forbes. “A strong, healthy culture is the execution engine of an organization, which makes it the most valuable asset any organization can possess,” writes Reid.
New York Times reporter Gina Bellafante spotlights a report from the Sloan School of Management which found that toxic work culture leads to a higher attrition rate than unsatisfactory pay. “Attrition rates in the financial sector hovered around 9 and 10 percent, several points higher than those for the health care and telecommunications industries and nearly twice as high as the figure for the airlines,” writes Bellafante.
Forbes reporter Bryan Robinson spotlights a report by researchers from the Sloan School of Management, which found people are quitting their jobs because of toxic workplace culture, not low pay. “The report says toxic workplace culture is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to an employee quitting,” writes Robinson.
Fortune reporter Tristan Bove spotlights a study led by economists from MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Mexico’s ITAM on how workers are spending their time while working from home. “Pandemic habits give Americans around 70 minutes of extra free time a day,” writes Bove. “The lion’s share of this, around 60 minutes, comes from getting rid of commuting, but workers have also spent around nine minutes less on average doing daily activities such as grooming or picking out fresh clothes.”
Economists from MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Mexico’s ITAM polled U.S. workers to see how the pandemic impacted American’s work from home setup, reports Nate DiCamillo for Quartz. “Overall, remote workers report that they’ve become more efficient at working from home than in office,” writes DiCamillo.
Writing for Fast Company, Prof. Erin Kelly emphasizes the need for employers to implement management practices that support the health and wellness of employees. “Forward-thinking business leaders can adopt sound strategies to reduce the negative impact common management practices have on employee health and well-being,” writes Kelly.
Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, speaks with Steven Zeitchik at The Washington Post about our changing understanding of the traditional office setting. “There are many jobs where physical presence is required, of course,” says Malone. “But where it isn’t, I just can’t see any reason we’ll be returning to a traditional office.”