In the debate over the future of work, the argument for hybrid home-office work arrangements just received another case exhibit.

After a Shanghai-based travel booking website tested what would happen when it allowed a sliver of employees to work from home on two days, attrition rates dropped and job satisfaction climbed.

Meanwhile, job performance did not suffer and self-assessed worker productivity edged up — leading management at Trip.com to extend the hybrid work approach to all its staffers after the six-month experiment ended earlier this year.

In a randomized trial among 1,612 software engineers, marketing and finance professionals, the data showed that attrition — or churn — rates were 35% lower for those allowed to work from home versus a control group.

The experiment showed a shift in time management for the hybrid workers, who worked around 80 minutes less on home days, but increased their overall weekly workload by about 30 minutes, sometimes because they worked on weekends. When these employees were in the office for face-to-face work, they still tended to use messaging and group video calls.

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