The WFH Experts In Hot Demand

Professors who’ve long studied remote work are now sought-after business advisers

- By Rebecca Penty and David Rocks

When Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom did his first study on working remotely in 2004, the field was an academic backwater. Less than 5% of all full work days took place at home, making the subject a low priority for business schools and corporate leaders. Then came Covid-19. “In March 2020,” Bloom says, “the thing just took off.”

As the omicron variant recedes, leaders everywhere are grappling with whether—or how much—to make working from home a feature of their organizations. Should they go fully remote and save on real estate but take a potential hit to productivity or culture? Or demand that workers return full time to encourage teamwork but risk losing talent to more flexible competitors? For many, the hybrid model is the most compelling, but it comes with its own vexing trade-offs.

The professors who study working from home are busy consulting with executives, collecting data, running research projects, writing books, and feeding the discoveries into their MBA courses. “My inbox is exploding daily,” says Tsedal Neeley, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the forthcoming Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. “Even more now because people are realizing remote work is not going away and they are concerned about doing it the right way.”