Cancel the commute: We need new ways to measure productivity at work

Opinion>Opinions - Technology The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Cancel the commute: We need new ways to measure productivity at work Comments: by Gleb Tsipursky, opinion contributor - 08/04/26 9:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Gleb Tsipursky, opinion contributor - 08/04/26 9:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied

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The return-to-office movement has a measurement problem. Executives keep treating the office commute as proof of work, just as the productivity boom has drawn attention to a more uncomfortable possibility: according to Stanford University’s Nick Bloom, the productivity gains they want may have come partly from the flexibility they are now trying to claw back.

The timing matters. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said better productivity started four or five years ago, and Powell rejected generative AI as the main explanation for recent gains. The boom began before most organizations moved artificial intelligence beyond scattered experiments. That does not make AI irrelevant, of course, but it does make the current executive habit of crediting software while distrusting work design look premature.

The evidence on remote work gives leaders less room for slogans. The May 2026 WFH Research update found that about 25 percent of paid U.S. workdays were worked from home in April 2026. Among full-time wage and salary employees over the previous year, the same update reported 12 percent were fully remote, 26 percent were hybrid, and 62 percent were fully onsite. This matters, because work from home is now a durable operating model, not an emergency improvisation.

The strongest case for hybrid work comes from experiments, not employee wish-casting. In a randomized trial of 1,612 employees at Trip.com, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom and co-authors found that a two-days-at-home schedule reduced quit rates by one-third without damaging performance. In an earlier field experiment by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) at sister platform Ctrip, Bloom and co-authors found a 13 percent performance increase among call-center employees assigned to work from home.

The office still matters, without a doubt. The mistake lies in confusing “the office matters” with “the office must dominate.”

Corporate leaders often defend in-person work by citing collaboration, faster decisions, training and culture. That argument has force. But a leader can fill an office with people and still make them spend the day on email, video calls and status updates. A company that brings everyone back for five days and then leaves collaboration to chance has restored commuting, not culture.

The office mandate wave shows how much corporate decision-making still runs on executive intuition. Amazon adopted a five-day office mandate for many employees starting in 2025. Home Depot told corporate employees to return five days a week in 2026. Instagram ordered most U.S. staff with assigned desks into a five-day office return beginning in February, and Stellantis told U.S. employees to transition to a fully onsite schedule this year. These policies may fit some cultures and business constraints. But executives should admit they are making a bet, not simply following settled science.

The labor-market effects make the bet riskier. Employees often value flexible work because it returns time, reduces commute friction, and lets people handle life logistics with less daily stress. In Bloom’s Trip.com trial, the reduction in quits was especially visible among women, non-managers and long commuters. That should get the attention of every leader facing skill shortages, retention problems or rising compensation demands. A hard office mandate can quietly convert a productivity question into a talent leakage problem.

AI complicates the story, but it does not erase it.

The latest Gallup-linked reporting found half of American workers now use AI at work, while an NBER paper reported that late-2024 respondents described time savings equal to 1.4 percent of work hours. Those are meaningful signals, suggesting AI will increasingly amplify productivity effects going forward. Moreover, a worker using AI for drafting, research, analysis, coding or customer support often needs stretches of protected focus. Remote days can provide that focus better than an open-plan office packed with interruptions. Thus, AI may be well-aligned with remote work productivity.

The smarter question for CEOs is no longer whether work from home works — it is where work happens best. Concentrated individual work often fits home. Mentorship, onboarding, conflict resolution, innovation workshops and relationship-building often fit the office. Routine status updates often fit neither. A company that maps tasks to location will outperform a company that maps status to attendance.

This requires discipline. Teams should set shared anchor days, protect deep-work blocks, measure outcomes, train managers to lead distributed teams, and redesign offices around collaboration rather than desk surveillance. They should also track churn, performance, promotion fairness, manager quality, and customer results before and after policy changes. The companies that win the next phase will treat workplace flexibility as a management system, not a perk.

The backlash against flexibility feels powerful because CEOs control the memo. And not every job can move home, nor does every worker want to. But a blanket return policy that satisfies managerial anxiety can easily weaken the conditions that helped employees produce more in the first place.

That lesson applies even more as AI adoption at work accelerates. AI will reward organizations that redesign work around attention, experimentation, judgment and trust. The productivity boom may have started before AI, but its next chapter will belong to leaders who combine the tool revolution with the work-design revolution. For many knowledge workers, that means fewer symbolic office days, better intentional collaboration, and a hybrid model built around results instead of rituals.

Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and wrote “The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results” and “ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators.”