Pay attention, Congress: A better model for remote work is here

On a weekday morning in downtown Washington, federal buildings and corporate offices still feel half-full, even as return-to-office emails pile up. At the same time, across the Atlantic, the House of Lords has treated remote work not as a culture-war skirmish but as a subject for a full inquiry on home-based working, backed by extensive evidence and formal hearings.

Its Home-based Working Committee spent 10 months asking two simple questions with big consequences: First, is working from home working? And second, if so, how should governments and employers respond?

The answer, detailed by researcher Jane Parry in a synthesis of five years of evidence on hybrid work, is clear enough for policymakers. Hybrid work shows only modest average effects on productivity, but it delivers meaningful gains in labor supply, employment rates, recruitment, retention and office efficiency when it is managed deliberately.

The committee heard evidence that hybrid arrangements can increase labor supply by 1 to 2 percent and cut turnover costs by an estimated £7 billion to £10 billion a year in the United Kingdom (between $9 billion and $13 billion U.S.), especially when employers lean into structured “anchor days” and redesign their offices around collaboration.  

Evidence submitted to the committee estimated that hybrid work can expand the available workforce, primarily by enabling people who cannot handle full-time commuting to participate. That group includes disabled workers, parents of young children and people in rural or high-cost regions who are effectively locked out of traditional office jobs.  

A National Bureau of Economic Research study finds that a 1 percentage point increase in remote work raises full-time employment among people with a physical disability by about 1 percent. The authors estimate that between 68 and 85 percent of the post-pandemic........

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