What We Learned From the Work-From-Home Experiment

When the pandemic shut offices around the globe, white-collar workers everywhere got a crash course on the pitfalls and benefits of working from home. The debate over whether employees perform as well at the kitchen table as they do in the workplace has raged ever since technology first made such a shift possible. The monthslong lockdowns served as an illuminating, if unplanned, experiment — one that seems certain to make toiling from home a bigger part of life for most office workers and even the daily norm for many.

The share of Americans working from home doubled in a matter of weeks to 62% in April, according to a Gallup poll. With schools shut, parents struggled to combine work with remote learning. Workers fired up videoconferencing and collaboration tools such as Slack. The novelty quickly wore off for some as longer workdays became the norm (three hours extra in the U.S., according to one report). But the flexibility appealed to many.