I dig through the paper and the study literally looked at two sectors and job types. So let’s just extrapolate that too all workers right 🙄
“Remote working appears to lower average productivity by around 10% to 20%. Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) use data from a Fortune 500 firm which had both in-person and remote call centers pre-pandemic. The firm shifted all workers to fully remote in April 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the always remote call-centers as the control group they find an 8% reduction in call volumes among employees who shifted from fully in-person to fully remote work. Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth (2022) examine IT professionals in a large Indian technology company who shifted to fully remote work at the onset of the pandemic. Measured performance among these workers remained constant while remote but they worked longer hours, implying a drop in employee productivity of 8% to 19%. Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde (2023) run a randomized control trial of data-entry workers in India, randomizing between working fully in the office and fully at home. They find home-workers are 18% less productive.”