Hybrid work cut quits by a third, with no loss of performance, in a 1,612-person trial
What the randomised Trip.com trial (Nature, June 2024) measured, why the 13% remote-productivity figure was about call centres, and what a manager should do, September 2026.
Two home days a week cut resignations by a third among 1,612 graduate employees and changed neither their performance reviews nor their promotions over the next two years.1 That is the result of a randomised trial published in Nature in June 2024, and it is a better guide to managing a remote team than the survey figures the 2023 original of this piece relied on.
01The 13% figure was about call centres
The original’s headline number, that remote workers are 13% more productive, comes from a 2013 experiment at the Chinese travel firm Ctrip. The staff were call-centre agents who volunteered to work from home; about 9 points of the 13 came from working more minutes per shift and 4 from more calls per minute. The same paper found something the original left out: home workers’ promotion rate, conditional on performance, fell.2 Counting calls is easy. Most remote teams in Indian IT, finance or marketing do work that cannot be counted that way.
02What the 2024 trial measured instead
From August 2021 to January 2022, Trip.com, as Ctrip is now called, randomised 1,612 engineers, marketers and finance staff by birthday into two groups: in the office five days, or at home on Wednesdays and Fridays. Quits over the six months fell from 7.20% to 4.80%. The drop was largest for women and for staff with long commutes, the people a team is most likely to lose.1
Two fixed home days a week cut quits by a third overall and by more than half for women
Share of employees who quit during the trial, %, Trip.com, August 2021 to January 2022
- Office five days
- Home Wednesday and Friday
Table view
| Office five days | Home Wednesday and Friday | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All staff | 7.2 | 4.8 | -2.4 pts |
| Non-managers | 8.59 | 5.33 | -3.3 pts |
| Women | 9.19 | 4.18 | -5 pts |
| Long commute | 6 | 2.89 | -3.1 pts |
Source: Bloom, Han and Liang, Nature 630, 920–925 · as of 12 June 2024 · Long-commute result P = 0.062; the other three are significant at 5%
03What a manager does with that
The software list is short: one suite for mail, documents, chat and meetings, and one place where tasks and owners are written down. Most teams already pay for the first.
In India, the suite is the cost line. Microsoft 365 Business Basic with Teams lists at US$7 a user a month and Business Standard at US$14 from 1 July 2026; bought through an Indian reseller it is invoiced in INR at the day’s rate plus 18% GST.3 If you add monitoring software to a home-working team, remember that employee data is personal data under the DPDP Act, 2023; section 7(i) lets an employer process it for employment purposes without consent, but the Rules notified on 13 November 2025 bring the security-safeguard and breach-notice duties into force on 13 May 2027.4 5 A laptop at home is still in scope of CERT-In’s Directions of 28 April 2022 and their six-hour incident reporting.6
Sources
- Bloom, Han and Liang, Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance, Nature 630, 920–925 — 12 June 2024
- Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying, Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment, NBER Working Paper 18871 — March 2013 Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015.
- Microsoft, 2026 Microsoft 365 packaging and pricing updates (Business Basic US$6 to US$7, Business Standard US$12.50 to US$14, effective 1 July 2026) — 16 February 2026 Announced 4 December 2025.
- MeitY, Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (section 7(i), employment purposes) — 11 August 2023
- Legismith Partners, DPDP Rules 2025 commencement timeline — Rules notified 13 November 2025
- CERT-In, Directions under section 70B(6) of the IT Act, 2000 (six-hour reporting) — 28 April 2022
Related on TechBag: the Microsoft 365 page compares the plans a remote team runs on; the remote access guide covers supporting laptops that never come to the office.
Disclosure. TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view.
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