--- title: "Hybrid work cut quits by a third, with no loss of performance, in a 1,612-person trial" summary: "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." url: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/effectively-manage-remote-teams-optimal-results format: Note desk: "SaaS & business software" published: 2025-04-08 facts_checked: 2026-09-30 author: TechBag (The TechBag Journal) tags: ["remote work","hybrid work","attrition","management","Microsoft 365","DPDP","employee monitoring"] cover: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/covers/effectively-manage-remote-teams-optimal-results.png --- # 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.* Note · SaaS & business software · By TechBag · Published 2025-04-08 · Facts checked 2026-09-30 · Canonical: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/effectively-manage-remote-teams-optimal-results 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. ## The 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. ## What 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] **Figure: 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 | 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% ReportedReported Performance grades did not differ over two years of reviews, promotions did not differ for any major subgroup, and engineers wrote no fewer lines of code. The 395 managers in the trial moved from expecting hybrid work to cost 2.6% of productivity to expecting a 1.0% gain.[1] ## What a manager does with that Our view Our view, from the two studies together. Fix the home days for the whole team, as Trip.com did, so the office days are shared days rather than empty desks. Review on written goals and delivered work, because the 2013 promotion gap is what happens when a manager rewards whoever is in the room. And count your own resignations by commute and by gender before and after a change: retention is where the trial found its effect, so it is where yours will show. 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] How we did this Figures as of 30 September 2026 The chart reproduces the attrition means reported in the Nature paper, by subgroup, for the six-month trial; the long-commute subgroup covers the 1,259 employees who answered the commuting question. The 2013 figures are from the NBER working paper’s abstract. Prices are Microsoft’s USD commercial list, before tax and discount. The 2023 original’s survey figures (Global Workplace Analytics, Owl Labs, FlexJobs, Buffer) were dropped because they could not be refreshed to dated primary sources. Both trials were run in China; no comparable randomised trial of Indian knowledge workers was found. Spotted an error? Write to us; corrections are published at the foot of the piece. Sources 1. [Bloom, Han and Liang, Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance, Nature 630, 920–925](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2) — 12 June 2024 2. [Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying, Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment, NBER Working Paper 18871](https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871) — March 2013 Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015. 3. [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)](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/2026-M365-Packaging-Pricing-Updates) — 16 February 2026 Announced 4 December 2025. 4. [MeitY, Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (section 7(i), employment purposes)](https://www.meity.gov.in/data-protection-framework) — 11 August 2023 5. [Legismith Partners, DPDP Rules 2025 commencement timeline](https://legismith.com/dpdp-rules-2025-timeline/) — Rules notified 13 November 2025 6. [CERT-In, Directions under section 70B(6) of the IT Act, 2000 (six-hour reporting)](https://www.cert-in.org.in/PDF/CERT-In_Directions_70B_28.04.2022.pdf) — 28 April 2022 Related on TechBag: the [Microsoft 365 page](https://www.thetechbag.com/microsoft/microsoft-365) compares the plans a remote team runs on; the [remote access guide](https://www.thetechbag.com/browse/endpoint-management/remote-access) 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. Go deeper on TechBag - [Microsoft 365](https://www.thetechbag.com/microsoft/microsoft-365) — the plans a remote team runs mail, chat and meetings on - [Remote access & support guide](https://www.thetechbag.com/browse/endpoint-management/remote-access) — supporting laptops that never come to the office