Like any good economist, Nicholas Bloom envisions the world in charts and graphs. Asked to describe the post-pandemic future of working from home, he says it will look like a Nike swoosh: After a recent slight decline as employers called workers back to the workplace, the line is turning upward, and Bloom predicts it will keep rising as the advantages of WFH become more apparent.
Bloom, a British-born economics professor at Stanford University, has been studying work from home for more than a decade. It’s only one of his research interests—others include the impact of uncertainty on the economy, the measurement of management practices, and innovation—but when the pandemic hit, WFH became a riveting topic for millions of employees and companies. He and colleagues at other universities quickly launched the widely-cited monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, which polls more than 120,000 employees and employers.
