It is one of the most repeated claims in the post-pandemic workplace debate: remote workers are more productive. It gets stated confidently, usually without a citation, and has become one of those things repeated often enough that it is treated as settled fact.
The actual research is more complicated than that. Here is what the peer-reviewed literature says, what it doesn’t say, and what serious employers do to find out for themselves.
The Study That Started It All
The foundation of the “remote work increases productivity” claim is a single randomized controlled trial published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015 by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and colleagues. The study followed call center employees at Ctrip, a large Chinese travel agency, over nine months. Workers randomly assigned to work from home showed a 13% performance increase compared to office-based counterparts — roughly 9% from working more minutes per shift due to fewer breaks and sick days, and 4% from handling more calls per minute in a quieter home environment.
The methodology is sound. The finding is real. The problem is what happened next: that 13% figure traveled through a decade of HR blog posts, think pieces, and workplace advocacy until it became a universal statement about all workers in all jobs everywhere.
The subjects were phone bank employees. Their output was precisely countable: calls handled per hour, calls per minute, time logged. It is one of the most measurable, most independent, least collaborative job categories that exists. Bloom himself noted in a Hoover Institution interview that the productivity findings apply to tasks that are “relatively repetitive, in particular, easy to monitor and evaluate”.
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What The Research Has Found Since
The decade of research following the Ctrip study has produced a notably more nuanced picture.
Bloom returned to the question in a 2024 randomized controlled trial published in Nature — among the most rigorous peer-reviewed journals in existence — this time examining hybrid arrangements at Trip.com, a large Chinese tech firm, with 1,612 university-educated engineers, marketers and finance staff. The finding was carefully worded: hybrid work does not damage performance. Not that it improves it. That it doesn’t hurt it. Bloom also noted explicitly in that paper that previous causal research on fully remote work found productivity effects that were “often negative.”
A 2023 study published in the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics by Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth examined over 10,000 skilled professionals at an Asian IT services company using actual personnel and analytics data rather than surveys. The results were striking: total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including an 18% rise in after-hours work. Average output did not significantly change. Productivity — measured as output per hour — fell between 8% and 19%. Workers worked more, produced the same, and coordination costs increased substantially as meetings multiplied and uninterrupted work time shrank.
A 2022 analysis of 60,000 Microsoft employees published in Nature Human Behaviour found that fully remote work caused professional networks to become more siloed over time, with employees forming fewer connections outside their immediate teams. The researchers found that network insularity correlates with lower innovation output and slower career development.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics published an industry-level analysis in 2024 finding a positive relationship between remote work adoption and total factor productivity across 61 major industries between 2019 and 2022. That finding is frequently cited in support of remote work productivity claims — but it is an industry-level correlation that includes massive productivity gains concentrated in tech, finance and information services, sectors that drove much of the overall number. It does not measure individual worker output, and government services are not among the sectors showing the largest gains.
Survey-based research — which makes up the bulk of the “remote workers feel more productive” literature — carries a significant methodological limitation. Asking employees whether they think they are more productive at home is not a productivity measurement. It is a preference measurement. Harvard Business School found in survey research that 70% of small business owners reported a productivity dip from remote work in early 2020. By 2021 the majority reported a positive impact — but both figures reflect how owners felt about productivity, not measured output data.
The honest summary of the research: productivity outcomes depend heavily on job type, whether arrangements are hybrid or fully remote, how carefully output has been defined in advance, and whether measurement is objective or self-reported. Studies showing gains are concentrated in measurable-output, independent-task roles. Studies showing losses or neutral results are concentrated in knowledge work, coordination-intensive roles, and research using objective output data.
What Serious Employers Do About It
The debate about whether remote work is more or less productive is, in practice, resolvable — but only if an employer builds the framework to measure it before remote work begins.
Industry standard practice for organizations that have thought carefully about remote work accountability includes several components. Output-based key performance indicators defined per role before telework begins, so there is a measurable baseline. Time tracking systems that log active computer use during work hours. VPN requirements so that work activity routes through monitored organizational systems. Explicit policies addressing secondary employment during work hours. Regular documented performance reviews measuring deliverables rather than presence.
A 2025 NBER study examining digital monitoring found that transparent monitoring — disclosed upfront and focused on outcomes — maintained or improved productivity. Workers who knew they were being monitored performed better. Those who weren’t told their activity was being tracked showed a 17% drop in output.
The federal Office of Personnel Management updated its guidance in 2025 to require that where remote work is permitted, agencies must closely monitor productivity. The Government Accountability Office, reviewing the Department of Defense’s telework programs, found that despite having between 65% and 68% of civilian positions eligible for telework, the DOD lacked formal processes to ensure eligibility data was accurate and had not formally evaluated the effects of telework against agency goals.
What Vermont Has On The Books
Vermont’s formal framework governing state employee telework is Policy Number 11.9, issued by the Department of Human Resources on February 3, 2012. It is the only published telework policy governing Vermont state employees.
The policy’s accountability section contains one relevant sentence: employees shall comply with existing job requirements including performance expectations and standards as apply at their official duty station.
There is no monitoring software requirement in the policy. No output metrics defined by role. No technology verification standard. No secondary employment prohibition. No framework for establishing productivity baselines before remote work begins or measuring against them after.
The entire accountability mechanism the 2012 policy provides for a remote Vermont state employee is a supervisor’s assumption that the employee is working.
Whether remote workers are more productive, less productive, or equivalent to their in-office counterparts is, in the end, an empirical question — one that requires defined output standards, consistent measurement, and honest data collection to answer. The research suggests the answer varies significantly by job type and implementation.
Vermont has 3,000 state employees who worked remotely for nearly six years under a policy framework that was not designed to answer that question. No productivity data measuring that period has been made public by the Scott administration, the legislature, or the union.
Dave Soulia | FYIVT
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