A massive Stanford WFH study reveals where the policy is popular—and why: Q&A

When Nicholas Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University in California, started studying working from home in 2004, “it was hard to get anyone engaged,” he says. Even in 2018, “no one had any interest whatsoever.” In 2025, that’s hard to fathom. Between the pandemic and technological advancements, WFH has become a norm among white collar workers. Not only has it normalized; it’s also destigmatized. The act that used to generate memes of Homer Simpson on the couch, prodding a distant computer with a stick has gained “positive connotations,” says Bloom. Working from home is seen as a privilege.

It’s also here to stay. For their latest study, “Working from Home in 2025,” Bloom and his collaborators analyzed responses from 16,000 college graduates across 40 countries and discovered that WFH levels appear to have stabilized as of 2025, but its embrace hasn’t been universal. WFH rates vary by location: highest in English speaking regions—the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand—the rate dips a little across continental Europe, then dips a lot across Africa and Central and South Americas. WFH is least prevalent in Asia.

To be clear, when Bloom says WFH, he’s mostly talking about those on hybrid work schedules. “Sixty percent of people work fully in-person, 30% are hybrid, and 10% are fully remote,” he says of those countries where the policy has stuck. Hybrid typically means Tuesday through Thursdays in the office—a schedule Blooms values at “about 8% more pay…because it saves two to three hours a week of commuting [and] enables people to live further away” from their offices, often to where real estate is cheaper. Companies also benefit from hybrid policies, Bloom’s study found, since fewer employees tend to quit. With all these advantages, you’d think bosses would have embraced WFH worldwide.

“Why on earth does, say, Japan have a third the work from home rates of the U.S.?” Bloom says. After looking at factors including development (Japan is about as developed as the U.S.), population density, industrial structure, and connectivity (no big differences there), it left Bloom and fellow researchers with one notable variable. “The big factor is cultural,” he says, “and it’s around individualism.”

In conversation with Fast Company, which has been edited for length and clarity, Bloom elaborated on how individualism drives working from home, how much the pandemic really increased at-home work rates, and why people still tend to think we’re returning to the office even though the data says otherwise.

Fast Company: What inspired you to look globally for your latest study?

Nicholas Bloom: If you look at the data, there was clearly a return to office movement from summer 2020 onwards after the lockdown in the U.S. But from Spring 2023 onwards, the return to office seems to slow down. People seem surprised by that. They’re like, “Isn’t the media full of stories of Zoom canceling [WFH], Amazon canceling [WFH]?” Yes, there are a bunch of high-profile firms canceling or reducing work from home. Turns out there are just as many on the other side, because their leases expire. If you’re Goliath National Bank and your lease expires, it’s a perfect opportunity to reduce days in the office and save a chunk of money. What we’ve seen over the last couple of years in the U.S. is like a war, and it’s been fought to a standstill.

That sparked the big question for us: What on earth does this look like globally? We last collected global data in 2023, so I really didn’t know. It turns out, globally, work from home has also stalled out. There has been no change since 2023. Globally, we’re in a new norm. Folks saying “when we return to the office” at this point are dreaming. This is the future.

One of your findings I found particularly interesting was that WFH rates are higher in individualistic societies than in collectivist ones. Can you unpack that?

In individualistic societies, managers typically aren’t micromanaging their employees. The U.S. setup is: A manager tells an employee what to do and gives them strong incentives, like performance evaluations and bonuses. In Japan, there’s much more micromanaging, because there’s much less hiring, firing, and bonuses. Managers want to see employees there. In Japan, you can’t leave the office until the boss has left. This long-hours culture exists for everyone. When the boss leaves, their junior leaves, then their junior leaves, etcetera. That is very problematic for work from home.

If you talk to folks working for American firms in Japan, they’re typically on a hybrid setup. If they work for Japanese firms in Japan, often doing the same job, they’re required to come into the office every day. Culture seems to have a huge explanation for this difference across countries.

To what extent do you think this comes down to bosses trusting their workers, or not?

It is kind of trust, although in the U.S., it’s “trust but verify.” Bosses don’t just trust workers—they trust them, but then they monitor.

Should companies without a WFH policy reconsider?

The big selling point is that it’s profitable. In my paper in Nature in June 2024, we did a massive, randomized control trial at a big company called Trip.com. They’re a publicly listed company worth about $40 billion. They randomized whether you got to work from home two days a week or come in all five days—the former if your birthday fell on an odd day, the latter if it fell on an even day. For 24 months, we tracked 1,600 employees working in finance, marketing, computer engineering—professionals with college degrees. There was no effect on performance.

However, quit rates fell by 35% for people allowed to work from home two days a week. For Trip.com, every person that quits costs about $50,000. If someone quits, you have to advertise, re-interview, re-recruit, get them up to speed, and take managers off activity to train them. By reducing quit rates by 35% with no effect on productivity, that’s increasing business profits by like $20 million a year. That is ultimately why work from home has stuck.

On the flipside, an Economist article that mentions your study cited JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s worry that the “young generation is being damaged” by increased working from home. To what extent do you agree or disagree with that statement, and why?

I advise my Stanford undergrads, particularly in their first five years of work, that it’s a good idea to go into the office four days a week, because Jamie Dimon is exactly right. It is easier to mentor, learn, and build connections in person. Typically, when I poll students, that’s what they want—they want to socialize, be mentored, and they don’t have a lot of space at home. As people get to their 30s and 40s, they’ve moved up that learning curve, but they still benefit from coming in, maybe three even two days a week.

Another interesting data point from your study was the similar WFH rates for men and women across regions. What do you think accounts for that?

They want to. You see a slightly higher preference for women to work from home. The main decider in the U.S. is: Do you have kids? A man with children under the age of 12 has a higher preference to work from home than a woman without kids, for example. Having a disability is also a huge driver, but gender doesn’t matter that much. What you see in countries like India is gender matters a lot more, because for women, there’s assault risk and massive sexism in the workplace. In lower income countries, the gender gap grows.

What was the most surprising takeaway from your study?

Working from home has stabilized globally. I did an online presentation for Australia last week, and people there are under the same view as in the U.S., that big companies were banning it. We just don’t see that in any data set. Fact and opinion are about as divergent as people’s views on crime—they always think crime is rising. On average, it’s tending to decline. Everyone thinks work from home is ending, but you don’t see it globally.