How often should you be working at the office? Here's what the research suggests

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Office attendance from Monday to Friday used to be a pretty standard requirement for many jobs. But plenty of employees have now developed a taste for working from home.

And in response, some of their employers have started to tighten the rules on hybrid work. Barclays Bank is one of the latest big companies to do so, telling thousands of U.K. staff they must be in the office at least three days a week instead of two. So what is the right balance for those who split the locations of their working week?

Plenty of research has now been done on that question. And while it does not give a single magic number, the evidence does suggest that the best range is two or three days in the office—on the same days as your colleagues. For example, in a study involving a large online travel agency in China, more than 1,500 engineers, marketing and finance staff were allowed to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays, while a control group stayed in the office full time.

Over the following two years of performance reviews, the performance of the hybrid workers was equal in quality to that of those who stayed in the office. And the ones who worked from home were much less likely to leave the company—especially women and the workers with long commutes. A smaller experiment at an international development organization went a step further by randomly varying how many days 148 staff spent in the office.

Those who came in around two days a week said they had a better work-life balance, more job satisfaction and less isolation than colleagues who came in more or less often. Their performance was unaffected. These studies (among others) suggest that a week split roughly half and half between home and office costs employers little, while keeping staff happier and more likely to stay.

But there is also evidence that the office time counts, and that some work really does suffer at a distance. In experiments across five countries, researchers found that video calls can reduce the flow of creative ideas. And an analysis of 20 million research papers and 4 million patents found that remote teams were less likely to produce breakthroughs.