雅思阅读 61: The Half-Remote Office（半远程办公室）

改编自 Stanford SIEPR / Nature / NBER（2024-2026）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://employerrecords.com/global-remote-work-statistics/

Reading Passage

A. When offices shut in 2020, almost everyone assumed the arrangement was temporary. Four years later, the assumption has not survived contact with the data. Rather than a brief emergency, working from home turned out to be an experiment run at planetary scale, and the results are still being argued about. By early 2023, roughly 30 percent of fully paid working days in the United States were being spent outside the office, and the dominant schedule was neither full office nor full remote but something in between: employees coming in two or three days a week, and working from home the rest. Managers who had predicted catastrophe at first, and then deliverance when they ordered everyone back, have found themselves on both sides of an argument that refuses to resolve. Economists, meanwhile, have been unusually lucky: a pandemic forced millions of people into a treatment that, in normal times, no company would have allowed them to test at random. What those natural experiments show is that the debate has been conducted in the wrong terms. The question was never "office versus home." It is how to combine the two without losing what each does well.

B. The strongest evidence comes from a randomised trial run at the online travel agency Trip.com, led by the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and published in Nature. More than 1,600 employees were assigned either to continue a fully office-based schedule or to work from home two days a week, while being paid the same and evaluated by the same managers. After two years the results were striking: the hybrid group was just as productive, was promoted at the same rate, and wrote code and handled customers at indistinguishable levels. But one number jumped off the page. Employees on the hybrid schedule were about 33 percent less likely to resign than their fully office-based peers — a retention dividend large enough, Bloom has argued, to offset almost any conceivable loss in productivity. The attrition effect was largest for women and for non-managers, the very workers who had previously been most likely to leave after having children or taking on caring responsibilities.

C. It is essential, however, not to read those results as a blanket endorsement of working from home. The same line of Stanford research had begun a decade earlier with an entirely different study of fully remote call-centre workers at Ctrip, a Chinese travel firm, which found a 13 percent productivity gain from home work. Reanalysis later showed that roughly a third of that gain came not from working faster but from working more hours and taking fewer breaks — a productivity improvement that workers, burning out, later reversed. When researchers look at fully remote jobs today, the picture is more equivocal: across large samples, working entirely from home runs about 10 percent below fully in-office output, with wide variation by role, management and tooling. Hybrid, two or three days at home, is the schedule that consistently looks as good as the office; going fully remote is the bet that only pays off in certain jobs. The popular conflation of "remote work" with "hybrid work" is, on the evidence, a category error.

D. Corporate head office has not always absorbed this distinction. Throughout 2024 and 2025, a series of prominent companies ordered workers back to the office three, four or five days a week, arguing that in-person collaboration was essential to creativity and culture. The financial evidence for these mandates has been weak. A University of Pittsburgh analysis of S&P 500 companies found no improvement in financial performance after firms imposed return-to-office rules, while Microsoft's own internal analysis of trillions of productivity signals suggested that output, measured by completed work rather than hours logged, was no worse than before the pandemic. Bloom's follow-up work identifies one practical variable that seems to matter: "anchor" days. Companies that agree in advance on which days everyone will be in, and use those days for meetings and social contact, do better than those that ask people to come in but then leave them alone in quiet rows of desks. The schedule that works, in other words, is not arbitrary presence but deliberate presence.

E. The wider consequences are only beginning to be felt. Hybrid work, by shaving two or three days of commuting out of millions of lives, has quietly changed where people can live, how much time they spend with their families, and what happens to the streets around city centres. The workers who have gained most are not the highly paid software engineers who first popularised the trend, but women, caregivers and junior staff, for whom the ability to structure two days a week around school runs or elder care has made otherwise incompatible jobs feasible. The workers who have lost out, studies suggest, are the most junior and the most visible: the people who used to be noticed at the water cooler, and who now find that being out of sight is, sometimes, being out of mind. The task for the next decade is not to prove that one model is best, but to design rules — anchor days, transparent promotion criteria, deliberate in-person time — that capture the flexibility of home without sacrificing the mentoring and casual learning that the office, at its best, still does uniquely well. The firms that pretend the choice is all-or-nothing will, on the evidence, be punished either by resignations or by quiet disengagement; the ones that treat presence as a deliberate, scheduled event rather than a default, will be the ones that retain the people who most need flexibility. Whether cities adapt in turn — with fewer peak-hour trains, more neighbourhood workspaces, and less pressure to commute five days a week — is a second-order consequence that has only just begun.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. A randomised trial and its headline numbers ii. Hybrid is not the same as fully remote iii. Why return-to-office mandates have disappointed iv. Who hybrid work actually helps — and who it may hurt v. A history of the modern office building vi. How to design a home workstation vii. The economics of city-centre coffee shops

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. In the Trip.com randomised trial, what happened to employees who worked from home two days a week? A. They were just as productive and about a third less likely to quit. B. They became roughly half as productive. C. They were promoted twice as quickly. D. They all resigned within a year.

6. What did the earlier fully remote call-centre study find? A. A 13 percent productivity gain, partly from working more hours. B. A 50 percent drop in output. C. No change in calls handled. D. Workers refused to work from home.

7. According to the University of Pittsburgh analysis, how did S&P 500 firms fare after imposing return-to-office mandates? A. They showed no improvement in financial performance. B. Their profits doubled within a year. C. They all stopped trading. D. Their share prices rose by 100 percent.

8. Among which group were the retention gains from hybrid work largest? A. Women and non-managers. B. Senior executives only. C. Part-time interns only. D. There were no gains at all.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The Trip.com randomised trial was published in the journal Nature.
10. Hybrid workers in the trial were promoted at significantly lower rates than fully office-based peers.
11. Working fully from home consistently outperforms in-office work in every study.
12. By early 2023, about 30 percent of fully paid working days were being spent outside the office.
13. Hybrid work has been shown to increase commuting-related carbon emissions.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The Stanford-led trial found that working from (14) __________ two days a week preserved productivity while cutting the resignation rate by roughly one-(15) __________.

答案与解析

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