No one can agree on whether remote work is making employees more productive

• A report from Goldman Sachs shows studies on remote work have had different conclusions.
• Some research indicated a positive impact on productivity, but that wasn't true for all studies.
• Goldman Sachs said this was probably partly because productivity wasn't measured the same way.

While lots of people are going back to the office, plenty are still taking virtual meetings from home and finishing their work remotely — or looking for jobs where they can be remote. But are people successfully getting their work done from home?

Results from different research studies don't seem to agree on what remote working means for productivity, a recent report from Goldman Sachs shows.

The studies Goldman Sachs looked at had different ways of evaluating work-from-home productivity gains or losses, such as measuring the performance gain of call-center workers who were randomly chosen to work from home or comparing the productivity of people randomly chosen to work from home with that of office peers.

As seen in the chart, some research indicated that the impact on productivity was positive — but that wasn't the result for all studies. In the report, Goldman Sachs said this was probably because of the variation in how productivity was measured, the type of industries examined, as well as the kinds of tasks looked at.

The different research cited in the report had different study designs. And one paper cited was from 2013, way before lots of employees had to work from home because of office closures during the pandemic.

"Earlier work that used survey data with a self-assessed measure of productivity or experimental evidence in an industry that involved routine tasks (e.g. call centers) tended to find positive impacts of remote work," the report said. "More recent studies that measure productivity through complex performance metrics and draw evidence from industries involving high-cognitive tasks (e.g. IT services) reveal more negative effects." 

As studies examine the productivity gains — or losses — of remote work, people have been asked to make the trip back to the office. While some companies are in favor of a hybrid model through which people can still attend many meetings from home and enjoy the perks of working outside of the office sometimes, other employers want people in the office five days a week. Even though hybrid work seems to be common right now, one recent paper from Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis suggested that the hybrid work structure appeared "to have small positive impacts on productivity."

While some companies may think being in the office is the answer, not all workers think the same.

"This belief of a certain cohort of people, and they are represented across all sectors, that presentee-ism is productivity, for them it's perfectly rational that if somebody doesn't want to come into the office then that basically means they're not somebody who wants to add value to the firm," Grace Lordan, an associate professor in behavioral science at the London School of Economics, previously told Insider.

Some people who prefer a fully remote or a hybrid model over going to the office every day are open to changing jobs or industries so they wouldn't have to be working in person all the time, according to a Bankrate survey.

"I know how to do my job. I don't need to be in an office to do my work," one person who quit a job instead of heading to the office five days a week told Insider. "I just knew I didn't want to go back to what it felt like before."

Are you feeling more productive working from home or in an office? Have you been called to work in an office again after working remotely? Reach out to this reporter to share your story at mhoff@insider.com.