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Chalk up one for compromise at work.
It turns out that having workers in the office, at home, or any one place for too long might be a drag on a company's growth.
Instead, the Goldilocks approach of spending a little time here and a little time there could be the best path to boosting sales.
Companies whose workers are in the same spot most of the week, regardless of where that is, report lower revenue growth than those employers that use a hybrid model, according to data from McKinsey & Co.
The consultancy recently surveyed nearly 4,000 execs at companies whose customers are other businesses. Survey respondents included heads of sales, chief marketing officers, and CFOs.
Among companies that sanctioned hybrid work, 35% of respondents said their top line had grown by more than 10% from the prior year. At companies that don't use or allow hybrid setups, only 28% of respondents reported an increase above 10%.
Jennifer Stanley, a McKinsey partner, told Business Insider that the difference in growth rates between the hybrid and less flexible arrangements was "very meaningful." That's because making big sales gains year over year is often difficult for many so-called B2B companies.
"If you're in a sector that's struggling for two or three points of growth, that could be actually a really meaningful lever," she said, referring to hybrid work.
Stanley also said the results indicate that much of the return-to-office discussion is often overly binary — and that neither a cubicle nor somewhere else most of the time is necessarily best for growth.
"It's probably not so black and white, and that's what the data show," she said.
In the research, people who operated from the same place four or more times a week were considered to work from a single location. Anything with more variety — maybe two days here, three somewhere else — was considered hybrid.
The findings are good news for the workers who have settled into a hybrid setup years after pandemic lockdowns forced a grand experiment in remote work. It's also a welcome morsel for the bosses who have acknowledged, perhaps grudgingly, that some version of remote work is as much a fixture of office jobs as email and Teams calls.
Stanley said hybrid work arrangements could represent a penchant for flexibility that might spill over into other ways of addressing work imperatives, including how companies serve their customers.
"It's just the agility coming full circle," Stanley said.
It's also possible that some of the growth could come from workers who can better balance the demands of work and their lives. BI previously reported that some Gen Z workers value flexibility in their jobs almost as much as how much they get paid.
More seasoned workers also often prize having autonomy over when and how they do their jobs. The research firm Gartner reported in 2024 that about one in three people looking for senior-level positions said that an RTO mandate was part of what prompted them to look for a new job — even when they had reason to go back to the office.
Caroline Ogawa, a director in the HR practice at Gartner, previously told BI that the firm's snapshot of exec sentiment made clear that having a rationale for going back to the office wasn't always enough to sway some workers.
"They overwhelmingly felt like the organization provided a convincing reason" to return to the office, she said. "But they still would leave if they were asked" to come back.
McKinsey's Stanley said businesses that demand a less flexible work style risk being out of step with the adaptability many of their clients seek.
"It makes it very difficult to be customer-first and to be operating in a way that the customers themselves want to behave," she said.
