Tompkins slashed her hours without slowing productivity by delegating more and limiting her availability for meetings. With more sleep, she brings fresh energy to her work, which has helped her make more impactful decisions and hit her targets, so her manager is happy, too. In her new-found leisure time, Tompkins can be with her family, head outside or meditate. (Pre-pandemic, she considered the latter “a complete waste of time”.) “I’m committed to sticking to these positive changes, even when life goes back to some kind of new normal,” she says.

Will the door stay open?

This new holistic perspective on productivity is improving many workers’ lives, giving them satisfaction, balance and success at once. However, even as employees may have found the key to a better place, they’re not the only factor in whether the door stays open.

Companies that employ these workers have to buy into the new framing of productivity, too or things will go back to the way they were. To adopt long-term changes, most need the sign off from their employers. And even though research shows corporate productivity has, in many cases, increased since the onset of Covid-19, experts agree that even a global pandemic can’t reverse deeply ingrained corporate productivity paradigms in the span of a year.

“For organisations to make these shifts worldwide, we would need to see incentives change, increased regulation or enough leaders and companies exert social pressure and create norms,” explains Michael Parke, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and supervisor of the remote-productivity study. “Otherwise, my concern is that once things ‘normalise’, we will return back to pre-pandemic times.”