On a randomized trial that sent half of 1,612 employees home two days a week, then checked whose careers had suffered. Nobody's had. The lesson for a mentee lies in who was afraid to go.
If you are a mentee, or would like to be one, working from home comes with a private worry. Mentoring seems to run on being around. The people in the office bump into senior colleagues, get noticed and get taken under a wing. The people at home get forgotten. So you wonder whether your two days in the spare room are costing you the mentor you have, or the one you have yet to find.
A large experiment put that worry to the test. Its answer is reassuring about your career and awkward about your habits. The damage hybrid workers fear did not appear. The damage a mentee does by staying quiet and waiting to be noticed is another matter, and it is the part you control.
Odd birthdays stay home
Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang ran a six-month randomized trial at Trip.com, one of the world's largest online travel agencies, in 2021 and 2022. They took 1,612 graduate employees in engineering, marketing, accounting and finance at its Shanghai office and split them by date of birth. Those born on an even-numbered day came in five days a week. Those born on an odd-numbered day could work from home for two of them.
The hybrid group was happier and quit less. Resignations fell by a third, and the effect showed among women, non-managers and people with long commutes. Performance reviews did not differ. Over the following two years, neither did promotions. Those reviews covered more than output. According to Stanford's account of the study, they also assessed innovation, leadership and mentoring.
The trial also changed the minds of the people doing the judging. Its 395 managers were surveyed before and after. At the start they expected hybrid working to cut productivity by 2.6 percent on average. By the end they judged it had raised productivity by 1 percent.
The detail that matters most for a mentee comes from before the trial started. When the company asked for volunteers, women and others held back. Bloom's explanation is that they feared being judged for not coming in every day. The fear was strong enough to stop people asking for something that, in the event, did them no harm.
The fear is bigger than the penalty
A fair caveat. This is one company and one office, with graduate employees and a formal review process. Two days at home is a long way from working remotely full-time, and the trial says nothing about people who rarely see their colleagues at all.
Still, the finding lands on a habit plenty of mentees will recognize. The fear of being seen as less committed stops people asking: for flexibility, for feedback and for mentoring. The trial suggests that at least some of that fear is self-inflicted.
The usual advice to anyone looking for a mentor is to be seen. Arrive early, stay late, linger by the coffee machine and hope that someone senior notices. That advice treats presence as the thing being measured. In this trial it was the work that was measured, and the work held up from home. Even the managers who expected otherwise came around once they had watched it happen.
What to do differently
Spend your office days on people. The days you are in are your best chance to meet potential mentors informally. Save solitary work for home and use the office for the conversations that never make it onto a calendar.
Put the early sessions in person. Trust builds faster across a table, and the remote sessions that follow go better once the relationship has a foundation.
When a session has to be remote, do the work the corridor used to do. Send a short agenda beforehand. Share something you are working on, so your mentor sees your work and not only your account of it. Say how things are going without waiting to be asked, because the cues your mentor would pick up in person do not travel well through a camera.
Stay in view between sessions. A two-line message after each one, saying what you tried and what happened, takes a minute to write. It tells your mentor the conversation was worth having, and it keeps you in mind during the weeks when you are not in the building.
Ask for what you need. If you want a mentor, ask. If you want more frequent contact while you are working from home, ask for that too. Silence from the spare room is easy to mistake for contentment.
The awkward conclusion
The trial settles one worry and leaves another standing. Two days a week at home cost nobody a review grade or a promotion. What it did to their learning, nobody measured.
Chapter 13 of The Accidental Mentee picks up there. It treats the employee who works from home as a close relative of the freelancer. The manager, the HR department and the paycheck are all still in place, but the informal half of development has gone: the problem somebody overhears, the glance at your screen, the passing verdict that it is fine to send. The chapter cites a study that followed workers as they moved between sitting together and working apart. Those who shared a space received about 22 percent more feedback, and junior and younger staff had the most to lose when it thinned.
The book's answer is a ten-minute routine called the Tune-Up. First you work out which supports went missing when your work changed shape: direction, feedback, a weekly rhythm, someone placed to notice when you drift. Then you set three dials. Arrive at every contact with a live problem. Keep the relationship worth your mentor's time, which includes telling them when their advice worked. Act on what you heard, and be the one who gets back in touch. Maya, a freelance brand consultant, loses her anchor client and finds that nobody is telling her whether her work is still good. She takes her mentor a pricing decision with the numbers attached, and later sends him two lines to say his steer won her the next engagement. He is now invested in how it goes. An office that empties is one of the chapter's cues to run the routine again.
So the careers of the people at home were fine. The feedback is the part you have to go and fetch.
Out of sight is fine. Out of touch is optional, and entirely your call.
Source
Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han, and James Liang, "Hybrid Working from Home Improves Retention without Damaging Performance," Nature 630 (2024): 920–25, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2.
Background: Stanford University summary (June 2024).
