Designing the experiment

- This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - Well, we're going to talk about working from home. You did quite the study on working from home. I I'd like it if we started there and then we fast forward to the current situation where there's a lot of work from home going on. It's a little bit different. So could you tell us the tail of your sea trip study? - So back in 2010, I teach in Stanford university. I'm a professor there, and I had someone in the back of my class who turned out quite amazingly to be the co-founder of a huge Chinese multinational sea trip. It listed on NASDAQ's worth about 15 billion dollars. That guy was called James Liang and he basically founded this company. And, you know, it was worth almost a billion dollars at this point. He decided to kind of step back and become the chairman and take a PhD. But sea trip had this big challenge which is there in Shanghai, the headquarters and they were growing very fast but they were struggling to keep up with office space. So as they grew they didn't want to have to spend huge amounts of money on very expensive Shanghai office space. So working with them, he set up what's called a randomized control trial on working from home. So quite explicitly, they ask 1000 people in the firm who wanted to work from home four out of five days, a week 500 them signed up is already, you know indicative that 500 people did not want to work from home. So sticking the 500 that did they then formally randomized them home to the office over the next nine months. So James on TV in front of a huge crowd pulled a ping pong ball out of an urn. And it said even, and everyone with an even birthday. So if you're born on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, et cetera 10th of the month worked from home for the next nine months. And if you are odd, so you know, like me I'm the 5th of May you stayed in the office and it was a way to scientifically evaluate the impact of working from home on these employees.