Standardizing the Gig Hybrid Work Week?

San Francisco Examiner reporter Jeff Elder describes efforts to coordinate hybrid work schedules that involve working part time at home and part time in the office (“Tech industry’s ‘three-day work week’ may change the future of the office forever”). Elder notes that tech workers, in the Bay Area seem to be gravitating toward working at home on Mondays and Fridays, and working in the office Tuesday through Friday.

Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute told the Examiner. “There’s going to have to be some experimentation. We’re going to end up somewhere around three days a week in the office. As we talk to companies, they increasingly say around three days in the office is what they want from employees.”

According to Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, “In 2022, employees will increasingly be required to come in on set days, with the payoff of working from home on the other days.”

A Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday work in the office week might offer employees an organized period to maximize collaboration, as opposed to less formalized arrangements in which employee attendance would be more random.

Such an arrangement would seem to have potential to maximize Tech employee productivity in the Bay Area, the world’s largest Gig labor market.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.