A researcher wanted to investigate human resource (HR) managers' perspectives on differences in productivity between remote-first employees and office-first employees. Previous research on this topic showed inconsistent findings. The researcher randomly selected five large corporate offices from a regional hub. Four of the five firms agreed to take part. The researcher interviewed the HR managers of remote-first departments and office-first departments in the four cooperative firms, asking each manager the same set of questions in the same order.

One of the questions asked the HR managers to rate the general level of productivity for their department as a whole on a scale of 1–10. A rating of 1 meant the general level of productivity was very low and a rating of 10 meant it was extremely high.