For most of the last 15 years, the United States economy was mired in a period of low productivity growth. Who would have guessed that the pathway out of it might include a pandemic?

Yet that is what the numbers show. Since the second quarter of 2020, labor productivity — the amount of output per hour of work — has risen at a 3.8 percent annual rate, compared with 1.4 percent from 2005 to 2019. New data published Tuesday showed the trend persisted this spring, with a 2.3 annual rate of productivity growth in the second quarter.

A different way to look at it: Since the pandemic recession bottomed out in the spring of 2020, the nation’s gross domestic product has more than fully recovered, with second-quarter output 0.8 percent higher than before coronavirus. The number of jobs decreased 4.4 percent in the same span. Productivity growth accounts for most of the wedge between those.

What is less clear, though, is how much this growth represents real progress toward deploying the work force in ways that will make Americans richer over time. It’s a murky story — like any attempt to connect big-picture productivity numbers to what’s happening in the guts of the economy — but crucial for understanding the economic outlook for the 2020s.

There are several parts to the story, and each has different implications for the future.

The jobs lost were low-productivity

In terms of economic output, not all jobs are created equal. A worker in a well-managed factory with state-of-the-art equipment produces more economic output for each hour of work than a counterpart in a poorly run place with worse equipment.

The differences are even starker when you compare productivity across sectors, and that’s where there is a clear pandemic story. Many more job losses were in low-productivity sectors than in higher ones.

For example, on the eve of the pandemic, manufacturing jobs — highly productive, with lots of automation — paid on average $28.23 an hour, while restaurant jobs paid $15.23 on average. Employment in manufacturing in July was down 3.4 percent from its February 2020 level, while restaurant employment was down 8 percent.

As people currently out of work return to the labor force, how many will take higher-productivity jobs vs. lower-productivity ones? That’s vital in determining the economy’s future growth potential.

Doing more with less

The labor shortage facing many types of businesses, especially in the service sector, is forcing some hard decisions. And in many cases, companies unable to return to normal staffing levels are getting creative.

Restaurants are experimenting with people ordering on their phones rather than through a waiter. Retailers are offering more self check-out options. And there is evidence that the difficulty recruiting workers is making companies invest more in training employees — potentially shifting people from low-productivity jobs to higher-productivity ones.

Sometimes there are tricky measurement questions. For example, if a hotel charges the same prices but, with fewer housekeepers on the payroll, no longer provides a daily cleaning service, that arguably is a worsening in the quality of the product and therefore a form of inflation, rather than higher labor productivity.

But to the degree that something fundamental is shifting in terms of businesses’ willingness to make labor-saving investments, rethink processes to be less labor-intensive, and move individual workers higher up the skill ladder, there’s opportunity for a productivity surge than outlasts the pandemic.

Running themselves ragged

The flip side of this could be that the apparent productivity boom, especially in the first half of this year, simply reflects people working harder than usual.

If a restaurant normally has 10 waiters for its dinner shift and cuts back to seven, each of whom has to work that much harder, it could look like a productivity gain. Fewer person-hours of work would be generating the same economic output. It also may or may not be sustainable.

But perhaps people will be willing to work harder at certain jobs if compensation is higher. There is a theory of “efficiency wages” that suggests, in effect, that employers get what they pay for — that paying more means a higher-performing work force.

“If you want extra effort, you pay people extra,” said Steven J. Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “You would expect to see some positive productivity benefits of compensating people to put forth more effort per hour than they normally would. Will it be sustained? Maybe if wages stay high.”

The work-from-home effect

In the space of just a few weeks in 2020, millions of American workers who once commuted to an office most of the time learned how to work from home. It could have lasting economic ripple effects if even a modest portion of them continue to work from home some or all of the time.

“Employers are embracing this as a long-term solution and taking the steps to invest in the appropriate technology to make it really effective,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “There is a lot of soul-searching going on and companies sharing best practices on how to create corporate cultural virtually.”

The Landscape of the Post-Pandemic Return to Office

• • Delta-variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do.
  • A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires.
  • How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use.
  • Return-to-work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout.

  At the height of the pandemic, the vast majority of office workers worked from home. In the post-pandemic world, those jobs that most require in-person collaboration may return to offices, but those that can be easily done remotely may stay remote.

  “The important thing to understand is that it’s not that working from home is better for everybody, but that once the pandemic is over, the kinds of people for whom it doesn’t work very well won’t continue it,” Professor Davis said. “It’s a selection of people who have figured out how to make remote work work, and that’s where the productivity gains are coming from.”

  There are several implications for the years ahead. For one, companies would be likely to need less office space, desks and cubicles relative to the size of their work force than in the past. That could mean higher “total factor productivity,” which takes into account not just the efforts of workers, but the capital investments that they use to do their jobs.

  For another, workers themselves say in surveys that they are more productive working at home — though not necessarily in ways that show up big in the official productivity numbers.

  A working paper by Jose Maria Barrero, Professor Davis and Nicholas Bloom that is based on a survey of 30,000 workers finds that widespread working from home could generate a 4.8 percent boost to productivity relative to the pre-pandemic economy, but that only 1 percent of that should be expected to show up in the official statistics.

  The reason? Much of the gain comes from time saved commuting, and official labor productivity statistics do not include commute time in the “hours worked” denominator.

  In effect, the pandemic forced a lot of innovation around office work practices to happen far more rapidly than would otherwise be the case.

  “The adoption of technology has accelerated, new firms are being created at an historic pace, and the shift to remote work is likely to outlast the crisis,” said Lydia Boussour, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, in a note analyzing the new productivity data. “While some of the pandemic-driven efficiencies could take years to be fully realized, we think these four forces will lead to a sustained productivity revival in the medium run.”

  The future is always uncertain, and economists’ understanding of what truly drives productivity gains is poor. But for now, the evidence suggests that many of the key drivers of this particular pandemic bump aren’t likely to go away anytime soon.

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