Virtual Office Featured Article

The Best Performing Employees Prefer to Work From Home

April 13, 2015
By Steve Anderson, Contributing Writer

Telecommuting has a strange reputation. Some swear by it, convinced that it's the next great thing in business to allow access to not only a better-performing workforce, but access to all those great workers from all parts of the globe. Others are convinced it's a convenient excuse to slack off at work. A new study from the Harvard Business Review suggests that those who think it's a shirking tool may need to reconsider.


The Harvard study—involving a couple Harvard students and China's largest travel agency, Ctrip—set up a work from home (WFH) policy to help Ctrip lower its office costs, a commonly-cited benefit of a WFH program. The program also hoped to reduce the 50 percent annual staff turnover rate Ctrip experienced. Naturally, Ctrip's management had the fairly common concern that employees out of direct line-of-sight of management would engage in widespread shirking, so the study was designed to see if that would be a factor as well. Thus groups were selected, and managed to the point where the only difference was the location worked. The study's results, meanwhile, were somewhat shocking.

The WFH workers managed to improve performance 13 percent over the nine month study, mostly by increasing the numbers of minutes actually worked. Fewer breaks were taken by the at-home workers, and fewer sick days came into the mix. Home workers also got more work done in a minute, on average, mainly due to much quieter working conditions at home. Turnover rates also fell, and there was no measurable improvement from the control group. There was no change either way there, actually, which itself was something of a surprise.

Interestingly, though, half of the home workers, when offered the option to return to the office, actually did. Three quarters of the control group likewise elected to remain at the office, leaving the home worker side somewhat diminished. The main reason for this? The home workers reportedly got lonely.

With this data in hand, the Harvard study went on to recommend that offices at least consider some breed of telecommuting program, particularly in the short term for things like bad weather or major events like an Olympic or World Cup hosting. While some did quite well from the arrangement, a healthy chunk of the office just wasn't interested.

This is where things get strange. Employees got more done in a WFH environment, but after a while, preferred to return to the office. Note that the WFH workers took fewer breaks, and fewer sick days. Essentially, not only were the WFH employees getting more done in a minute, said employees also spent more time on the job. That's one major component of a recipe known as “burnout”, and it's one that needs to be watched carefully. After all, some employees might well have thought that the level of compensation is the same at home or at the office, and there's less work getting done at the office, so why not do less work for the same pay? Still, that's just one part of the equation, and considering the whole thing may offer valuable insight into just how an office works best.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino

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