Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment
econ.brown.edu
econ.brown.edu
1) Really long commutes for the sake of my butt keeping a seat warm to keep a manager happy are dealbreakers. I have never made such a job work out for me. At the most recent example, my brief position at Google involved a 1-hour commute each way only to spend 8-10 hours in a dead-silent office, where no one significantly interacted and for which I was forbidden to telecommute by my mostly absentee manager, ever. Loved the food and the gym though.
2) Working at home 3-4 days a week is productivity Nirvana for me leading to patents, promotions and pay raises lather rinse repeat.
3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression.
4) Despite #3, I prefer to do crunch mode work in isolation because I'm easily startled and prone to the excessive use of colorful metaphors when under the gun. My cat doesn't mind. My dog doesn't care. But I suspect coworkers in proximity would fear for their lives.
I did that for about three months straight and I agree with the assessment. At my new job I work 3-4 days a week in the office and 1-2 days at home. I find a mix of office and home to be a good balance, though I do find the commute an utter waste of time.
I've never worked from home, but I'd really like to. I like to think as long as I still socialized after work (happy hour type stuff, kickball league, etc.) I wouldn't feel the isolation and depression.
edit: That being said, I'm not sure I would be able to return to regular office work and all the social posturing that comes along with it.
My outside of work socializing is simply people I've either met on my own or through the 2-3 people I knew in the city befor I moved here 2 years ago.
I would recommend Honolulu for your relocation, but cost of living is a little steep (but manageable...and worth it) and our tech community is definitely in the development stage (though it is existent and fairly active).
EDIT: I want to clarify that I probably do underestimate the benefit of my work interactions. The reason I go out and socialize so much is that I find myself feeling isolated and lonely on nights/weekends where I choose to stay in.
To cope with it I exercise and try to see my friends as much as I can.
Running and weights seem to be more effective against isolation induced anxiety. Swimming helps me relax when I feel frustrated with a specific problem.
Reading HN helps as well.
I am much more productive working at home, but as soon as I finish my current project I am going to try to get contract work that involves some office time before I loose my sanity.
In our day and age, I really feel as though traditional office work conditions are archaic and in fact do not encourage productivity, as they instil the idea that the employee should forget about his or her job as soon as the clock hits 5PM. I believe this is also why many children and students find it hard to do their homework after school. We can get a lot more done now as we are constantly connected and online. Many of us still do our work outside of, and before, working hours. In return, there should be more freedom of movement and flexibility.
However, please don't take far-ranging conclusions from this experiment. Call-center work is a fairly specific type of work with extreme values of "noise" and "distraction". For other kinds of work, the results might end up vastly differently.
(Also, the Chrome spelling correction sucks. Just sayin'.)
(Also, I've often wondered why Chrome's spell checker can mark a word as wrong, but when I copy it into Google search, Google knows it's spelled right. Should be the same system, I would think. The word uninstall comes to mind, I see that red squiggly right now.)
In addition, I sit right next to a QA guy that works on my product and I can easy waste half a day dealing with his issues and questions.
I find that I get significantly more work done while at home because I don't have the distraction of coworkers tying up my time. I also find I tend to put in at least an hour more a day because I work when I would normally be commuting.
For me, it's just a different type of distraction. When I got bored when working in an office, I would take a break, go get a drink, walk around and see what everybody else was up to, and then go back to work refreshed.
From home, when I get bored, I get up, get a drink of water, play with my kids for a couple of minutes and then go back to work refreshed.
All that being said, I'm not sure this particular study has much to say in the way of helping those of us who do knowledge work from home. Call center work seems like it's different enough that I can see the type of work invalidating the applicability of this particular study to our particular line of work.
"We find a highly significant 12% increase in performance from home-working, of which 8% is from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 3% from higher performance per minute. We find no negative spillovers onto workers left in the office. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and their job attrition rates fell by over 50%."
it's an important consideration...
Management won't promote the person they don't remember.
This is for two reasons: firstly, the long term impact of losing function in a limb is far less than people think, and the long term impact of an increased commute is far more than people think.
I have started listening to podcasts on my commute, and it's much more enjoyable than my music collection or any of the radio options here. I definitely should have started doing it earlier.
Likewise, when I decided to move 20 minutes farther away, my QOL actually improved, since I liked the area I lived in much more and there was more stuff to do after work.
After the move, it was about a 7-12 minute drive to work. Much shorter, but I liked being able to walk before and I could read or nap on the train. Had I been driving to work (instead of taking the train) before, it would have been a 1-2 hour stressful commute in heavy traffic.
As I read what I just wrote, I wonder if the reason for the "loss of limb" comparison is that the 20 minute commute they used as a reference is in heavy traffic. I have a 35-45 minute drive to work 2x a day now and again, dropping it to 15 minutes wouldn't be a big deal for me, but it is a very relaxing commute mostly along country roads where I get to drive at a consistently high speed.
Of course, if I were telecommuting I could just go take a bike ride at lunchtime on nice days, and not have to deal with darkness or bad weather or packing work clothes or rush hour traffic. Though I worry that I wouldn't.
- As others have mentioned, it is not generalizable to other types of jobs. Call-center work may be improved when working from home, but what about other types of jobs requiring more interaction/communication
- But the biggest issue I see is with their mention of a "Randomized experiment". Well, technically it is randomized among those who volunteered for the experiment. So from a causal inference perspective, the results generalize only to the population of employees who volunteered, not to the entire company.
More generally, one of the problems with these types of study is that the best it can give is an average gain from home working. But suppose the gain is null. It doesn't mean that this is not a viable option. Maybe there is a huge variance in the gain, depending on the individuals: maybe the gain in productivity is huge for some employees, while it is negative for some others. This could depend on the employee's self-discipline (whatever that means), his family situation (single/married, how many kids), where he leaves, is he introvert, etc... A useful study would be to randomized the assignment, stratifying by according to these covariates, in order to learn more about their effect on the performance of the employees.
I don't understand why they even mention the USA. Do they try to extrapolate that USA workers would react the same way Chinese workers did? I'm don't know if they would but it is reasonable to fear that the very different cultural environment could affect results. Or not, we don't know. Hence my question.
The next step is to perform the same sort of analysis where workers complete multi-day projects and communicate asynchronously with co-workers (email, issue trackers). Workers that only WFH one or a few days a week (as opposed to all the time or none) are also worth looking at; instinctually, I'd think this group would be the most abusive.
Further, it sounds like the telework involved is relatively pleasant -- CTrip is a travel agency, which I imagine involves happier customer calls than ones to the phone company. The study might not even be representative of all call-answering telework in China, which is a pretty narrow focus.
Having spent a few years in a corporate environment, and many more as a consultant in other people's corporate environments, I can tell you first hand that the amount of work you do has very little to do with where your chair is located.
Either you are the type of person who gets stuff done, or you aren't.
There are huge distractions everywhere you go. People who get things done incorporate them into their schedules & stay productive. Others use them as a welcome escape from actually working.
That said, home workers are 1) monitored more closely and 2) fresher from not having to deal with commutes, so no surprise to see the numbers show them as "more productive"
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-...
BUT, it is a skill that you have to learn. I had to read and watch-attend many productivity programs for "getting it".
Probably I will get a job teaching people how to do it in the future, because as networking speeds increase to Gygabits/second (thing google fiber in every house ten years from now), having instant hidef video would mean even more jobs would be possible from home.