{"id":8955,"date":"2020-07-17T10:14:21","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T10:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/?p=8955"},"modified":"2023-11-28T12:11:50","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T12:11:50","slug":"remote-work-is-surprisingly-productive-but-for-many-something-is-missing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/future-of-work\/remote-work-is-surprisingly-productive-but-for-many-something-is-missing\/","title":{"rendered":"Remote Work is Surprisingly Productive, But For Many\u2026 Something Is Missing"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What If Working From Home Goes on \u2026 Forever?<\/a>, asks science and technology journalist\u00a0Clive Thompson<\/a>\u00a0in the title of his June 9\u00a0NY Times Magazine<\/em>\u00a0article.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe coronavirus crisis is forcing white-collar America to reconsider nearly every aspect of office life.\u00a0\u00a0Some practices now seem to be wastes of time, happily discarded; others seem to be unexpectedly crucial, and impossible to replicate online.\u00a0\u00a0For workers wondering right now if they\u2019re ever going back to the office, the most honest answer is this: Even if they do, the office might never be the same.\u201d<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A recent\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0found that of the 56% of respondents employed pre-Covid-19, half were working from home, – 35% having recently switched to working from home, while another 15% were already doing so pre-Covid; 37% continued to commute to work, and 10% had been recently laid-off or furloughed.\u00a0 The survey was\u00a0\u00a0based on two separate national samples of US data, – one which gathered 25,000 responses in early April, and the second another 25,000 responses in early May.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Thompson\u2019s article cites the experience of\u00a0Accenture<\/a>, which has around 500,000 employees in more than 200 cities in 120 countries.\u00a0\u00a0Before the pandemic, no more than 10% worked remotely on any given day.\u00a0\u00a0But, by the middle of March, nearly all were asked to work from home.\u00a0\u00a0Employees adapted quickly, said Accenture\u2019s CTO.\u00a0\u00a0The volume of video calls went up by a factor of six while those of audio calls tripled.\u00a0\u00a0Despite having to switch from face-to-face to audio and video interactions, overall productivity actually went up as measured by several metrics.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It\u2019s difficult to judge whether the surge in remote work will last.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cHome life in a lockdown is much harder than usual,\u201d notes Thompson.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cMany workers who live alone are experiencing enforced isolation as an emotional grind\u2026 Nearly every parent I spoke to had their fingers crossed that schools and day care would reopen in the fall – at which point remote work might become an option they could choose, as opposed to one they were forced to endure.\u00a0\u00a0Assuming that such a day does arrive, it\u2019s possible that quite a few may elect to continue working outside the office.\u201d<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Remote work<\/a>\u00a0aka telecommuting has been around for decades, but took off in the mid-late 1990s with the explosive growth of the Internet.\u00a0\u00a0Some even predicted that the Internet would lead to the decline of cities, because it would enable people to work, be in touch with friends and colleagues, and shop from home.\u00a0\u00a0Why would anyone choose to live in an expensive and crowded metropolitan area, when they could live in a more affordable, less stressful, potentially healthier location.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u201cResearch conducted before the pandemic found that remote work offers significant positive effects for both employee and employer,\u201d said Thompson.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWhat Accenture discovered is not, it seems, a fluke: Output often rises when people work remotely.\u201d\u00a0 His\u00a0article discussed two separate productivity case studies, one focused on working from home (WFH), the second on working from anywhere (WFA).\u00a0\u00a0Research on remote work has dealt largely with WFH programs, in which employees generally live within commuting distance of the office.\u00a0\u00a0Such programs offer workers temporal flexibility, including reduced commute times, and improved work-life balance.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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But, how effective is working from home?\u00a0 Stanford researchers addressed this question in a\u00a02013 paper<\/a>\u00a0based on\u00a0a 9-month experiment conducted with\u00a0CTrip<\/a>, –\u00a0\u00a0China\u2019s largest travel agency, since renamed\u00a0trip.com<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0CTrip\u00a0asked nearly 1000 employees in their Shanghai call center if they would be interested in working from home four days a week, with the fifth day in the office as usual.\u00a0\u00a0About half the employees were interested, – especially those who had children and long commutes to work, – and approximately 250 qualified by virtue of having at least six months tenure, as well as broadband access and a private room in which they could work at home.\u00a0\u00a0CTrip then held a lottery draw, and those with even-numbered birthdays were selected for the experiment while the rest continued to work from the office as a control group.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u201cHome working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment),\u201d said the paper.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cHome workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell.\u00a0\u00a0Due to the success of the experiment, CTrip rolled-out the WFH option to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to re-select between the home or office.\u00a0\u00a0Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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How does working from anywhere (WFA) compare to working from home (WFH)?\u00a0 A\u00a02018 paper<\/a>\u00a0evaluated the difference in productivity between WFH and WFA programs, based on the experiences of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).\u00a0\u00a0In 2006, the USPTO introduced a voluntary WFH program with an initial group of 500 patent examiners, allowing eligible employees to work from home up to four days per week. Then in 2012, the USPTO launched a\u00a0\u00a0pilot WFA program, now allowing patent examiners to live anywhere.\u00a0\u00a0Employees were eligible for the WFA pilot if they were already enrolled in WFH, lived over 50 miles from the USPTO\u2019s headquarters in Northern Virginia, and agreed to waive their rights to be reimbursed for the required trips back to headquarters, which were capped at five per year.\u00a0\u00a0Overall, the WFA program led to an additional increase in work output of 4.4% compared to the baseline WFH program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working at home\u00a0can also improve how employees feel about their jobs, said Thompson, citing\u00a0studies<\/a>\u00a0that have shown a positive correlation between telecommuting and job satisfaction.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cPeople tend to prize the greater flexibility in setting their work hours, the additional time with family members, the reduced distractions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Besides increasing the productivity and job satisfaction of their employees, another attraction for employers is shrinking real estate costs.\u00a0 The USPTO estimates that they\u2019ve saved over $38 million in headquarters office space.\u00a0\u00a0In addition, companies have access to a larger pool of talented employees who may not afford to relocate to expensive cities or prefer not to do so for family or other reasons.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cAnd in the pandemic, they may need to accommodate employees who – even after health authorities\u00a0reopen<\/em>\u00a0their state – don\u2019t want to come back,\u201d added Thompson.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cMany will hesitate at the idea of riding a crowded, unventilated elevator to an open office where people are crowded together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe truth, as I heard from many of the newly remote workers I interviewed, is that as much as our offices can be inefficient, productivity-killing spreaders of infectious disease, a lot of people are desperate to get back to them,\u201d wrote Thompson in conclusion.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s because\u00a0\u00a0office work is more than just straightforward productivity – briskly ticking off to-do items.\u00a0\u00a0It also consists of the chemistry and workplace culture that comes from employees\u2019 interacting all day, in ways that are unexpected and often inefficient, like the stray conversations that take place while people are procrastinating or bumping into one another on the way to lunch.\u00a0\u00a0During the pandemic, though, many employees worry that this culture is eroding.\u201d<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research on remote work has dealt largely with WFH programs, in which employees generally live within commuting distance of the office. Such programs offer workers temporal flexibility, including reduced commute times, and improved work-life balance. But, how effective is working from home? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":612,"featured_media":8956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[230,471,470,469,220],"ppma_author":[3320],"class_list":["post-8955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-future-of-work","tag-remote-work","tag-wfa","tag-wfh","tag-work-from-anywhere","tag-work-from-home"],"authors":[{"term_id":3320,"user_id":612,"is_guest":0,"slug":"irving-wladawsky-berger","display_name":"Irving Wladawsky-Berger","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Wladawsky-Berger","first_name":"Irving","job_title":"","description":"Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a Guest Columnist at WSJ CIO Journal, is Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management, Adjunct Professor at Imperial College, London, and Chairman Advisory Board at r4 Technologies."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/612"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8955"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=8955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}