![]() Who else likes the work-from-home option? The airline believes this policy has improved the quality of its workforce. When I asked the people at JetBlue about this policy, they said it helped them gain access to educated, high-ability mothers who wanted flexibility in their jobs. JetBlue allows folks to work as far as three hours from headquarters-close enough to come in now and again but a much bigger radius from which it can draw applicants. It’s hugely beneficial to their well-being, helps you attract talent, and lowers attrition. More research needs to be done on creative work and teamwork, but the evidence still suggests that with most jobs, a good rule of thumb is to let employees have one to two days a week at home. The more robotic the work, the greater the benefits, we think. Will knowledge and creative workers also be more productive at home? The positive impact of working from home was pretty constant over that entire period, suggesting that it wasn’t driven just by some initial burst of enthusiasm. Ctrip tried to address it by running the experiment for nine months. Also, we were studying call center work, which is easily measured and easily performed remotely.ĭid workers know they were being measured for productivity? Could there have been a grace period when they were trying to prove that working at home works, after which their efforts tailed off? There are lots of factors that could lead to such a ban, including a culture where remote workers tend to be slacking because of low morale. So Marissa Mayer, who famously banned working from home at Yahoo last year, was wrong? ![]() Search “working remotely” on the web, and everything that comes up will be supernegative and say that telecommuters don’t work as hard as people in the office. Sick days for employees working from home plummeted. They started earlier, took shorter breaks, and worked until the end of the day. The other two-thirds can be attributed to the fact that the people at home worked more hours. Offices are actually incredibly distracting places. At home people don’t experience what we call the “cake in the break room” effect. One-third of the productivity increase, we think, was due to having a quieter environment, which makes it easier to process calls. Lower attrition rates make sense-working from home gives you more flexibility if you have kids and so forth-but how do you explain the productivity increases? Why would people get more done out of the office? It estimated that it saved $1,900 per employee for the nine months. HBR: And how much did Ctrip save on furniture and space? And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office-way beyond what we anticipated. Instead, we found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did-meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment. The challenge: Should more of us be doing our jobs in our pajamas? Would the performance of employees actually improve if companies let them stay home? Professor Bloom, defend your research.īloom: The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. After a group of Ctrip service reps were sent home to do their work, they consistently completed more calls than their counterparts who remained in the call center.
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