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Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

econ.brown.edu

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Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#21

Post by freehunter »

aristidb wrote: post #13

Gotta applaud this Chinese firm for using scientific experiments rather than gut feeling to decide on important policies. 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 sayi…

I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and I need significant face-time with my coworkers and people outside of my team just to get the most basic work done. As an anecdote, I get significantly less work done on the one day a week (today) when 90% of my coworkers work from home just due to the fact that I often need to collaborate with them.

(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.)

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#22

Post by ryguytilidie »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #10
jaggederest wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find a citation, but I believe that I read that a 20 minute addition to your commute has the same long-term quality of life impact as losing function in a limb. 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'm having trouble seeing that. When the company I worked for moved 15 miles closer to home, my commute dropped from about an hour to less than 10 minutes. It had very little impact on my QOL. 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.

How could having nearly 2 hours extra each day NOT improve your QOL? That really surprises me.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#23

Post by sliverstorm »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #3

I wonder how much improvement in morale can be attributed to not having a commute. I wonder if people who have a short walk to work are even happier than people who work from home, broadly speaking.

Not having a nasty commute would surely be an improvement, but the social aspect of working face-to-face with your coworkers has a morale value as well (I've found).

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#24

Post by Osiris »

freehunter wrote: post #21
aristidb wrote: post #13

Gotta applaud this Chinese firm for using scientific experiments rather than gut feeling to decide on important policies. 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 sayi…

I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and…

It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience. When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at work just to block out the noise.

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.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#25

Post by abraxasz »

Interesting initiative, but I see many issues in the study:

- 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.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#26

Post by varelse »

As someone who has mostly worked from home for the past decade:

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.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#27

Post by varelse »

Osiris wrote: post #24
freehunter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and…

It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience. When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at work just to block out the noise. 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 significan…

My experiences are similar. But I suspect putting in a day or two a week listening to your QA guy might be a good thing in the long term.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#28

Post by vasco »

"The frequency of working from home has been rising rapidly in the US"

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.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#29

Post by freehunter »

Osiris wrote: post #24
freehunter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and…

It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience. When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at work just to block out the noise. 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 significan…

It really just depends on how much your job requires collaboration with other people, and what tools your company employs to make this possible. At my job, the first one is a lot, and the second one is next to nothing.

Re: Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

#30

Post by Buzaga »

mc32 wrote: post #19
nostromo wrote: post #16

Here's the payload for those not wanting to hunt for it in the paper: "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 psyc…

Somewhere (can't recall) it was said that those who predominantly worked from home, while effective as a workforce, suffered from lack of visibility and thus tended to not get raises or promotions as much as those who remained in the office (I assume this was normalized for responsibility/position).

there was a post some weeks ago(by 37signals? don't remember) on how to treat this "telecommuters will feel/be seen as 2nd class citizens"...

it's an important consideration...

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