Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

Full remote engineer for 7 years here.

I don't think it ever stops. If I had to venture an answer as to why, I'd say "fewer interruptions" - most interactions are asynchronous (email, IRC in my case but slack just as much). The only times I need to have synchronous discussions are either our "watercoolers" (social face-to-face over google hangouts) or the eventual meeting.

Note: the companies I've worked for in this setup are all committed to 100% remoteness, and understand that keeping meetings to a minimum is a good thing (note, not abolish - but make sure "meetings" are only called for when actually needed).

Distractions are indeed costly, and productivity (as in technical throughput) i can see increase quite a lot. That might end up keeping one happy for quite a long time - i noticed my happiness for a day depends a lot on how much stuff i got done that day.

Not to mention: able to live in a large, comfortable house in the country side in the middle of nature (if that's your thing).

EDIT: I think kids-flu is hard to avoid at that age, home office or not :P

We've got a lot of experience running a remote team, in fact, we wrote a guide/book on it: https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/

We certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but we've found it makes people pretty happy and we all seem pretty productive. If you want to give it a go, we're hiring! ;-) https://zapier.com/jobs/

I’m not sure realism/positivism is the best approach to empirical data on this.

Only one of my workers is more productive from home, in the IT department almost all the workers are more productive from home.

We haven’t done any research on the causality, but the personality’s profiles for or digitization and IT departments are vastly different, so too is the work we donald the way we go about it.

If you looked at us over all, there’s 20 workers in my department and around 60 in the IT department and around 55 of the 80 are more productive from home.

The setup I personally use to gain the most out of my employees is letting them work their own hours the way they want. I don’t check their hours but trust them to put in the hours they need, and they do, in fact the biggest problem is getting them to only work the 37 hours they are hired to put in.

Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else. But then sometimes I’ll get an email at 2am on a Saturday because someone found his/her coding flow at an off hour.

This would be extremely unhealthy if I required it, but my employee satisfaction went up from 4.3 out of 7 under the previous manager to 6.3/7 under me and our performance output nearly doubled.

Working at home is fine, but I don’t think you can truthfully say that it works for everyone. I think it’s important to leave the option open along with other options in a framework that encourages team work and communication, and then trust your employees to do the right thing and only intervene in their schedule and where they want to work, when you begin to spot trouble.