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Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

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Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#101

Post by piyush_soni »

gowld wrote: post #71
piyush_soni wrote: post #26

Did their sample involve men with a 2 year old at home that constantly needs their attention as long as they are at home, and thinks that when their father is sitting on the laptop, he's making pink and blue spheres in paintbrush? Honestly, I can achieve little at home these days and feel like I'm doing injustice to both, work and the kid.

Do you live in a 1-room home?

Nope. Whenever I try to work from home, I work from a separate room, and close it - but then the room does not have an attached bathroom inside, and there are other things (water/food etc.) for which you have to come out - and once she knows I'm at home, she will bang the door every few minutes to come in, to talk or play with me.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#102

Post by geerlingguy »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #25
eksemplar wrote: post #20

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…

> the biggest problem is getting them to only work the 37 hours they are hired to put in When I started working from home 10 years ago, this hit me hard. I used to work about 10 hour days in the office. When I started working from home I was working 13-14 hours most days. Over time that lead to burn out and that made me even less productive. Some of it was because I felt a little guilty working from home so I put in…

It’s important to have a separate computer, and ideally a completely separate room, where you do ‘work’. When your office hours are over, the work computer goes off and you exit your at-home ‘office’. That’s helped me separate work and keep my sanity.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#103

Post by kuriho »

dvt wrote: post #51
kuriho wrote: post #33

With the population exploding and space to build new houses growing ever so scarcely I can not imagine a long-term future in which working from home would be profitable. Instead of working from home, living at work seems to be the more logical step forward. Personally I'd prefer living at a shared-workspace or company campus as long as work and living facilities are clearly separate.

> Personally I'd prefer living at a shared-workspace or company campus as long as work and living facilities are clearly separate. May I ask why? I'd prefer living close to my family and friends, many of which may not work for the same company as I work for. I'm trying to see what your motivating factors are because I, for one, could not disagree more.

A shared-workspace campus for you and your friends would work out then? You can picture it as a shared-workspace town if that is more appealing to you. Living quarters, parks, etc. on one side of the highway. A shared-workspace campus hosting multiple companies/teams on the other. Living and working stays strictly separate, everyone has a short commute and you still have all project members available on-site at the same time to reliably work together and gasp actually meet up when required.

To answer your question, I do not want to bring work into my home. BYOD resolves most of the factors that would make me want to provide my own office at home.

May I ask how you currently manage to live close to your family and friends and (because I have to assume you are surrounded by like-minded individuals) their families and their friends and so on? Frankly, I find this very unrealistic, but maybe that's because my friends and family are spread out across the globe.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#104

Post by thinkingemote »

atypeoferror wrote: post #54

Link to the actual paper: https://people.stanford.edu/nbloom/sites/default/files/wfh.p...

This really needs to be higher, and the paper actually read by us, as it addresses the nature of the work, the study size and methodology, as well as sociological issues. All things that these other comments speculate about

Crucially it's not IT, the work is a call centre travel agency (and it's also in China).

"First, the job of a call center employee is particularly suitable for telecommuting. It requires neither teamwork nor in-person face time. Quantity and quality of performance can be easily quantified and evaluated. The link between effort and performance is direct. These conditions apply to a range of service jobs, such as sales, IT support, and secretarial assistance, but they are far from universal. Second, the firm can closely monitor the performance and labor supply of the employees thanks to its extensive centralized database. Team leaders and managers could generate a report from the database of the performance of the team members daily and easily detect problems in individual employees’ performance. Third, the extent of WFH was limited, so that it did not require a significant reorganization at the workplace. Team leaders continued to supervise their teams with a mix of home and office workers without any major reshuffling of team membership."

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#105

Post by HenryBemis »

lagadu wrote: post #98
cameldrv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are: 1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have t…

> but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding Why would the manager be the one making estimates? That's a task either for the team, if applicable, or for the implementer. edit: I work from home, every sprint we have a planning meeting where we do the estimates together, my manager isn't even involed in it. Only if we're expecting to exceed an estimate by 20% do we conta…

Assuming that "the "manager" knows his 'stuffs', should know that TaskA requires 5 hours, and TaskB requires 1 hour. Now to that add a 20% for interruptions, emails, etc.

With my team(s) I (almost) always knew (more or less) the time for various tasks.

I was also expecting any feedback/'negotiation' to happen at the time of task assignment OR as soon as someone can see that deadline is at risk.

I know that Tasks from Tasks vary, but hey, this setup requires knowledge from both parties AND trust.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#106

Post by atrexler »

I wonder at how this would vary across industries and also company sizes. I'm surprised the study had positive results at a relatively large firm. I think its easy to imagine working-from-home gains in small firms and startups where typically there's a much stronger selection for highly motivated and enthusiastic people. It's not clear the same would result in a huge firm where you have less of that selection.

Also how does one measure productivity? (this is probably a naive question as a relative neophyte) An article I found on this says they were 13.5% "more efficient" but I'd love to get the details on what that means. Its a travel agency so are they just booking, scheduling, organizing, etc? Would love to see a similar study in a SW dev environment, alternately something less tech focused but collaborative...I dunno but something creative most likely.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#107

Post by netsharc »

thinkingemote wrote: post #104
atypeoferror wrote: post #54

Link to the actual paper: https://people.stanford.edu/nbloom/sites/default/files/wfh.p...

This really needs to be higher, and the paper actually read by us, as it addresses the nature of the work, the study size and methodology, as well as sociological issues. All things that these other comments speculate about Crucially it's not IT, the work is a call centre travel agency (and it's also in China). "First, the job of a call center employee is particularly suitable for telecommuting. It requires neither t…

Geez, a call-centre? I thought "virtual call centers" are common nowadays, i.e. you can be at home doing laundry, when the phone rings, it will say "Call for $COMPANY", you pick up and say "Hello, $COMPANY, Angela speaking, how may I help you?"...

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#108

Post by kccqzy »

ILikeConemowk wrote: post #32
kccqzy wrote: post #15

On the other hand, it is also imaginable that working at home away from everyone else makes communication harder, and more opaque. Or it can make you lonelier. Not every company has policies and culture that makes it conducive to work from home.

> lonelier How can being at home ever make you lonely when it gives you more time to focus on relationships that actually matter. Am I alone in thinking that those who expect any kind of meaningful bonding at work are misguided? Yeah, one can enjoy smalltalk and the like but I'd much rather change that for a chat with a friend or my dad early in the morning.

It's likely that you are the only one working from home in your household, so during working hours you are all by yourself.

By "relationships that really matter" I suppose you mean family. Those bonding happens outside of working hours anyways, so whether or not you work from home you can always relish those relationships.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#110

Post by JepZ »

What I find most interesting about this is the productivity boost coming not just from people working more, but also from fewer sick days.

> Additionally (and incredibly), employee attrition decreased by 50 percent among the telecommuters, they took shorter breaks, had fewer sick days, and took less time off.

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