Working from home has got a bad rap. Many people seem to think it’s a way to avoid hard working by getting out from under management’s watchful eyes. Indeed, few pundits seemed to object when Yahoo, IBM and Aetna rolled back their work-from-home policies.
Indeed, working from home seems like heresy if believe in the “collaborative, innovative workplace” idea, or (as I call it) the “let’s-force-everyone-to-work-in-an-office-that-looks-like-a-hotel-lobby-from-outer-space” management fad.
Well, the Open Plan Office Nazis have it all wrong, according to Stanford Professor of Economics Nicholas Bloom. (Kudos to Qz.com for calling my attention to Bloom’s incredibly entertaining TED talk.)
In his TED talk, Bloom explains that work-from-home is as potentially as powerful and innovative as the driverless car. And he’s dead serious.
As evidence, Bloom cites a Singapore firm where half of the staff worked from home for 4 days a week while the other half came into the office 5 days a week.
The two-year study revealed that the employees who worked from home had a “massive, massive” (Bloom’s words) increase in productivity–almost equivalent to an additional workday–primarily because of fewer distractions and fewer pointless conversations.
The work-from-home employees also tended to remain in their jobs longer, thereby decreasing employee turnover, which (of course) drains management productivity and which results in an expensive loss of skills and connections when an employee quits.
Finally, the work-from-home employees were happier and therefore healthier, thereby reducing sick days, reducing absenteeism (and people coming into work with contagious colds and flu), all of which decreased the company’s overall healthcare expenses.
The experiment–which lasted two years–was so successful that the company instituted work-from-home throughout the company, which also (as a side benefit) allowed the company to grow without adding expensive office space.
These results echo a recent Gallup study showing that employees who work from home 3 to 4 days a weekare far more likely (41% vs 30%) to “feel engaged” and far less likely (48% vs 55%) to feel “not engaged” than people who report to the office each day.
So there you have it. Companies that are forcing employees to come into their glitzy but noisy and distracting open plan offices would be much better off if they instead let their employees work from home most of the time.
To which I say: duh.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.