A glamorous life
The company I work for has offices in:
- Cambridgeshire
- Essex
- Greater Manchester
- Merseyside
- Sussex
- Tyne and Wear
- Yorkshire
As an ops guy I get to visit them all. If I am lucky I get invited to London to talk strategy as well. I spend my life on a train. Being part of the train-set isn’t quite as chic as being part of the jet-set.
There is an upside. A couple of days a week I hand in my rail pass and work from home.
An easy life
There are two opposing points of view about home-workers:
- They get their heads down and graft, there are no distractions. Because they don’t commute they start earlier and finish later. Home-workers are hugely productive.
- They are a bunch of idle gits. There is nobody checking up on them, so they spend their hours watching daytime TV in their slippers. Home-workers are a bunch of slackers.
I like to think that the more enlightened among us hold the first opinion, whilst the second is a little medieval, but what do I know?
Am I an idle git?
A company in China decided to find out if working from home is a good thing or not.
Ctrip are a NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency with sixteen thousand employees. They asked their call centre staff if they would like to take part in a home-working experiment. After checking a couple of qualifying factors (availability of home broad band and a quiet place to work) Ctrip managers selected a trial pool of employees and randomly assigned them to two groups. A home-working population and a control group who stayed in the office.
Then for 9 months they ran a trial and measured its performance.
The results
What they discovered was quite startling. Employees who worked from home put in 9% more hours per shift (fewer breaks and time off sick). They also answered 4% more calls per hour (this was attributed to a quieter, more convenient working environment).
A 13% increase in productivity isn’t to be sniffed at, but there was more. Staff attrition fell by 50% and, of course, the company saved the cost of office space.
The trial was so successful that Ctrip offered home-working as an option to all employees.
Side effects
Interestingly this policy led in turn to a couple more spin-off benefits.
- Ctrip were wise enough to offer staff a choice. Some decided that home-working wasn’t for them (they didn’t like the loneliness) and returned to the office. However there was a further productivity rise to 22% for the staff who self selected to work from home.
- Ctrip also increased the geographical base of its hiring activity. It started offering home-working contracts in other (lower wage) areas of the country.
The study (which you can read here) doesn’t say what the overall productivity improvement was. When I factor in all the improvements I suspect home-working was between 33% and 50% more productive than working in an office.
So I’m not a lazy slob
Maybe not, but arguably what is true for Chinese call centre staff isn’t the same for British middle managers.
Experiments are a wonderful thing
Nobody would ever have guessed that a home-working trial would have boosted productivity by over 30%.
What would your company have done? Would it have set up a robust statistical test, run a trial and measured the outcome? Or would it have stuck with its gut instinct and carried on with its medieval practices?
Experiments are only wonderful if you run them.
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Read another opinion
Image by Michael R
Hello James,
When I have real work to get done – requires concentration, no interruptions, thinking, producing something – I work from home. And that which needs doing gets done. When there is little or no work to do I go to the office – I chat to folks, go to meetings, go for lunch with colleagues…. The beauty of this approach is that when I am in the office the assumption is that I am working.
Up to now I had thought I was the only one. The other day one of my team had nothing to do and was not going to have anything to do for a day or so. So I suggested he work from home. His response? “I only work from home when it is obvious to all that I have work to do and I can show that I have delivered something tangible at the end of the work day. When I have little or nothing to do I come into the office!”
Upon probing further, many of us get that it is a privilege to work from home. And thus are keen not to abuse it.
All the best to you. I hope all is well with you.
Maz
Hi Maz
If you don’t have real work to get done – requires concentration, no interruptions, thinking, producing something – then should you be doing it at all?!
Matt
I guess that depends on wether or not somebody is paying for it Matt :)
I have always said that I get more done in six hours working from home than 10 hours in the office. Glad to see the experiment proved out this level of productivity and didn’t show that folks were home doing laundry and watching TV! I think offering the option is a fair solution.
Annette :-)