Work From Home People Earn More, Quit Less, and Are Happier Than Their Office-bound Counterparts (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Working from home gets a bad rap. Google the phrase and examine the results -- you'll see scams or low-level jobs, followed by links calling out "legitimate" virtual jobs. But Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Nicholas Bloom says requiring employees to be in the office is an outdated work tradition, set up during the Industrial Revolution. Such inflexibility ignores today's sophisticated communications methods and long commutes, and actually hurts firms and employees. "Working from home is a future-looking technology," Bloom told an audience during a conference, which took place in April. "I think it has enormous potential." To test his claim, Bloom studied China's largest travel agency, Ctrip. Headquartered in Shanghai, the company has 20,000 employees and a market capitalization of about $20 billion. The company's leaders -- conscious of how expensive real estate is in Shanghai -- were interested in the impact of working from home. Could they continue to grow while avoiding exorbitant office space costs? They solicited worker volunteers for a study in which half worked from home for nine months, coming into the office one day a week, and half worked only from the office. Bloom tracked these two groups for about two years. The results? "We found massive, massive improvement in performance -- a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home," Bloom says.

Comments

Re:Maybe for a travel agency

[cayenne8]

For the past approx. 5+ years, I've been working on a contract gig, large federal govt. agency.....from home.

Everyone on the teams, work remotely, all across the US, and there is NO problem in getting things done.

This is all IT work. Servers are in data centers we hit remotely, we have teleconferences for meetings...IM for screen shares if needed.

It works great. No problems her, and yet...most of the folks I work with, I have no idea what they look like, or anything about them other than their voices.

Frankly, I LOVE this work mode. I do my job, I'm home for package deliveries (no more getting stolen off porch)...you can be doing things around the house even while on conference calls (yay for headsets)....

And my commute is a blistering walk across the hall from my bedroom to my office.

Frankly, I get MUCH more done at home these days, than I did in the office....and doing it as a contractor is great as that I get to bill for all hours worked.

Sure, I'm available more often...but I always get paid for it too.

Reminds, me, I need to check with my CPA to see if I can write off boxer shorts and t-shirts as work attire.

:)