Home workers more productive, study finds

New evidence has come to the support of those who claim they are more productive when they work from home.

It is a luxury that many people want but not all workers are lucky enough to get. However, debate has always existed as to whether employees will get more done from their home or from their desk - now new research has suggested home workers come out on top.

A global study by Nicholas Bloom and John Roberts of Stanford University, focused on 250 employees from China's biggest travel agency, Ctrip. The research came about because Ctrip wanted to test a home working policy both to reduce office costs, which were becoming an increasingly high percentage of total costs due to rising rents at the firm’s Shanghai base, and to reduce the firm’s high annual rate of staff turnover, which stood at around 50 per cent.

The company had been concerned that allowing employees to work from their homes would be detrimental to their productivity. To examine if this was the case, staff's productivity, including the number of sales they made and the quality of their interaction with customers, and the number of sick days they took was tracked over the course of nine months.

The results of the study found that the performance of the home-workers went up dramatically, increasing by 13 per cent over the period. This increase in output came mainly from a rise in the number of minutes they worked during each shift, which was due to a reduction in the number of breaks and sick days that they took.

Furthermore, staff turnover fell sharply for the home-workers, dropping by almost 50 per cent compared to the control group. This was because home-workers reported substantially higher work satisfaction and less “work exhaustion” in a psychological attitudes survey.

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