
Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment - cwan
http://www.econ.brown.edu/econ/events/bloom.pdf
======
varelse
As someone who has mostly worked from home for the past decade:

1) Really long commutes for the sake of my butt keeping a seat warm to keep a
manager happy are dealbreakers. I have never made such a job work out for me.
At the most recent example, my brief position at Google involved a 1-hour
commute each way only to spend 8-10 hours in a dead-silent office, where no
one significantly interacted and for which I was forbidden to telecommute by
my mostly absentee manager, ever. Loved the food and the gym though.

2) Working at home 3-4 days a week is productivity Nirvana for me leading to
patents, promotions and pay raises lather rinse repeat.

3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of
isolation and depression.

4) Despite #3, I prefer to do crunch mode work in isolation because I'm easily
startled and prone to the excessive use of colorful metaphors when under the
gun. My cat doesn't mind. My dog doesn't care. But I suspect coworkers in
proximity would fear for their lives.

~~~
Osiris
_3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of
isolation and depression._

I did that for about three months straight and I agree with the assessment. At
my new job I work 3-4 days a week in the office and 1-2 days at home. I find a
mix of office and home to be a good balance, though I do find the commute an
utter waste of time.

~~~
EvanKelly
Is this the case with an active social life as well? I don't find that most of
my socializing and interaction comes from my co-workers (who are significantly
out of my age range).

I've never worked from home, but I'd really like to. I like to think as long
as I still socialized after work (happy hour type stuff, kickball league,
etc.) I wouldn't feel the isolation and depression.

~~~
pault
You underestimate how much of your social interaction comes from your
coworkers. I've been remote for 3 years now, and my social network has
atrophied to nothing, with the exception of some superficial interactions on
facebook with people I used to see every day. To be fair, I have been
traveling pretty consistently since I started this arrangement, and nobody
wants to be friends with a transient. I mostly cope by working out several
hours per day, but I'm at the end of my rope and all I really want is to
settle down (as soon as I find a mid-sized city with year-round perfect
weather, cheap cost of living, and a thriving community of creative technical
professionals ;)

edit: That being said, I'm not sure I would be able to return to regular
office work and all the social posturing that comes along with it.

~~~
EvanKelly
I certainly interact with my co-workers at work and talk about the normal
stuff (sports, news, politics, etc.), but outside of work I see my co-workers
0% of the time, unless I coincidentally run into them.

My outside of work socializing is simply people I've either met on my own or
through the 2-3 people I knew in the city befor I moved here 2 years ago.

I would recommend Honolulu for your relocation, but cost of living is a little
steep (but manageable...and worth it) and our tech community is definitely in
the development stage (though it is existent and fairly active).

EDIT: I want to clarify that I probably do underestimate the benefit of my
work interactions. The reason I go out and socialize so much is that I find
myself feeling isolated and lonely on nights/weekends where I choose to stay
in.

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aristidb
Gotta applaud this Chinese firm for using scientific experiments rather than
gut feeling to decide on important policies.

However, please don't take far-ranging conclusions from this experiment. Call-
center work is a fairly specific type of work with extreme values of "noise"
and "distraction". For other kinds of work, the results might end up vastly
differently.

(Also, the Chrome spelling correction sucks. Just sayin'.)

~~~
freehunter
I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration
from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this
quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be
for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work.
Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming
(or other engineering) at a corporation, and I need significant face-time with
my coworkers and people outside of my team just to get the most basic work
done. As an anecdote, I get significantly less work done on the one day a week
(today) when 90% of my coworkers work from home just due to the fact that I
often need to collaborate with them.

(Also, I've often wondered why Chrome's spell checker can mark a word as
wrong, but when I copy it into Google search, Google knows it's spelled right.
Should be the same system, I would think. The word uninstall comes to mind, I
see that red squiggly right now.)

~~~
Osiris
It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience.
When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a
significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at
work just to block out the noise.

In addition, I sit right next to a QA guy that works on my product and I can
easy waste half a day dealing with his issues and questions.

I find that I get significantly more work done while at home because I don't
have the distraction of coworkers tying up my time. I also find I tend to put
in at least an hour more a day because I work when I would normally be
commuting.

~~~
varelse
My experiences are similar. But I suspect putting in a day or two a week
listening to your QA guy might be a good thing in the long term.

~~~
Osiris
It has it's pros and cons, that's for sure. In some ways it's very good and in
other ways it can be distracting.

------
phuff
I frequently speak with people in my neighborhood about my experience of
working from home, and they say: "I don't think I could handle it."

For me, it's just a different type of distraction. When I got bored when
working in an office, I would take a break, go get a drink, walk around and
see what everybody else was up to, and then go back to work refreshed.

From home, when I get bored, I get up, get a drink of water, play with my kids
for a couple of minutes and then go back to work refreshed.

All that being said, I'm not sure this particular study has much to say in the
way of helping those of us who do knowledge work from home. Call center work
seems like it's different enough that I can see the type of work invalidating
the applicability of this particular study to our particular line of work.

~~~
stephengillie
Call centers are a very different type of work than most office work. And
different types of call center work have very different implications. The
company involved in this study was _CTrip – China’s largest travel agency_. [I
think] Travel agencies are usually speaking with happy customers planning
vacations. Tech support, customer service, and telemarketing call center
employees would have had a _significant_ reduction in utilization in this
study.

------
nostromo
Here's the payload for those not wanting to hunt for it in the paper:

"We find a highly significant 12% increase in performance from home-working,
of which 8% is from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks
and sick-days) and 3% from higher performance per minute. We find no negative
spillovers onto workers left in the office. Home workers also reported
substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and
their job attrition rates fell by over 50%."

~~~
mc32
Somewhere (can't recall) it was said that those who predominantly worked from
home, while effective as a workforce, suffered from lack of visibility and
thus tended to not get raises or promotions as much as those who remained in
the office (I assume this was normalized for responsibility/position).

~~~
mhurron
IIRC that was mentioned here and was most likely to occur in teams where just
a few worked remotely while the majority came into the office and interacted
with management. The same thing will happen if you come to work, quietly do
your job, quietly leave and don't interact with management.

Management won't promote the person they don't remember.

------
the_cat_kittles
I wonder how much improvement in morale can be attributed to not having a
commute. I wonder if people who have a short walk to work are even happier
than people who work from home, broadly speaking.

~~~
jaggederest
I can't find a citation, but I believe that I read that a 20 minute addition
to your commute has the same long-term quality of life impact as losing
function in a limb.

This is for two reasons: firstly, the long term impact of losing function in a
limb is far less than people think, and the long term impact of an increased
commute is far more than people think.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I'm having trouble seeing that. When the company I worked for moved 15 miles
closer to home, my commute dropped from about an hour to less than 10 minutes.
It had very little impact on my QOL.

Likewise, when I decided to move 20 minutes farther away, my QOL actually
improved, since I liked the area I lived in much more and there was more stuff
to do after work.

~~~
ryguytilidie
How could having nearly 2 hours extra each day NOT improve your QOL? That
really surprises me.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Because when it was taking me 1 hour to get to work it was about 20 minutes
walking to train station, wait 5-10 mins for train, 20 minute train ride
reading books/magazines, 5-10 minute walk to work. Fairly enjoyable.

After the move, it was about a 7-12 minute drive to work. Much shorter, but I
liked being able to walk before and I could read or nap on the train. Had I
been driving to work (instead of taking the train) before, it would have been
a 1-2 hour stressful commute in heavy traffic.

As I read what I just wrote, I wonder if the reason for the "loss of limb"
comparison is that the 20 minute commute they used as a reference is in heavy
traffic. I have a 35-45 minute drive to work 2x a day now and again, dropping
it to 15 minutes wouldn't be a big deal for me, but it is a very relaxing
commute mostly along country roads where I get to drive at a consistently high
speed.

------
abraxasz
Interesting initiative, but I see many issues in the study:

\- As others have mentioned, it is not generalizable to other types of jobs.
Call-center work may be improved when working from home, but what about other
types of jobs requiring more interaction/communication

\- But the biggest issue I see is with their mention of a "Randomized
experiment". Well, technically it is randomized _among those who volunteered_
for the experiment. So from a causal inference perspective, the results
generalize only to the population of employees who volunteered, not to the
entire company.

More generally, one of the problems with these types of study is that the best
it can give is an average gain from home working. But suppose the gain is
null. It doesn't mean that this is not a viable option. Maybe there is a huge
variance in the gain, depending on the individuals: maybe the gain in
productivity is huge for some employees, while it is negative for some others.
This could depend on the employee's self-discipline (whatever that means), his
family situation (single/married, how many kids), where he leaves, is he
introvert, etc... A useful study would be to randomized the assignment,
stratifying by according to these covariates, in order to learn more about
their effect on the performance of the employees.

------
vasco
"The frequency of working from home has been rising rapidly in the US"

I don't understand why they even mention the USA. Do they try to extrapolate
that USA workers would react the same way Chinese workers did? I'm don't know
if they would but it is reasonable to fear that the very different cultural
environment could affect results. Or not, we don't know. Hence my question.

~~~
patrikmcguire
A lot of classical psych studies get completely different results when run in
non-Western societies (I'd link but Wikipedia cites a print publication |:).
There's a tendency to view everything in the West as "the default" and
deviations from that as culture bound. So to answer your question, it would be
a pretty tenuous extrapolation from Chinese to American workers.

------
tastive
I hope this is followed by similar studies for teleworkers in different
professions. This specific study isn't generalize-able; it focuses on
teleworkers where work units come directly to workers in short, easily
measured spurts (unlike most IT positions, which often involve multi-day
tasks).

The next step is to perform the same sort of analysis where workers complete
multi-day projects and communicate asynchronously with co-workers (email,
issue trackers). Workers that only WFH one or a few days a week (as opposed to
all the time or none) are also worth looking at; instinctually, I'd think this
group would be the most abusive.

Further, it sounds like the telework involved is relatively pleasant -- CTrip
is a travel agency, which I imagine involves happier customer calls than ones
to the phone company. The study might not even be representative of all call-
answering telework in China, which is a pretty narrow focus.

------
jmadsen
I tend to reply to "Does working from Home work?" with "Does working from Work
work?"

Having spent a few years in a corporate environment, and many more as a
consultant in other people's corporate environments, I can tell you first hand
that the amount of work you do has very little to do with where your chair is
located.

Either you are the type of person who gets stuff done, or you aren't.

There are huge distractions everywhere you go. People who get things done
incorporate them into their schedules & stay productive. Others use them as a
welcome escape from actually working.

That said, home workers are 1) monitored more closely and 2) fresher from not
having to deal with commutes, so no surprise to see the numbers show them as
"more productive"

~~~
enraged_camel
Your post comes across as very cynical, and I disagree with it completely. The
type of environment someone is in _always_ has an effect on their
productivity. In my case this effect is huge. For example, I build software
demos for a living (Sales Engineer at a software company), which requires big
chunks of uninterrupted time. I cannot find that at work, even with noise-
canceling headphones. If I'm at home though, or even a coffee shop, I get in
"The Zone" very easily and can stay in it for quite a while before needing a
break. This way, I've built demos in one day that would otherwise have taken
me over a week.

------
zumbojo
The most recent Freakonomics on Marketplace segment focused on this study:

[http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-...](http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-
in-the-breakroom-a-new-marketplace-podcast/)

------
forgottenpaswrd
In my opinion, as a a worker from home now for several years it is the best
thing ever.

BUT, it is a skill that you have to learn. I had to read and watch-attend many
productivity programs for "getting it".

Probably I will get a job teaching people how to do it in the future, because
as networking speeds increase to Gygabits/second (thing google fiber in every
house ten years from now), having instant hidef video would mean even more
jobs would be possible from home.

------
enraged_camel
Another benefit of working from home is not having to worry about preparation
rituals such as shaving or making sure you have clothes to wear. These are
fairly important for me. On rare occasions I get to work from home, I find
that being able to jump straight to work after I finish my breakfast is very
refreshing. Said breakfast also tastes better since I had more time to prepare
it.

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lurkinggrue
I seems to work more when I am home.

