
Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment (2013) - brownbat
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18871
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rgbrenner
Sometimes I think of the work from home debate as a variation on the closed
door issue... forgot who said it: the person with the door closed gets more
work done in the short term, but in the long term seems to work on slightly
the wrong thing (because of reduced communication).

Working from home is very similar to working with the door closed.

~~~
beefsack
I don't think it's correct to assume that working from home results in reduced
communication, communication takes on different forms but good communication
out of the office is equally as much of a challenge as good communication
inside the office.

Both require a smart approach to communication, both are negatively affected
by too little or too much.

The best thing we did outside the office was short term to-do lists in Trello
(one list per team member, limited to around 5-6 items for the day.) This has
a lot of the benefits of a stand-up meeting, but is very useful because it's
updated through the day and you can easily see what everyone's working on
right now. We use this to complement our task management system (Jira) and
have been very happy with the results so far.

Apart from that, the rest of our communication requirements are covered with
Google Apps (email, groups, chat, video hangouts with screen sharing for adhoc
comms and meetings) and we haven't had any more communication issues than when
we used to all be in the office together.

~~~
qwer
> good communication out of the office is equally as much of a challenge as
> good communication inside the office

Working from home may have a bunch of advantages, but it's pretty tough to
believe that it's anywhere near equal in your ability to communicate. Even if
you had a permanent skype/hangouts connection, you still have a much lower
fidelity communication medium than face-to-face.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
It depends on the company. As a remote worker at a 90% remote tech company of
~1000 employees, I have experienced much better communication here than at any
other 90% in-office tech company of similar size.

The key here is "good" communication. A 90% in-office company will have lots
more communication than a 90% remote company. But hardly any of that
communication is getting written down, recorded, or shared among potential
stakeholders (on a an internal mailing list, IRC channel, or video meeting for
example). A 90% remote company communicates in ways that are more inclusive,
robust, and efficient.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
A thousand workers, 90% remote - wow! Can you tell us more? Does the company
have any official comment on this (presumably it's a fairly fundamental tenet
for the owners?)

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davidgerard
I'm a Unix sysadmin in London, paid about £50k (a pretty middling salary for
the job). I need to work from home on an ad-hoc basis, due to a chronically
ill partner and a small child to take care of - typically a day or two a week.
Frankly, the ad-hoc WFH is work £10-15k on its own.

I've had entire months done from home when it was necessary. This requires a
much more organised approach than just staggering along to the office and
working on autopilot. Communication is something you need to make damn sure
you actively pursue. I have had the disconcertingly strange thought "it's
Monday 9am, damn I wish I was at the office right now ..." because Monday is a
_very effective day_ to show up around our work and liaise with people in real
time.

I have a natural tendency to be a surly asshole. So one of the most productive
things I've ever done in my job is to treat public relations as about half the
job (which it is) and every email like a communication to a friendly but
incisive journalist. This has worked out _really well_.

tl;dr If you want your work from home to work out, COMMUNICATE. COMMUNICATE.
COMMUNICATE.

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visos
tl;dr:

"Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned to work
from home or in the office for 9 months. Home working led to a 13% performance
increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer
breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a
quieter working environment).

Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less
turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. "

Pay attention to the last sentence.

~~~
hobs
The study just reinforces what everyone knows after working a few places with
office politics, that promotions for performance (and raises) are often due to
how much people like the recipient.

When you just do your job and don't socialize, it is significantly harder to
get promoted.

~~~
cariaso
Remote is not the route to promotion. It does many have other benefits. Make
this choice consciously.

~~~
jasondemeuse
Maybe in a big company that doesn't have a majority of remote workers or
somewhere that remote is a new concept. The company where I work is ~70%
remote and has been since the beginning and there has never been an issue with
promotions dependent on being the office or not. A lot of this may have to do
with our relatively flat hierarchy though, a "promotion" with us is mostly a
raise and going from Junior dev to Senior dev, and the only positions "higher"
than that are executives. I definitely could imagine PM type positions being
harder to get as a remote employee.

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mariojv
I've seen the pros/cons of working from home.

At my current job I can choose whether to work from home or not. Some days
I'll spend the whole days at the office, some days I'll spend at home, and
sometimes I'll do half and half. I like the "half and half" strategy because
it gets some time in for the organic discussions that happen and the office
and time for serious work that is better with silence.

Tried working from home for two weeks straight, and I just got cabin fever.
Ironically it may be more difficult for introverts to work from home for long
periods since they may be less likely to try to maintain contacts outside of
work.

It helps if the workforce is really distributed. Before, a few on the core
team were in the office, but the other lead on the project was in a city about
an hour away, and we had others working out of two other states and Nova
Scotia. Now, I'm separated from a different team by a few time zones, and the
only ones in the office are new to the team, so I expect to be working from
home more. It's also mostly open-source work, so I wouldn't interact with most
collaborators in-person anyway.

Regardless of personal pros/cons, it's good for an organization to allow work
from home so that they get access to a larger talent pool. It may be harder
with a startup, but that's just speculation on my part.

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me_myself_and_I
I've been working full time both from an office and from home. Too much time
spent in both places can be stressful, for me at least.

I feel less motivated from home after a while, since being surrounded by co-
workers keeps me focus on completing objectives.

If I have to choose, I'd work neither from home or an office, but in a co-
working space. A coffee shop would do as well :)

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lsc
for me? I get a _lot_ more done in the office, not because I work more
effectively, but because I put in more hours. There is social pressure to
work, so I'm not spending my time on, hah, hacker news. When I work from home,
I generally put in way fewer hours, because I do visit hacker news, and that
ain't work. I don't lie about my hours; I'm a contractor, and I just put a
much smaller number on my timesheet; but for most employers? that's no
consolation. They've budgeted X; charging them less than X doesn't really help
them. giving them less work than they budgeted for does hurt them.

If I go to work? Being in the office puts me under social pressure to actually
work. I put in a lot more hours. And yeah, you get some of my suboptimal hours
when I'm having a hard time focusing, but for most employers? they seem to
prefer that to just getting a few of my best hours in the working from home
situation.

On the other hand, for me? callcenter work would be pretty perfect for working
from home, because I'm not going to wander off while I'm on the phone with
someone. Work is driven by the pressure from the person on the other end of
the phone.

From that perspective, this experiment might not carry over to programming
work for the sort of people who have a hard time focusing.

Note: most "We work 80 hours a week" environments, where people hang out and
read facebook or what have you at work, are just as bad for me as being at
home, because if the people around me aren't working, then there's no pressure
for _me_ to work, and in that case, you might as well save the money on the
office, again, unless it is interrupt driven work. I'd do fine in that sort of
office if I'm IT or some other job where someone comes up to me and asks me to
help them solve something quick.

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jimworm
I've been working remotely for the past three years. The greatest benefit was
time saved from the lack of commute. Work requiring deep concentration is a
lot easier, but I found it harder to influence others in the company not
within my team. There isn't an adequate replacement for chats in the kitchen
during breaks, where engineers can mingle with finance/marketing/etc in a
casual environment.

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wodenokoto
As a grad student working on my thesis, I totally understand why my future
boss doesn't want me to work from home.

How do you guys do this?

~~~
bornabox
Thesis is gruesome work, at least to some extent. Your job hopefully will be
something you enjoy. And having worked first in an office for a few years, you
end up appreciating working remotely much more...

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zhte415
Not in the article, but hugely relevant: "Take care of your own time, just be
here when I need you." Practical advice, and with meetings planned in advance
perfectly actionable.

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paulhauggis
It has worked for me for the past 5 years. I no longer work for anyone, but
when I did, I was able to get a lot more work done. With no commute time, I
saved money on gas as well.

The downside is that I never really got to know my co-workers or manager and
when I had issues with the boss, I could never see if my manager had my back
because of the lack of face-to-face communication. We were also all in
different states and many in different countries.

Real human contact still can't be fully replaced by Text messages or Skype.
The plus was that it made it really easy for me to quit when my own business
took off because I really didn't feel any emotional attachment to my job.

~~~
lucaspiller
I've been working remotely full-time for the past 2 years, and before that I
took regular breaks of a week or two, to work outside of the office.

I get a lot more done when I'm outside of the office. I track the time of how
much actual work I do, and it is regularly 7 or 8 hours a day - I never did
this much work in the office. You need self discipline to do this, but I find
it's a lot easier to work from home as there are too many distractions in an
office that were outside of my control. Working in an office with set hours I
felt compelled to stay until 6pm even if I didn't feel like doing anything
productive, now I'm free to take a break for an hour or so to recharge and
continue working afterwards (yes, taking a break does help!).

I think whether communication is going to be a problem or not is very
dependant on your company culture. The company I worked for when I first
started working remotely did everything face-to-face and hardly anything was
written down, as such it was hard. I'm now working for a company with various
offices and remote workers worldwide, my team is distributed across 5
different timezones (with a 13.5 hour difference), and it works a lot better.
We have daily standups and bi-weekly planning meetings (over Skype, just
audio), if something isn't clear we just have an impromptu 5 minute call. We
use JIRA and Confluence which are both pretty horrible, but it's good to know
that there is one place to find everything and exactly what is going on.

I don't feel the real human element is an issue. Work has always been separate
from the rest of my life, so I have always had friends outside of work.

~~~
technomancy
> I don't feel the real human element is an issue.

I've been remote since 2009, and sometimes the team dynamics can get a bit
rocky. Having a regular (2-4x a year) meeting where all the remotes on a team
come face to face does wonders to address this. It's worked best for me when
the team rents out a whole house and spends a week together working out of it
and cooking for each other. Lots of fun, and you get a much better feeling for
each others' sense of humor, etc.

~~~
danieltillett
This is a great idea. Do you guys rent in a holiday location neutral to you
all or rotate the location around your home areas?

~~~
toomuchtodo
On the remote team I'm on, we all vote on the location each time.

~~~
danieltillett
Well then I hope you vote for great locations :) Hats off to ever thought of
this :)

