Nicholas Bloom
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW - From the January–February 2014 Issue
The study: Nicholas Bloom and graduate student James
Liang, who is also a cofounder of the Chinese travel website Ctrip, gave
the staff at Ctrip’s call center the opportunity to volunteer to work
from home for nine months. Half the volunteers were allowed to
telecommute; the rest remained in the office as a control group. Survey
responses and performance data collected at the conclusion of the study
revealed that, in comparison with the employees who came into the
office, the at-home workers were not only happier and less likely to
quit but also more productive.
The challenge: Should more of us be doing our jobs
in our pajamas? Would the performance of employees actually improve if
companies let them stay home? Professor Bloom, defend your research.
Bloom: The
results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could
save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that
the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when
employees left the discipline of the office environment. Instead, we
found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the
staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a
week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the
office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers
reported much higher job satisfaction.
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