Companies are reaping rewards by embracing remote work
By Shelly Strom, for Liveops
Current trends signal a future where work from home options become the commonly accepted standard over the 9-5 office jobs of the past. While almost all workers across the nation and globe are elated by this movement, companies and organizations have high expectations for output as an outcome, and for good reason.
A study featured in Harvard Business Review looked at call center workers who worked from home versus those in the brick and mortar. The work-at-home arrangements led to higher productivity, which generated an estimated savings of $1,900 over the nine-month study. While the dollar amount might not sound like much, the hours add up to an extra workday a week.
“We found that people working from home completed 13.5 percent more calls than the staff in the office did,” said Stanford University Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom. Bloom, quoted in the article.
The people working from home “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,” Bloom said. He attributed the productivity increase to a quieter environment where processing calls is easier. “At home, people don’t experience what we call the ‘cake in the break room’ effect,” he said. Read more.