The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Dur­ing an exper­i­ment that ran for nine months, they let half of the 252 vol­un­teer­ing trav­el-book­ers work­ing for China’s largest trav­el agency CTrip keep work­ing from the office and half to work from home (four out of five days a week) under the pre­con­di­tion that they had a fast inter­net con­nec­tion and a des­ig­nat­ed room to work in at home.

More focus and more done, but less climb­ing of career-ladders

Three of the results were par­tic­u­lar­ly interesting:

1. Those who worked from home got on aver­age 13% more work done — part­ly because they took short­er breaks and were home sick from work less, and part­ly because their work­ing envi­ron­ment was more silent and they found it eas­i­er to focus.
2. The num­ber of employ­ees who quit their jobs decreased by 50% amongst those who were allowed to work from home com­pared to those who con­tin­ued work­ing from the office.
3. But, those who worked from home were at a dis­ad­van­tage in terms of mak­ing advance­ments in their career. The pro­mo­tions in this group went down by 50% com­pared to the office-workers.

If it fits you, it real­ly fits you

Anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing aspect of the study was that after the exper­i­ment was con­clud­ed, half of the work-from-home-work­ers went back to work­ing only at the office. This was the half that did not do very well work­ing from home, which means that the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty sta­tis­tics for those who con­tin­ued doing so increased to 22% com­pared to the orig­i­nal group of office-work­ers (which com­pares to the 13% increase mea­sured when those who did not do well from home were still includ­ed in this group).

Do this

It might be dif­fi­cult to draw any final and gen­er­al con­clu­sions from this study since it was con­duct­ed using a group of test sub­jects who work in a pro­fes­sion with very spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics, some­thing which the researchers were sure to point out in the study. Their job did, for instance, not require them to col­lab­o­rate with oth­ers or be phys­i­cal­ly near those they per­form tasks for since con­tact with the trav­el­ers they serve occurs over the phone and via book­ing systems.

But, if you have tasks which could just as well be done when you are alone and which require your full atten­tion and focus for longer stretch­es of time to be done well, it appears as if you might be bet­ter off doing them from a home office (depend­ing on how calm things are at your house, that is).

If this set­up might suit you, why not try it? If it is not your deci­sion alone, ask for per­mis­sion to try it out. Per­haps you are one of those who would be so com­fort­able work­ing this way that your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty increas­es sig­nif­i­cant­ly — and your well­be­ing too.

But, nota bene: judg­ing by the study, work­ing from home every day is not the ide­al set­up — not if you want to be pro­mot­ed once in a while any­way. This is worth keep­ing in mind.

What’s your way?

Do you work from home from time to time? If so, what dif­fer­ence does it make to how you work and how pro­duc­tive you are? I would love to know. Please share your thoughts in an email to me.

(By the way, do you know how to show your col­leagues when you plan to work from home?)