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There's a large amount of working from home goes on,
at all levels of employment, from the call center people that we were dealing with,
who are reasonably lowly paid and not terribly skilled.
Up through programmers regularly work from home,
database administrators reg, regularly work from home.
Several of the most prominent Valley firms encourage managers to work from home.
And this is the first evidence we have about the efficacy of that.
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What we found was that working from home turned out to be a win-win.
The employees, the employees were happier because they
weren't having to commute an hour and a half a day.
The firm saved on real estate.
And the employees worked more and worked more efficiently.
More because saving time on commuting, they didn't have to
take time off to go to the dentist or take the kids to the doctor.
And more effectively because working at
home was quieter than working in a noisy call center.
So they didn't have to ask clients to repeat themselves.
The people who were working at home worked about 9% longer, a lot,
9% bigger share of their assigned eight hour shift.
They took smaller breaks and fewer hour, time off.
And they also were about 4% more effective.
So 13% gain and output.
Then once people were allowed to decide where they wanted to
work it jumped to 22%.
And a large part of this was that some people found though they
thought they wanted to work at home, they were just too lonely.
They wanted to get back to the office.
And so the people who chose to work from home, knowing what they were getting into,
were even more effective and more productive.
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Working from home works really well for some people, that, we've proven that.
In some people, in some companies, some jobs.
I don't think it necessarily would work well for
all people in all jobs at all times.
There's, the, the manager has to understand the tasks that
are involved in the job, understand the mechanisms that can be used to control and
motivate the employees who are working at home.
And has to understand the, the social implications.
A lot of our employees at Sea Trip became lonely and
didn't want to work at home any more.
You'd worry that in another context,
people who were not in frequent contact with one another would be less innovative.
You really just have to think through the individual situation.
And maybe run your own experiment.
What the CEO, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo's doing, isn't really much
about working from home or not working from home, it's about not working.
Yahoo has been a company in big trouble, in, in, a death spiral for several years.
And as I learned while being interviewed repeatedly about her,
her outlawing working from home.
The company just wasn't working and people weren't working.
People who were nominally working from home were, in fact,
setting up their own companies on, on Yahoo's time.
And the culture at Yahoo had become really dysfunctional.
And what I see her doing is trying to change the culture.
To save the company and, and that's, this is one element of it.
She's got, you've got to do that face to face.
You can't do that over, over email.
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If workers want to, want to experiment with working from home
one of the things to do is to approach the boss with, with some data.
And the old data is a start but
this new data is, is gold standard stuff.
How much you wanna rely on our work rather than
other stuff may depend a lot on how much your job looks like the call centers.
Where the bosses can be sure that you'll be motivated to,
to work once you're home and
not to sit around in your bathrobe and play Angry Birds.
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Now this is an area where there's been really no scientific research at all.
There's surveys and there's case studies.
But you never have any idea what's really cause and effect in a situation like that.
Whereas here, because of the randomization, we could pretty well ensure
that that the changes we saw were driven by the changes in the management practice.
And any time you find management, good evidence that management really works, for
somebody who's spent 40 plus years teaching management, that's,
that's a good day.
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