Dear employers, letting your employees work from home will make them more productive!

Does your manager get annoyed whenever you ask for work-from-home option? Or your company believes that working from home reduces an employee’s productivity and only offers full-time employment. Well, Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom conducted a study to figure out how work-from-home impacts an employee’s performance and had some insightful findings to share.

Bloom divided 500 employees of a company into two groups. The first batch of workers continued working from the office headquarters while the others were allowed to work from home. The latter batch had one private room in their house to work from, broadband access and at least six months tenure with the organisation.

Interestingly, the study pointed a excellent productivity boost in telecommuters’ work. The reason? These participants found it easier to focus on work at home. In fact, they worked a full-shift in comparison to the other employees who arrived office late or left early in the evening multiple times in a week.

Surprisingly, the attribution rate of the employees who worked from home dropped by 50 per cent, and they took shorter breaks and fewer sick leaves. Also, this led to less carbon emission as they did not have to commute to the office every day. Indeed, a win-win situation!

Apart from better work productivity, the company saved 2000 dollars (that’s around 1,42,620 INR!) per employee in this two-year study because it significantly reduced the amount spent on renting the office headquarters.

However, the telecommuters complained about ‘too much isolation’ and more than 50 per cent of them were not interested in working from home every day of the month.