The remote work experiment that upped productivity 13% – By Bryan Lufkin (BBC) / July 13 2020
For some, working from home is distracting and draining. But one pioneering study that has new relevance found that working from home one day a week boosted output by 13%.
This story is from Curing Our Positivity Problem, an episode of BBC Sounds. It was presented by Sangita Myska and produced by Sarah Shebbeare. To listen to more episodes of BBC Sounds, click here. Adapted by Bryan Lufkin.
Amid the Covid-19 crisis, working from home has become run of the mill for many. But even as remote work has normalised, it’s a recent development: doing your job from your couch was less mainstream before the coronavirus – and even stigmatised.
“Have you punched into Google image search, ‘working from home’, and looked at the top 20 images? They’re basically naked people, a guy drinking champagne in what looks like a jacuzzi. I mean, almost none of them are positive images,” says Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University in California. He’s made a career out of studying work practices, including remote work. And he thinks the attitudes around working from home are finally changing.
“One silver lining with the Covid pandemic: it’s going to kickstart working from home [moving from the] fringe to a mainstream technology that is commonly used across the country,” he says. That process is already under way; firms including Fujitsu and Twitter have already announced plans to make remote work a permanent option, even after the pandemic.
A study Bloom did back in 2013 somewhat forecast this trend: in his experiment, Bloom worked with a Chinese company to study remote-work productivity. Somewhat to Bloom’s surprise, the company’s staff became notably more productive by working from home four days a week.
Continue to article: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200710-the-remote-work-experiment-that-made-staff-more-productive
