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Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t your typical office worker. He was No. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. But there’s at least one thing Zuckerberg has in common with many other workers: he seems to like working from home. In an internal memo, which made its way to the Wall Street Journal , as Facebook announced plans to offer increased flexibility to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he would work remotely for at least half the year.
“Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” Zuckerberg wrote. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebook’s employees to be fully remote within the next decade.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage in many countries, and variants are complicating the picture, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, people are desperate for life to return to normal—everywhere but the office. After more than a year at home, some employees are keen to return to their workplaces and colleagues. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Somewhere between their bedrooms and kitchens, they have established new models of work-life balance they are loath to give up.
This has left some companies trying to recreate their work policies, determining how best to handle a workforce that in many cases is demanding more flexibility. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Goldman’s CEO David Solomon, in February, called working from home an “aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.” And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said of exclusively remote work: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”
This pivotal feature of pandemic life has accelerated a long-running debate: What do employers and employees lose and gain through remote work? In which setting—the office or the home—are employees more productive? Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. But this giant, forced experiment has only just begun.
A persistent sticking point in this debate has been productivity. Back in 2001, a group of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, led by Robert E. Kraut , wrote that “collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than collaboration when members of a work group are collocated.” Two decades later, this statement remains part of today’s discussion.
However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that “dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration.” For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.
Two decades later, remote-work technology is far more developed. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that, even in pre-pandemic 2019, more than 26 million Americans—approximately 16 percent of the total US workforce—worked remotely on an average day. The Pew Research Center put that pre-pandemic number at 20 percent, and in December 2020 reported that 71 percent of workers whose responsibilities allowed them to work from home were doing so all or most of the time.
The sentiment toward and effectiveness of remote work depend on the industry involved. It makes sense that executives working in and promoting social media are comfortable connecting with others online, while those in industries in which deals are typically closed with handshakes in a conference room, or over drinks at dinner, don’t necessarily feel the same. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a person’s line of work.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom was bullish on work-from-home trends. His 2015 study, for one—with James Liang , John Roberts , and Zhichun Jenny Ying , all then at Stanford—finds a 13 percent increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency.
But in the early days of the pandemic, Bloom was less optimistic about remote work. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom told a Stanford publication in March 2020. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”
To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis launched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 20–64 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019.
Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.
The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com .
In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7 percent higher than they expected. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy.
“Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted,” Bloom says.
Some workers arguing in favor of flexibility might say they’re more efficient at home away from chatty colleagues and the other distractions of an office, and that may be true. But above all, the increased productivity comes from saving transit time, an effect overlooked by standard productivity calculations. “Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time,” Davis says. Eliminate commuting as a factor, and the researchers project only a 1 percent productivity boost in the postpandemic work-from-home environment, as compared with before.
It makes sense that standard statistics miss the impact of commutes, Davis explains. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesn’t shift significantly in the aggregate. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity.
Before the pandemic, US workers were commuting an average of 54 minutes daily, according to Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. In the aggregate, the researchers say, the pandemic-induced shift to remote work meant 62.5 million fewer commuting hours per workday.
People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.
With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom , and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis . The researchers launched a survey of US workers, starting in May 2020 and continuing in waves for more than a year since, to capture a range of information including workers’ attitudes about their new remote arrangements.
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Aside from commuting less, remote workers may also be sleeping more efficiently, another phenomenon that could feed into productivity. On days they worked remotely, people rose about 30 minutes later than on-site workers did, according to pre-pandemic research by Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and SUNY Empire’s Victoria Vernon . Both groups worked the same number of hours and slept about the same amount each night, so it’s most likely that “working from home permits a more comfortable personal sleep schedule,” says Vernon. “Teleworkers who spend less time commuting may be happier and less tired, and therefore more productive,” write the researchers, who analyzed BLS data from 2017 to 2018.
While remote employees gained back commuting time during the pandemic, they also worked fewer hours, note Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. Hours on the job averaged about 32 per week, compared with 36 pre-pandemic, although the work time stretched past traditional office hours. “Respondents may devote a few more minutes in the morning to chores and childcare, while still devoting about a third of their old commuting time slot to their primary job. At the end of the day, they might end somewhat early and turn on the TV. They might interrupt TV time to respond to a late afternoon or early evening work request,” the researchers explain.
This interpretation, they write, is consistent with media reports that employees worked longer hours from home during the pandemic but with the added flexibility to interrupt the working day. Yet, according to the survey, this does not have a negative overall effect on productivity, contradicting one outdated stereotype of a remote worker eating bonbons, watching TV, and getting no work done.
The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. This technology will boost work-from-home productivity by 46 percent by the end of the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic situation, according to a model developed by Rutgers’s Morris A. Davis , University of North Carolina’s Andra C. Ghent , and University of Wisconsin’s Jesse M. Gregory . “While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption,” the researchers note.
There are significant costs to leaving the office, Rutgers’s Davis says, pointing to the loss of face-to-face interaction, among other things. “Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always,” he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast.
One reason, he says , has to do with the function of cities as business centers. “Cities exist because, we think, the crowding of employment makes everyone more productive,” he explains. “This idea also applies to firms: a firm puts all workers on the same floor of a building, or all in the same suite rather than spread throughout a building, for reasons of efficiency. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes.” While some employees are more productive at home, that’s not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration “implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic,” he says.
What will happen to urban business districts and the cities in which they are located in the age of increasing remote work?
About three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to need less office space in the future, according to a May 2021 poll. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.
And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregory’s model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. While physical proximity may be superior, working from home is far more productive than it used to be. Had the pandemic hit in 1990, it would not have produced this rise in relative productivity, per the researchers’ model, because the technology available at the time was not sufficient to support remote work.
A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Citing the 5.4 percent increase in US labor productivity in the first quarter of 2021, as reported by the BLS, the researchers attribute at least some of this to the rise of work-from-home technologies. The pandemic, they write, has “compressed a decade’s worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year.” The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue.
Not all the research supports the idea that remote work increases productivity and decreases the number of hours workers spend on the job. Chicago Booth’s Michael Gibbs and University of Essex’s Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth find contradictory evidence from a study of 10,000 high-skilled workers at a large Asian IT-services company.
The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.
Total hours worked during that time increased by approximately 30 percent, including an 18 percent rise in working beyond normal business hours, the researchers find. At the same time, however, average output—as measured by the company through setting work goals and tracking progress toward them—declined slightly. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings also increased, while uninterrupted work hours shrank. Additionally, employees spent less time networking and had fewer one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, find the researchers, adding that the increase in hours worked and the decline in productivity were more significant for employees with children at home. Weighing output against hours worked, the researchers conclude that productivity decreased by about 20 percent. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. “Of course, that time was spent in productive work instead of sitting in traffic, which is beneficial,” they acknowledge.
Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules.
Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? It could take more data to answer this question. “I suspect that a high fraction of employees of all types, across the globe, value the flexibility, lack of a commute, and other aspects of work from home. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity,” says Gibbs.
The findings of his research do not entirely contradict those of Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, however. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesn’t necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. “While the average effect of working from home on productivity is negative in our study, this does not rule out that a ‘targeted working from home’ regime might be desirable,” they write.
Additionally, the research data are derived from a single company and may not be representative of the wider economy, although Gibbs notes that the IT company is one that should be able to optimize remote work. Most employees worked on company laptops, “and IT-related industries and occupations are usually at the top of lists of those areas most likely to be able to do WFH effectively.” Thus, he says, the findings may represent a cautionary note that remote work has costs and complexities worth addressing.
As he, Mengel, and Siemroth write, some predictions of work-from-home success may be overly optimistic, “perhaps because professionals engage in many tasks that require collaboration, communication, and innovation, which are more difficult to achieve with virtual, scheduled interactions.”
The focus on IT employees’ productivity, however, excludes issues such as worker morale and retention, Booth’s Davis notes. More generally, “the producer has to attract workers . . . and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, they’re going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.”
Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. The data from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis reveal that some workers are willing to take a sizable pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely two or three days a week. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman—who said at the company’s US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”—a bit less bite. Meanwhile, Duke PhD student John W. Barry , Cornell’s Murillo Campello , Duke’s John R. Graham , and Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma find that companies offering flexibility are the ones most poised to grow.
Working policies may be shaped by employees’ preferences. Some workers still prefer working from the office; others prefer to stay working remotely; many would opt for a hybrid model, with some days in the office and some at home (as Amazon and other companies have introduced). As countries emerge from the pandemic and employers recalibrate, companies could bring back some employees and allow others to work from home. This should ultimately boost productivity, Booth’s Davis says.
Or they could allow some to work from far-flung locales. Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury has long focused his research on working not just from home but “from anywhere.” This goes beyond the idea of employees working from their living room in the same city in which their company is located—instead, if they want to live across the country, or even in another country, they can do so without any concern about being near headquarters.
At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and women—but only to a point.
“In my mind, there’s no question that it has to be a plus, on net,” says Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Before the pandemic, many women deemphasized their careers when they started families, she says.
Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi and Northeastern University’s Barbara Larson analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime.
“Work from anywhere offers workers geographic flexibility and can help workers relocate to their preferred locations,” Choudhury says. “Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers.”
He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. “In addition to benefits to workers and organizations, WFA might also help reverse talent flows from smaller towns to larger cities and from emerging markets,” he says. “This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.”
It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. People who were sent home to work because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more motivated than before to prove they were essential, says Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist. Additionally, there were fewer distractions from the outside because of the broad shutdowns. “The world helped them stay motivated,” she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would.
Before the pandemic, workers who already knew they performed better in a remote-working lifestyle self-selected into it, if allowed. During the pandemic, shutdowns forced remote work on millions. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. “The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still don’t have great data,” Fishbach says.
Adding to the less optimistic view of a work-from-home future, Booth’s Austan D. Goolsbee says that some long-term trends may challenge remote work. Since the 1980s, as the largest companies have gained market power, corporate profits have risen dramatically while the share of profits going to workers has dropped to record lows. “This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time,” he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. Companies may try to claw back time from those who are remote, he says, by expecting employees to work for longer hours or during their off hours.
And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men).
Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. “Managers may specify that the entire team meets in person every Monday morning, for example,” he says. “R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.”
Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. Japanese workers are reportedly still mostly opting to go to the office, even as the government promotes remote work. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office.
Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. While only about 28 percent of US office workers were back onsite by June 2021, employees who had become used to more flexibility were demanding it remain. A May survey of 1,000 workers by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News finds that about half of millennial and Gen Z workers, and two-fifths of all workers, would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about work-from-home policies. And additional research from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis finds that four in 10 Americans who currently work from home at least one day a week would look for another job if their employers told them to come back to the office full time. Additionally, most employees would look favorably upon a new job that offered the same pay as their current job along with the option to work from home two to three days a week.
The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. A study by Chicago Booth’s Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman finds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. Of these jobs, the majority—including many in engineering, computing, law, and finance—pay more than those that cannot be done at home, such as food service, construction, and building-maintenance jobs.
Barrero, Bloom, and Davis project that, postpandemic, Americans overall will work approximately 20 percent of full workdays from home, four times the pre-pandemic level. This would make remote work less an aberration than a new norm. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings.
Works Cited
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Chicago Booth’s Raghuram G. Rajan describes a path forward for India’s economy.
The former governor of the Reserve Bank of India discusses the Fed’s role in the US economy and analyzes its response to the pandemic.
Linkages have helped mitigate the effects of recent economic shocks.
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Furman University’s George Shields, professor of chemistry, has received a 2024 SEED Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement . The $60,000 grant will advance his research in prebiotic atmospheric chemistry to study how life-giving proteins emanated from a lifeless Earth.
The award stems from Shields’ work with undergraduates over the last several years that advances a novel hypothesis that tests how peptides – chains of amino acids that make up proteins – formed on primordial Earth with just a handful of water molecules in the prebiotic, oxygen-starved atmosphere.
“How life began is an unsolved mystery in science,” Shields said. “Which came first: DNA, RNA or proteins? No one knows. Our project is looking at the idea that perhaps small peptides were synthesized in the atmosphere. As amino acids floated in the air, water molecules catalyzed the formation of small peptides, which eventually would descend to Earth, seeding the planet with essential building blocks for life.”
Like the peptide chains at the center of Shields’ investigations, research in his lab is built block by block, in semester- and summer-long chunks by young student scientists who bring their unique perspectives and ideas to the work.
Shields first explored origins-of-life science in 2018 with Ariel Gale ’20, a Goldwater Scholar , Beckman Scholar and recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant. Gale, who is working toward her doctorate in theoretical chemistry at Emory University, was one of only a few students working on the project crafted by Shields. At the time, the research was unfunded, but it led to two papers with Gale as lead author.
Two more Furman biochemistry enthusiasts picked up where Gale left off. Shannon Harold ’22 M ’23 and Sky Warf ’24 pushed the work to a point where it could be funded and again published . Harold is now pursuing a medical degree; Warf, a doctoral degree.
Recently, Shields received NSF-MRI funding to support the MERCURY consortium and high-performance computing. He is principal investigator for a $465,000 grant from NSF-REU that bolsters research and STEM representation in the Southeast. This latest grant from RCSA funds Shields’ own research project and enables him to dedicate two to three students to it each year over the next two years. And the cycle continues.
“If we make good progress on this grant and learn new things about prebiotic atmospheric chemistry, I’ll submit a grant to NASA in the future for more funding,” he said.
Shields is one of 11 scientists to receive the RSCA SEED grant this year. He is grateful to the foundation and the people at Furman who helped him submit a winning proposal, including Bri Pochard , associate director for grants and research administration, and Greg Springsteen , professor of chemistry and NASA- and NSF-funded scientist who also studies prebiotic chemistry.
Shields is equally indebted to the undergraduates who have collaborated in his lab. “Furman punches way above its weight” in terms of research excellence, he said. “These students work hard, they’re super smart, and they deserve all the recognition they get. It’s a privilege to work with them.”
Furman included on the forbes list of top colleges, furman included in princeton review's 'best 390 colleges'.
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Research Article
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Affiliations Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America
Roles Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing
Affiliations Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, Department of Environmental Health, Sustainability and Health Initiative (SHINE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America, Faculty of Philosophy, Centre for Evaluation and Analysis of Public Policies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
Affiliation Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America
Affiliations Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Human Flourishing Program, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, Department of Environmental Health, Sustainability and Health Initiative (SHINE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America, Department of Economics, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland
Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing
Affiliation Department of Environmental Health, Sustainability and Health Initiative (SHINE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America
* E-mail: [email protected]
Frequent working from home (WFH) may stay as a new work norm after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior observational studies on WFH and work outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances are mostly cross-sectional and often studied employees who worked from home in limited capacity. To provide additional insights that might inform post-pandemic work policies, using longitudinal data collected before the COVID-19 pandemic (June 2018 to July 2019), this study aims to examine the associations between WFH and multiple subsequent work-related outcomes, as well as potential modifiers of these associations, in a sample of employees among whom frequent or even full-time WFH was common ( N = 1,123, Mean age = 43.37 years). In linear regression models, each subsequent work outcome (standardized score was used) was regressed on frequencies of WFH, adjusting for baseline values of the outcome variables and other covariates. The results suggested that WFH for 5 days/week versus never WFH was associated with subsequently less work distraction (ß = -0.24, 95% CI = -0.38, -0.11), greater perceived productivity/engagement (ß = 0.23, 95% CI = 0.11, 0.36), and greater job satisfaction (ß = 0.15, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.27), and was associated with subsequent work-family conflicts to a lesser extent (ß = -0.13, 95% CI = -0.26, 0.004). There was also evidence suggesting that long work hours, caregiving responsibilities, and a greater sense of meaningful work can all potentially attenuate the benefits of WFH. As we move towards the post-pandemic era, further research will be needed to understand the impacts of WFH and resources for supporting employees who work from home.
Citation: Chen Y, Weziak-Bialowolska D, Lee MT, Bialowolski P, Cowden RG, McNeely E, et al. (2023) Working from home and subsequent work outcomes: Pre-pandemic evidence. PLoS ONE 18(4): e0283788. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788
Editor: Daphne Nicolitsas, University of Crete, GREECE
Received: December 8, 2022; Accepted: March 20, 2023; Published: April 4, 2023
Copyright: © 2023 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The dataset and the SAS codes used in this study are deposited in the Dataverse repository ( https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FRUZLW ).
Funding: The study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation under the grant No. 74275 “Building a Culture of Health: A Business Leadership Imperative”, by the John Templeton Foundation under the grant No. 61075 “Religion and human flourishing – new empirical approaches”, and by Aetna Inc. under the grant No. A33796 “Well-Being Research Program”. Work of Dr. Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska was supported by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 (UMO-2020/37/K/HS6/02772). The research findings represent the perspective of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of any organization.
Competing interests: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Dr. McNeely and Dr. VanderWeele report receiving grants and personal fees from Aetna Inc. Dr. McNeely reports receiving grants from the Levi Strauss Foundation, and she also reports serving as Executive Director of SHINE at Harvard (Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise); Support is made possible through SHINE from multiple companies. Dr. VanderWeele reports receiving grants from the John Templeton Foundation. Other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented challenges to people’s social and work lives. To comply with the social distancing measures, 71% of the US workforce whose job could be mostly done from home worked remotely all or most of the time during the pandemic, whereas only 20% of them did so prior to the pandemic [ 1 ]. This wide-spread transition to working from home (WFH) may become a lasting consequence of the pandemic [ 2 ]. Some companies, such as Meta Platforms, have announced their long-term flexible remote work policy [ 3 ], and 54% of U.S. workers who could work from home indicated that they would want to continue WFH after the pandemic [ 1 ]. As we move toward the post-pandemic recovery era, it is important to understand how WFH impacts work outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances.
WFH (also referred to as telework, telecommuting, or remote work) is largely defined as “a work arrangement in which the work is done from places other than a traditional office space using information and communication technologies” [ 4 ]. WFH has become increasingly common over the past decade, but it generally has not been adopted as widely as possible prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, around 56% of the full-time employees in the U.S. are remote-capable employees whose work can be done remotely from home, but as of 2019 only 42% of the U.S. workforce had ever worked from home [ 2 , 5 ]. WFH may have a broad range of implications for employees’ work and life. According to the Conservation of Resource Theory [ 6 ] and the Job Demands-Resources Model [ 7 , 8 ], WFH provides employees with resources for reducing work life conflicts (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), which may lead to greater work life balance, job satisfaction, and possibly higher productivity [ 9 , 10 ]. WFH may also help eliminate commute times which have been associated with various adverse health and well-being outcomes including poor mental health, poor diet, back pain, and cardiovascular disease [ 11 , 12 ]. Importantly, some studies have shown that the adverse health effects of commuting may be greater for women than men [ 13 ]. Not all studies demonstrate a negative impact of commuting on health, however. Recent data during the pandemic suggest some potential benefits of commuting, or venturing out versus staying home, related to ritualistic downtime, chance social encounters, and greater sense of purpose [ 14 ]. On the other hand, WFH has led to some unintended consequences for employees such as increased sense of isolation, distraction by family obligations, work intensification, longer work hours, reduced supervisor support and mentoring, and concerns about opportunities for promotion, all adding complexity to the impacts of WFH [ 4 , 9 , 15 ].
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential benefits of working in the office have also had to be weighed against pandemic-specific needs, such as reducing the risk of disease or being at home to manage uncertain events (e.g., school cancelations). Therefore, it is challenging to study the effects of “voluntary” WFH in the context of the pandemic. An emerging literature has sought to understand the impacts of “enforced WHF” during the pandemic [ 16 , 17 ]. However, the context of “enforced” (such as during the pandemic) and “voluntary” (such as prior to the pandemic) WFH may differ in many ways, such as employees’ motivations behind the choice of work arrangement, level of preparation for WFH, family arrangements, and sources of social interaction outside work [ 18 ]. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that WFH may shape work outcomes differently during the COVID-19 pandemic than under normal circumstances.
Empirical studies on WFH prior to the pandemic are mostly cross-sectional observational studies, with the strongest evidence coming from only a handful of experimental or longitudinal observational studies. For instance, an experiment conducted in a sample of 249 employees at a call center at Ctrip (a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency) in which participants were randomized to WFH or working in an office suggested that WFH was related to a 13% increase in productivity, substantially greater work satisfaction, and a reduced turnover rate by 50% over the 9-month study period [ 19 ]. Likewise, a natural experiment study among workers of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office [ 20 ] and three large-scale longitudinal panel studies in Europe [ 21 – 23 ] also found that WFH was related to higher productivity, greater job satisfaction, and reduced turnover intention. Further, a number of review studies and meta-analyses (though primarily based on cross-sectional evidence) also suggested that WFH generally has a positive impact on work outcomes, job attitudes, and work-family balance [ 16 , 24 , 25 ]. For instance, a meta-analysis by Gajendran et al. [ 24 ] based on 46 (mostly cross-sectional) studies involving 12,883 employees indicated that WFH was related to greater employee job satisfaction (r = 0.09), better supervisor-rated work performance (r = 0.18), and lower work-family conflicts (r = -.16), though the effect sizes were relatively small. In addition, there was evidence suggesting that the frequency of WFH matters. For instance, some studies have found that the association between WFH and job satisfaction follows an inverted U-shape, with the inflection point occurring when WFH exceeds 2 or 3 days per week [ 24 , 26 ]. Based on these findings, it was hypothesized that when telecommuting is extensive, there might be an increased likelihood of social isolation and sense of frustration that offset the benefits of increased autonomy [ 24 , 26 ].
While prior studies have substantially advanced our understanding of WFH, several knowledge gaps remain. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped WFH practices in multiple aspects. Thus, WFH may follow new trends and adopt different patterns after the pandemic [ 2 , 27 ]. It is expected that as more companies allow WFH, workers may increasingly be WFH on a regular basis [ 1 , 28 ]. Prior work on pre-pandemic WFH has, however, often focused on workers who worked from home in limited capacity. It is, therefore, helpful to understand WFH in companies with a tradition of flexible work arrangements and among workers who have worked from home on a more continual basis. Moreover, heterogeneity in the association of WFH with work outcomes remains understudied. Such information would be helpful for identifying resources, informing training programs, and refining policies for supporting employees who are WFH. In addition, prior observational studies on “voluntary” WFH and work outcomes have mostly relied on cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to address concerns about reverse causality. Although it may be unlikely that work outcomes would affect workers’ preferences to WFH, it is possible that managers may be more willing to provide WFH opportunities to high-preforming employees [ 24 ]. Longitudinal evidence would, therefore, be needed to help establish temporality.
To address some of these issues, the present study uses pre-pandemic longitudinal data from a sample of employees with a high rate of frequent “voluntary” WFH to examine the associations between a full spectrum of WFH frequencies and multiple work-related outcomes including work distraction, perceived productivity/work engagement, work-family conflict, and job satisfaction. These outcomes are commonly-used markers of employee work performance, work-family balance, and job attitudes, and together they represent the major aspects of employees’ work and life that may be impacted by WFH [ 16 , 25 ]. Based on prior evidence suggesting an inverted U-shaped association between WFH and some work outcomes [ 24 , 26 ], we hypothesized that moderate frequencies of WFH would be associated with better work performance and greater work-related wellbeing, as compared to lower or higher frequencies of WFH. Some prior evidence suggests that certain worker characteristics (e.g., family caregiving responsibilities, health status, purpose in life) and workplace resource factors (e.g., workload, coworker support, sense of meaningful work) may affect employees’ work outcomes [ 24 , 29 – 32 ], but their roles in the context of WFH remain unclear. To understand potential heterogeneity in the impacts of WFH on work outcomes, as a secondary analysis this study also explored a number of worker characteristics and workplace resources as potential modifiers of the associations.
This study used data from a sample of employees at a large U.S. national self-insured service organization. At study baseline (June 2018), an invitation to participate was sent to a randomly selected sample of 15,000 employees in this organization through the work email system. A total of 2,364 employees returned the completed questionnaire (as an incentive for participation, 52 of them were randomly selected to win a cash prize ranging from $100 to $1000). In July 2019, participants who completed the initial survey and remained employed in the organization were asked to complete a follow-up survey, and 1,411 of them responded. The analytic sample for the present study was drawn from those who participated at both waves of data collection (N = 1,411). Those with missing data on WFH (n = 17), any of the work outcome variables (n = 177) or any covariates (n = 94) were excluded, yielding an analytic sample of 1,123 participants. As compared to those who were excluded, participants included in the sample were younger, worked from home less frequently, had shorter work hours, had greater self-rated physical health, reported lower coworker support, and perceived lower productivity/work engagement at baseline ( S1 Table ). However, participants in this sample were comparable to the total employee population in this organization on major sociodemographic characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, and education level [ 33 ]. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Frequency of working from home (wfh)..
Participants reported their frequency of WFH in response to the question at baseline: “How many days per week do you regularly work from home?”. Response categories ranged from 0 (0 days/week) to 5 (5 days/week). Because a majority of the participants in this sample reported either full-time WFH (5 days/week) or not WFH at all (0 day/week), to reduce data sparsity the responses were collapsed into three categories including 0 day/week, 1–4 days/week, and 5 days/week. In a sensitivity analysis, we also considered a more nuanced categorization scheme of 0 day/week, 1 day/week, 2 days/week, 3 to 4 days/week, and 5 days/week.
Work distraction..
Participants reported their assessment of distraction at work in response to the question: “Thinking about your last week of work, what percent of the time did you feel distracted or not as productive as you would like?” [ 34 ]. The response categories included 0% of time, 5–10% of time, 10–25% of time, 25–50% of time, and 50–100% of time. Following the approach in prior work [ 34 ], we took the mid-point of the categories as the response value (i.e., 0%, 7.5%, 17.5%, 37.5%, 75%), and considered them as a continuous score.
The participants reported the extent to which they agreed with the following statement on work productivity/engagement: “The employees are productive and engaged” [ 35 ]. Response options ranged from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree). The response was considered as a continuous score.
Work-family conflict was measured with an item from the previously-validated Work-Family Conflict Scale [ 36 , 37 ]: “Demands of my job interfere with my home life”. Response options ranged from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree). The response was considered as a continuous score.
Job satisfaction was measured with a previously validated item: “How satisfied are you with your job?” [ 38 – 40 ]. The response ranged from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree), and was used as a continuous score.
Prior evidence has suggested that employee characteristics (e.g., sociodemographic factors, household responsibilities, psychosocial wellbeing, health status) and workplace resources (e.g., manageable workload, meaningful work, work/life integration, coworker support) may shape employees’ work outcomes in the traditional circumstances of working in an office [ 29 – 32 ]. However, their roles in the context of WFH are less clear. To understand potential heterogeneity in the impacts of WFH, we explored a number of such factors (as described in detail below) assessed at baseline as potential modifiers of the associations between WFH and subsequent work outcomes.
Family responsibilities may interfere with one’s work, and women generally take more household responsibilities than men [ 41 ]. Therefore, we examined gender (male, female) and several indicators of family caring responsibilities, including caregiving to children (the number of children under the age of 18 that the participant took care at home, used as a continuous score), to elder persons (the number of elder parents or relatives that the participant took care at home, used as a continuous score), and to pets (pet ownership, yes or no), as modifiers. In addition, because psychological states may drive one’s work outcomes [ 29 ], we also examined sense of purpose in life (assessed with “My life has a clear sense of purpose” [ 42 ] on a scale from 0 [strongly disagree] to 10 [strongly agree]) as a modifier.
Prior studies have identified a number of workplace resources as drivers of employee performance and wellbeing, such as manageable workload, meaningful work, work recognition, and coworker support [ 31 , 32 , 35 , 43 – 45 ]. Therefore, this study explored these factors as candidate modifiers of the outcomes. First, work hours were examined as an indicator of workload with the question: “During a typical work week, about how many hours per day do you usually work?”. Response categories included “<8 hours”, “8 hours”, “9–10 hours”, and “>10 hours”. Second, participants used an 11-point response scale (0 = strongly disagree; 10 = strongly agree) to rate the extent to which they agreed with statements about meaningful work (i.e., “I find my work meaningful”) [ 46 ], work recognition (i.e., “I feel recognized for my work”) [ 47 ], and coworker support (i.e., “I feel part of a team at work”) [ 48 ].
In addition to the abovementioned candidate modifiers, a number of other covariates were considered. These included sociodemographic characteristics including participants’ age (≤30 years, 31–50 years, >50 years), race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, other races/ethnicities), marital status (married or in partnership, unmarried), educational attainment (high school diploma or equivalent, some college, college degree, graduate school), and house ownership (yes, no). Because mental and physical health status may affect individual’s work outcomes and work-related wellbeing [ 49 – 51 ], we also adjusted for participants’ depressive symptoms (on a scale from 0 [not at all depressed] to 10 [very depressed]) and self-rated physical health (on a scale from 0 [poor] to 10 [excellent]) assessed at baseline. To reduce potential reverse causation, baseline values of all outcome variables (i.e., work distraction, productivity/ engagement, work-family conflict, job satisfaction) were additionally controlled for.
Statistical analyses were performed in SAS 9.4 (SAS Institute Inc). Tests of statistical significance were two-sided. Analysis of variance and Chi-square tests were performed to examine participants’ baseline characteristics across frequencies of WFH.
Linear regression models were used in the primary analyses to regress each of the 4 work outcome variables (one at a time) at follow-up on frequencies of WFH at baseline, adjusting for baseline values of all the dependent variables simultaneously in addition to other covariates. The normality assumption of the linear regression models was tested, and there was no evidence suggesting violation of the assumption. For easier interpretation, the dependent variables were standardized (mean = 0, standard deviation = 1), such that the effect estimates were reported in terms of standard deviations in the dependent variables. As a sensitivity analysis, the primary sets of models were reanalyzed with a more nuanced categorization of the frequencies of WFH.
The secondary analyses explored candidate modifiers of the associations between WFH and work outcomes. Specifically, the primary sets of regression models were reanalyzed with an interaction term added between each of the candidate modifiers (examined one at a time) and the independent variable of WFH for each dependent variable.
To account for multiple testing, Bonferroni correction was applied. However, the practices for multiple testing vary in the literature and it is an evolving area of research [ 52 , 53 ]. Therefore, we do not use Bonferroni correction as the primary lens for interpreting the results. However, to acknowledge the different practices and types of cutoffs that can be used for interpreting the results, we reported our results both with and without Bonferroni correction and with multiple p-value cutoffs marked.
The participants had a mean age of 43.37 (SD = 10.48) years, and were predominantly female (84.15%), non-Hispanic White (74.62%), married or in partnership (70.61%), had a college degree or higher (69.19%), owned a house (71.95%), and had caring responsibilities (to children, older persons, or pets) at home. A majority of the participants worked exclusively from home for 5 days/week (42.56%), and the remaining worked from home for 1 to 4 days/week (26.80%) or did not work from home at all (30.63%) ( S1 Table ). At the follow-up wave, the participants generally reported low levels of work distraction (over 75% of the participants reported being distracted for less than 10% of their time at work) and work family conflicts (mean = 3.20 out of a range of 0 to 10, SD = 2.94), as well as moderate levels of perceived productivity/work engagement (mean = 7.49 out of a range of 0 to 10, SD = 1.96) and job satisfaction (mean = 7.25 out of a range of 0 to 10, SD = 2.10).
As compared to those who did not work from home, participants who worked from home at least 1 day/week were more likely to be older, female, non-Hispanic White, married or in partnership, highly educated, and house-owners. They also tended to report fewer depressive symptoms, better self-rated physical health, greater purpose in life, a greater sense of meaningful work, shorter work hours, and greater job satisfaction at baseline ( Table 1 ).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.t001
There was a monotonic inverse association between WFH and work distraction. As compared to no WFH, WFH for 1–4 days/week (ß = -0.20, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.34, -0.06) and for 5 days/week (ß = -0.24, 95% CI = -0.38, -0.11) were both associated with subsequently less work distraction, adjusting for baseline levels of work distraction and other covariates. These associations remained p < .05 after Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). Sensitivity analysis using a more nuanced categorization of WFH frequencies yielded similar results ( S2 Table ).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.t002
As compared to never WFH, WFH for 5 days/week was associated with subsequently greater perceived productivity/work engagement (ß = 0.23, 95% CI = 0.11, 0.36), and the association remained p < .05 after Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). However, less frequent WFH for 1–4 days/week did not differ from never WFH in perceived productivity/engagement. Results were similar when a more nuanced categorization of WFH frequencies was used ( S2 Table ).
The participants who worked exclusively from home reported subsequently greater job satisfaction (ß = 0.15, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.27), though the associations did not remain p < .05 after Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). There was no difference between job satisfaction of participants with 1–4 days/week WFH and 0 day/week WFH. The sensitivity analysis with a more nuanced measure of WFH frequencies again yielded similar results ( S2 Table ).
The association of WFH with subsequent work-family conflicts was slightly weaker compared to the other outcomes, and did not meet the conventional p < .05 threshold before Bonferroni correction ( Table 2 ). Sensitivity analysis with a more nuanced measure of WFH frequencies yielded similar results ( S2 Table ).
There was generally little evidence that the candidate modifiers altered the associations. There were, however, a few exceptions ( Table 3 ). Specifically, the inverse association of WFH with less work distraction was weaker among participants with caring responsibilities at home (specifically, caregiving to older persons or pets, but not to children). For instance, the inverse association between WFH (5 days/week vs. 0 day/week) and work distraction was substantially weaker among those who did versus did not have caregiving responsibilities to older people at home. Likewise, the inverse association with work distraction was weaker among participants with long work hours. However, the interaction terms of WFH with both caregiving responsibilities and work hours only passed the conventional, but not the Bonferroni-corrected p < .05 thresholds. Interestingly, the association with greater perceived productivity/engagement was weaker among those with a higher vs. lower sense of meaning of work, though the interaction term again only passed the conventional but not the Bonferroni-corrected p < .05 thresholds. There was, however, no substantial evidence that any of the candidate modifiers modified the associations of WFH with subsequent work-family conflicts or job satisfaction ( Table 3 ).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.t003
Over recent years, there have been calls for creating a caring climate at the workplace that makes employees feel being treated with care, trust, fairness and respect [ 35 ]. A regenerative workplace may help improve employee’s motivation at work and enhance their flourishing in life, which in turn may also boost organizational business outcomes [ 45 , 54 ]. Allowing employees to work from home may be one of the workplace resources that contribute to creating a caring organizational climate.
Congruent with the majority of prior studies on pre-pandemic WFH, the present study adds to the evidence that WFH is positively associated with multiple work-related outcomes [ 25 , 55 , 56 ], and extends the literature with longitudinal data from a unique sample with a high rate of frequent or even full-time WFH under non-pandemic circumstances. For instance, a prior meta-analysis (of mostly cross-sectional studies on pre-pandemic WFH) suggested that WFH was positively associated with objectively measured work performance ( r = 0.18, 95% CI = 0.08, 0.26) and with job satisfaction ( r = 0.09, 95% CI = 0.07, 0.11). Likewise, prior studies on “enforced WFH” during the pandemic indicated that switching to WFH was linked with increased or at least unchanged productivity [ 57 , 58 ], despite a decline in the average productivity per hour which was partly due to increased work hours among remote workers [ 59 ]. In comparison, empirical evidence on the impacts of WFH on work-family conflicts has been less clear. For instance, while some early meta-analyses [ 24 , 60 ] suggested a modest cross-sectional association between WFH and lower work interference with family, the present study was more consistent with recent work using large-scale panel data that suggested little medium-term effects of WFH on employee work-life balance [ 61 ]. Considering frequencies of WFH, somewhat contrary to our original hypothesis and to some prior literature which has suggested an inverted U-shaped association between frequencies of WFH and work outcomes [ 24 , 26 ], in our sample full-time remote work was associated with the best performance and highest job satisfaction. This may be attributable to the characteristics of this sample. Specifically, all our participants were employees of an organization with a long-standing flexible work tradition, where management, technical, and infrastructure support for WFH was available, and there might be less stigma associated with frequent WFH. Working exclusively from home might also help establish a consistent routine that reduces the need to organize one’s schedule and helps enhance one’s sense of coherence and meaning [ 62 ]. In comparison, prior studies seldom included participants who regularly worked from home for more than 3 days/week. Therefore, this sample provided an unique opportunity to understand a fuller spectrum of the frequencies of WHF. Taken together, the findings of this study provide some evidence supporting the Conservation of Resource Theory [ 6 ], the Job Demands-Resources Model [ 7 , 8 ], and the Caring Climate Workplace Framework [ 35 ], and suggest that work life integration should be treated as a workplace resource that could potentially contribute to improved work performance and worker wellbeing.
Heterogeneity in the associations between WFH and employee work outcomes remained understudied in the literature. The exploratory analysis in this study suggested that some worker characteristics and workplace resources might modify the WFH—work performance association. For instance, it was previously hypothesized that WFH carried the risk of blurring the boundaries between work and family, which might compromise employee productivity [ 25 ]. Consistent with this hypothesis, in this sample the inverse association between WFH and work distraction was weaker among participants with caring responsibilities at home (particularly to older persons and to pets). There was, however, little evidence that having children was a strong modifier, which may be attributed to the availability of childcare and education services under normal circumstances. Evidence on WFH during the pandemic when childcare and education services were interrupted indeed suggested stronger evidence that having young children at home can negatively impact WFH productivity [ 63 ]. Although women generally have greater household responsibilities than men [ 64 , 65 ], previous research indicated that women tend to have similar, if not higher, productivity in the office relative to men [ 66 ]. Considering WFH, while evidence pointed to greater vulnerabilities to disruption at work among women than men during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns [ 66 ], this study’s findings are consistent with pre-pandemic evidence that has found little gender gaps in perceived productivity. This trend might be related to a greater likelihood of sacrifice of leisure time for work among women versus men and again to the availability of childcare services [ 67 ]. This study also suggested novel evidence that the inverse association between WFH and work distraction might be weaker among participants with long working hours. This might be related to the fatigue and burnout of maintaining boundaries between work roles and household responsibilities while WFH [ 68 ]. Interestingly, there was also some evidence that the positive association of WFH with perceived productivity/engagement was weaker among those with a stronger sense of meaningful work. One possible explanation for this finding is that WFH may affect the depth and/or breadth of knowledge an employee has about the inner workings of the organization (e.g., daily activities of its employees), which could be especially impactful among those who find their work to be more meaningful because they typically have a better understanding of the organization and how they fit within it [ 69 ]. Therefore, employees engaged in meaningful work but are WFH might not have sufficient opportunities to acquire the kind of detailed organizational knowledge they may need in order to rate the productivity/engagement of the workforce more positively. There was, however, little evidence that any of the candidate modifiers modified the association with work-family conflicts or job satisfaction in this sample. It is possible that WFH may improve job satisfaction more unanimously, whereas the association with work-family conflicts may vary by factors not examined in this study due to a lack of data (e.g., self-efficacy, characteristics of the workspace at home).
This study has certain limitations. First, the participants were primarily female and non-Hispanic White, and most were client service workers. The results, therefore, may not be applicable to other populations or to other job types. Second, the dependent variables and candidate modifiers in the study were mostly assessed with self-reported single-item questions. However, these items are all face valid and some of them were taken from previously validated scales. There was also prior evidence supporting the validity of single-item measures of worker wellbeing [ 38 – 40 , 70 ] and the validity of self-reported work performance [ 71 ]. In a prior meta-analysis (of mostly cross-sectional studies), WFH had an even stronger association with objectively-measured work performance outcomes compared to self-assessed performance [ 24 ]. Next, due to a lack of data, this study was not able to examine some potentially critical modifiers for the outcomes of WFH such as self-efficacy, or availability of a dedicated workspace at home [ 72 , 73 ]. Further, this study had only 1-year follow-up and was not able to examine the long-term impacts of WFH. These limitations are, however, balanced by important strengths of this study, such as its use of longitudinal data from a sample with a high rate of frequent and even full-time “voluntary WFH”, which provides a unique opportunity to understand the implications of frequent WFH under non-pandemic circumstances.
Taken together, this study adds to the evidence that WFH is positively associated with subsequent work-related outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances, and also suggests several workplace resources and worker characteristics as potential modifiers of the associations. The shift towards WFH induced by the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to stay as a new work norm long after the public health crisis wanes [ 58 ]. Although the pandemic has led to reduced stigma against WFH and a surge in investments enabling WFH, there are many challenges to and opportunities for improving the efficiency and sustainability of WFH [ 58 , 74 ]. Further research on the impacts of WFH on work and wellbeing under normal circumstances and potential resources for supporting WFH would be important for informing effective training programs and workplace innovations, which could help to cultivate and maintain a happy, healthy, and engaged workforce.
S1 table. comparison of baseline characteristics between the participants included in the analyses and those excluded from the analyses (n = 1,411)..
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.s001
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283788.s002
We thank all participants for their participation in this study.
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The different research cited in the report had different study designs. And one paper cited was from 2013, way before lots of employees had to work from home because of office closures during the ...
The data and research show well-managed work from home can raise and maintain productivity, while cutting costs and raising profits. It keeps employees happy, reduces pollution by cutting billions ...
Possibly, this is due to the fact that employees with children get distracted more often during WFH and compensate by working longer hours. Employees with children at home work almost a third of an hour more per working day during WFH than those without children, who themselves still work 1.4 hours more during WFH.
Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi and Northeastern University's Barbara Larson analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was ...
The more of the researchers' work will be done from home in the future, the greater the. challenge will grow to integrate their work and non-work life. The extensive research on work-. life ...
Download our time series data on the extent of working from home. Coming Soon: Program for the 2024 Remote Work Conference , 9 to 11 October at Stanford, CA Research papers
The $60,000 grant will advance research in prebiotic atmospheric chemistry to study how life-giving proteins emanated from a lifeless Earth. The work started in 2018 with former student Ariel Gale '20, who is now working toward her doctorate in theoretical chemistry at Emory University.
Frequent working from home (WFH) may stay as a new work norm after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior observational studies on WFH and work outcomes under non-pandemic circumstances are mostly cross-sectional and often studied employees who worked from home in limited capacity. To provide additional insights that might inform post-pandemic work policies, using longitudinal data collected before the ...
The authors use data from the October 2020 Pew Research Center American Trends Panel. On the basis of a sample of 4,508 respondents, the authors find that working from home improves job satisfaction, flexibility over when to put in one's work hours, work-family balance, productivity, and work hours. ... Those who work from home are more ...