[RESEARCH] Working from home may boost happiness and productivity. Study by Professor John Roberts: stnfd.biz/i9Jkn
— Stanford Business (@StanfordBiz) March 3, 2013
New research says working from home boosts employee happiness and productivity.
Across the industrialized world and across employers, there are huge variations in what Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom calls being-nice-to-people practices. These are policies that try to address the fact that men and women in today’s workforce are often struggling to balance their work and family responsibilities.
The French have reduced the legal work week to 35 hours. The Australians have added paid parental leave of 18 weeks for the primary caregiver of newborns. The United States requires larger employers to offer unpaid leave to employees with seriously ill family members. Some companies allow some workers to decide when and where to work, but flexibility is not generally the case, according to a 2010 report on work-life balance by the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisors. What many employers would like to know, says Bloom, is whether more flexibility in working arrangements would hurt or help the company's profitability and competitiveness. In a new study with three colleagues, he found solid evidence at one company that allowing workers to work from home produced a large productivity boost as well as happier workers.
The study was conducted over 10 months at CTrip.com, a billion-dollar NASDAQ-listed company based in Shanghai...
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