Home office - The lessons of telecommuting

THE LESSONS OF TELECOMMUTING: 4 prime advantages of working from home

Last updated: April 3rd, 2019

Excerpted from The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace, in which social psychologist Ron Friedman, Ph.D., draws upon extensive research to guide employers and employees alike towards creating a better, stronger workplace. 

This section was inspired by the American national debate on whether employees are better off working from home or from an office outside the home. 

“A workforce culture based on long hours at the office with little regard for family or community does not inevitably lead to strong productivity or innovation,” wrote sociologist Jennifer Glass in an impassioned New York Times op-ed. U.S. News & World Report columnist Susan Milligan was more sympathetic: “Technology is great; it helps us do things more efficiently and cheaper. But it has also led to a breakdown in human interaction that is bad not only for humankind in general, but for business.”

Watching all this unfold, I was struck by how much of the debate seemed to be centred on the wrong question. Instead of asking whether employees are more productive at home or at work—to which the obvious answer is, it depends on the specific individual and the particular task—what we should have been asking is what home environments can teach us about building a better workplace.

Numerous studies have found that in many cases, employees who have the option of telecommuting are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. But what is it about working from home that often boosts our output? And more important: How do we apply those insights to the office so that employees can be more effective at work?

In fairness, some comforts of home just can’t be replicated, no matter how hard a company tries. Take shaving two hours off an employee’s commute. Eliminating travel time reduces employees’ stress levels and allows them to spend the best hours of their day doing their job. It’s a legitimate benefit that deserves serious consideration. But there’s more to working from home than simply less travel.

A lack of distractions

Consider access to a quiet, private space, for example. It’s impossible to excel at challenging mental work when we’re under a constant barrage of emails, conference calls and meetings. Our brains can only handle so much. The cognitive bandwidth we each have is limited, which is why distractions can be so harmful. Allowing disruptions to consume our attention leaves us with fewer resources to attend to the work that matters.

Workplace distractions also slow us down more than we might recognize. A quick visit from a colleague might only take 30 seconds, but the cognitive reverberations of that diversion can last much longer. A University of California–Irvine study found that when we’re distracted from an activity in which we’re fully immersed, it takes us an average of more than 20 minutes just to regain our previous momentum.

A low-pressure environment

Unlike in the workplace, there’s also less pressure in a quiet home environment to multitask. While we like to believe that we’re good at multitasking, research suggests it’s rarely an effective strategy. What appears to us as tackling several activities at once often involves simply shuffling between tasks, for which there are serious consequences. When we multitask, our performance suffers and our stress levels spike. In part, it’s because redirecting our attention from one task to another depletes our cognitive resources, leaving us with less mental energy than if we had simply devoted our full attention to one activity at a time. Researchers are also finding that chronic multitaskers—those of us who can’t help but read emails while talking on the phone, for example—are especially prone to experiencing boredom, anxiety and depression.

Personalization and control

Another benefit of working from home: personalization. At home we get to control many aspects of our environment—everything from the setup of our office to the lighting of our desk to the temperature in our room—which improves our comfort level and allows us to direct our focus to our work.

But personal comfort isn’t the only reason personalization is important. Human beings are territorial animals. When we have the freedom to shape our surroundings, we experience a heightened sense of personal control, which reduces stress and improves our confidence. In contrast, believing that we lack control over our environment leads to a decline in motivation.

Psychologists have found that organizations that encourage employees to customize their workspaces tend to have happier workers. Not only does decorating an office make employees feel more comfortable, it also promotes a sense of personal ownership and belonging.

In one experiment, researchers measured a 32 percent increase in performance among people who were allowed to customize their offices, compared to those whose offices were kept bare. Another study reported that employees who don’t personalize their offices (when personalization is allowed) are typically the ones who are the least happy with their jobs. Findings like these help explain why companies such as DreamWorks and Etsy have started providing new hires with a modest budget for decorating their workstations. A small investment in personalization can go a long way.

Access to restorative experiences

When we work from home, we also have access to restorative experiences, like glancing out a window, going out for a run or taking a nap. At most organizations, opportunities like these are rare. Having the freedom to recharge in ways that many workplaces discourage undoubtedly plays a role in facilitating a telecommuter’s productivity.

Workplace design: We need a change!

It’s no wonder so many employees believe they are more productive from their home office. It’s because in many cases, they are. When we’re placed in an environment that’s conducive to complex thinking, our minds respond.

But the real lesson of telecommuting, the one that every CEO would do well to consider, is that there’s something deeply wrong with the design of a workplace when the only way for an employee to feel productive is to physically leave the building. When coming in early, staying late and working weekends become implicit requirements for keeping up, this much is clear: The current model is broken.

Do you agree with Friedman that the current workplace model needs to be fixed? If so, how could we go about fixing it, without sending all employees home? Leave a comment to let us know. 

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Ron Friedman, Ph.D., is an award-winning psychologist and the founder of ignite80, a consulting firm that helps smart leaders build extraordinary workplaces. Popular accounts of his research have appeared on National Public Radio (NPR) and in major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. To learn more about his work, visit ignite80.com and connect with him on Twitter @RonFriedman.

q? encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0399165606&Format= SL160 &ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=theminwor01 20ir?t=theminwor01 20&l=as2&o=1&a=0399165606 From THE BEST PLACE TO WORK by Ron Friedman, paperback published December 1, 2015 by Tarcher Perigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2015, Ron Friedman, Ph.D.
image: Home office interior via Shutterstock