Sixty-seven percent of professionals feel that working remotely is productive, and it’s easy to see why.
As winter storms continue to wreak havoc on the Northeast, many employees are opting out of their daily commutes to their 9-to-5 office jobs and instead choosing to stay cozy — and warm — in the comfort of their homes and in front of their laptops.
According to two recent studies, working from home is something you should actually be doing more of. In fact, working from home can be good for both your health and productivity. Not only did employees who worked from home report increased job satisfaction and a reduction in “work exhaustion,” they also claimed to sleep better.
Separately, researchers also found that the highest performing employees were the ones most likely to thrive in a work from home environment.
Researchers from Stanford University conducted the study on 255 employees from a large Chinese travel agency, all of whom had been employed with the company for at least six months. Half of the employees worked from home for nine months, while the remaining half acted as the control group, and continued to work at the agency’s office. Both groups worked exactly the same shifts.
Though the performance of the group working in the office continued to remain stable, the performance of the group working from home increased by 13%, measured by their sales rate and interactions with clients. They were also found to be more productive per minuted. The researchers attributed this to less noise distraction, fewer breaks, and fewer sick days, Harvard Business Review reported.
However, they also found something else that was quite interesting. Following the test period, the employees were given the option to continue working from home or to return to working at the office. Surprisingly, nearly half of the employees who worked from home decided to return to the office, while three-quarters of the group who worked in the office decided to stay there.
“Our advice is that firms — at the very least — ought to be open to employees working from home occasionally, to allow them to focus on individual projects and tasks,” the study’s authors wrote in Harvard Business Review.