The Future of Work? (Location, Location, Location @Not so Much!)

Mew York Times EDITORIAL

Location, Location, Location

Published: March 2, 2013

Marissa Mayer, chief executive at Yahoo, may not have set out to start a national conversation about working from home when shedecided that employees at that Internet company must come into the office. But she has done just that. In a memo, Ms. Mayer’s top human resources executive wrote: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Proponents of telecommuting, however, point to numerous studies showing that people who work from home are on average more productive than other workers and that telecommuting cuts down on traffic during peak hours, reduces companies’ real estate costs and improves employee morale, leading to less turnover. Ten percent of American workers spend at least one day a week clocking in from home, according to government data. The percentage of people working exclusively from home climbed to 6.6 percent of in 2010, from 4.8 percent in 1997.

A recent experiment by professors at Stanford University and Beijing University provides compelling evidence that home-based work benefits both employers and workers. With the cooperation of CTrip, a Chinese travel agency that employs 16,000 people, researchers randomly assigned 250 call center employees to work from home or the office for nine months. Those at home were noticeably more productive, spending 9 percent more time on calls and handling 4 percent more calls per minute. Workers were sick less often, reported being happier and quit less frequently.

Of course, the experience of call center agents may have no relevance for other kinds of workers, like, say, Web designers. But numerous companies that support working from home, including Aetna, the health insurer, say they have seen similar benefits. Aetna reports that its home-work policies have also saved it $78 million in real estate costs. Cisco Systems, the computing networking company that adopted a telecommuting policy in 1993, calculated that it realized $195 million in productivity gains from its approach in just one year.

Still, there are downsides. The Stanford study found that the rate at which home-based workers were promoted dropped by 50 percent, seeming to confirm the cliché “out of sight, out of mind.” That is bad for workers who are passed over, but it is also bad for employers because they might be wasting the talents of potentially great managers.

Another negative effect — hard to measure but an article of faith among entrepreneurs and some executives — is the missed serendipitous encounters between employees at the office that lead to new products or strategies. Some companies, like Bank of America, haverecently changed their policies to force workers to go into the office more often, perhaps to make sure they do not become too disconnected from their colleagues.

Some people would say that in many jobs there is no clear distinction between home and office. Thanks to cellphones and wireless connections, it is possible to be tethered to the office and expected to respond to work calls and e-mail messages every waking hour. The doyens of Silicon Valley who have made this always-connected world possible should be the first to realize that the workplace of the future will not be easy to define.