Is working from home really working, or is it just an excuse for employees to goof off at home? After Marissa Mayer famously ended working from home at Yahoo, researchers at Stanford decided to answer that question. So what did their research reveal? Well, it turns out that working from home is good for business!
Instead of tuning into Netflix, workers who worked from home were 13% more productive and reported improved work satisfaction and sleep. The researchers hypothesized that the increase in productivity was caused by a range of factors, including less distractions and sick days. Most dramatically, employee turnover reduced 50% in the group that worked from home.
A curious finding is that top performing employees reported the highest satisfaction with working from home. So, if your business is serious about attracting and retaining the best talent, a work from home policy might aid those efforts!
These findings support previous studies that have reported on the benefits of working from home. In a 2013 study, researchers found that employees who worked from home were substantially less stressed than those that did not work from home. With stress being the number 1 problem in workplaces today, any technique to reduce stress is worth examining further.
If your employer doesn’t offer any kind of work from home options, now might be the time to ask for it since the science is loud and clear about the benefits! At Grokker we have one mandatory work from home day each week, and while we don’t have hard data on how it affects productivity, we know that it does improve employee satisfaction and happiness.