Remote working better for staff and employers

by Tom Jowitt

November 22, 2007 —

Working from home (or teleworking) is better for both
workers and bosses, as it boosts morale and job satisfaction, and cuts stress
levels, researchers have discovered.

Researchers analysed 46 studies on flexible work arrangements over the past
twenty years.

Ravi S. Gajendran and David A. Harrison, at the Department of Management and
Organisation at Pennsylvania State University studied data on 12,833 telecommuters
who spend time working away from the office, and found that working away from
the office has more pluses than negatives for people and the companies that
employ them.

They reported their findings to the journal of Applied Psychology, published
by the American Psychological Association (APA).

"Our results show that telecommuting has an overall beneficial effect
because the arrangement provides employees with more control over how they do
their work," said lead author Gajendran.

"We found that telecommuters reported more job satisfaction, less motivation
to leave the company, less stress, improved work-family balance, and higher
performance ratings by supervisors," he said.

Gajendran and Harrison also found that telecommuting has more positive than
negative effects on employees and employers. In addition, the employees in their
study reported that telecommuting was beneficial for managing the often conflicting
demands of work and family.

The researchers also refuted the popular belief that "face time"
at the office is essential for good work relationships.

"Telecommuters' relationship with their managers and coworkers did not
suffer from telecommuting with one exception. Employees who worked away from
their offices for three or more days a week reported worsening of their relationships
with co-workers," said Gajendran.

They also countered productivity concerns, saying that that managers who oversaw
telecommuters reported that the telecommuters' performance was not negatively
affected by working from home.

"Telecommuting has a clear upside: small but favourable effects on perceived
autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent
and stress," the authors wrote.

"Contrary to expectations in both academic and practitioner literatures,
telecommuting has no straightforward, damaging effects on the quality of workplace
relationships or perceived career prospects."

An estimated 45 million Americans telecommuted in 2006, up from 41 million
in 2003, according to the magazine WorldatWork. The uptake of broadband in recent
years has often been linked to the rise in teleworking.

Yet it is not all plain sailing, and there is still resistance to teleworking
in some quarters. Despite AT&T concluding a few years back that teleworking
was the future, it now seems that the US carrier is now requiring thousands
of employees who work from home to return to traditional office environments.

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