Tuesday, 26 February 2013

Working from home is a dead-end job

Yahoo may be helping workers by demanding they work in the office

Yahoo employees who work from home will have to start packing up their lunches and reporting to the office for duty. But new research suggests there may be a good reason for them to show up: a future.
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Yahoo to employees: No more working from home

Yahoo is set to implement a new rule which requires all employees to work in the office, a move that could impact hundreds. Rachel Emma Silverman joins digits. Photo: Getty Images.
Those hired by the Internet giant with agreements that they could work partly, or entirely, from home are no doubt peeved over new CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to end the company’s flexible location policies. In a memo issued last week, all employees were told they’d have to show up for work in the office starting in June, according to a report in AllThingsDigital. (Yahoo didn’t respond to requests for comment.) The memo says working from the office facilitates more brainstorming. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” it says. See: “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More.
But while studies suggest that those who work from home tend to be happier than the average cubicle drone, the chance to work in one’s pajamas often comes at a cost. Controlling for performance, working from home reduced rates of promotion by 50%, according to a report published last week by professors at Stanford University, which reviewed a working-from-home program at a 16,000-employee, Nasdaq-listed Chinese travel agency over nine months. One reason for the bleaker career prospects: less on-the-job training. See: Does Working From Home Work?
With its new policy, Yahoo YHOO -0.29%   is moving in the opposite direction of much of corporate America. The number of people working from home has almost doubled in 30 years, from 2.3% in 1980 to 4.2% in 2010, according to the latest U.S. Census. In fact, the Census data found that about 10% of the workforce works from home at least one day a week, and the wage discount for working from home — 30% in 1980 — has effectively vanished. The company saved around $2,000 per employee, primarily because it paid less rent for office space and increased productivity, the study found.
Aside from fewer promotions, those working from home face other obstacles, says Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford and a co-author of the study. “Even though their productivity went up, they got less face time at the office.” Some also said they were lonely, he says. On the upside, the percentage of workers who quit was halved to 25% from 50% among those who worked from home. Many of the people who volunteered for the work-at-home study were married women with children.

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And Yahoo aside, employers often find that work-from-home arrangements are a win-win. In Stanford’s study, telecommuting led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift. These workers also tended to take fewer breaks and sick days. What’s more, call-center workers who stayed at home handled 4% more calls per minute, primarily as a result of a quieter work environment. Eventually, more than half of the employees studied opted to work from home after the nine months were up.
Given such research, industry pros don’t expect too many other companies to follow Yahoo’s lead. Recent studies show employers are continuing to encourage telecommuting — not pulling back. Around 29% of employers reported they will allow more staff to work from home this year, up from 26% last year, according to a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com, a job-search website. And among information technology employers, that rate is even higher: 63% said they will allow more workers to telecommute in 2013, up from 53% last year.
“The ability to work and perform well as a remote team has become even easier,” says Amanda Augustine, a job-search expert at TheLadders, a careers website. Telecommuters are helped by video conferencing software like Skype and iMeet and document-sharing services like iCloud and Dropbox, she says. What’s more, the Internal Revenue service said last month that it’s simplifying the process of enabling home-based workers to right off expenses. See: Coming Soon: A simpler home-office tax deduction.
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