MAGINE: YOU WAKE UP at 7:30 a.m. instead of 5:30; you don’t have a two-hour commute ahead of you. You prepare coffee for yourself and breakfast for the kids at a leisurely pace instead of the hectic pace of the past. You drive the kids to school, then return home. Yes, return home. No, you’re not
on holiday; you’re not retired; you are a “mobile worker,” a modern manifestation of new approaches to work made easier by the cellphone, laptop and tablet revolution. You work mostly from home. Mobile work is transforming where, when and how knowledge
workers and others do their jobs. The latest IDC Canada report concludes that in 2014 mobile workers made up about 70% of employed Canadians, a slight increase from year-earlier figures. “Our mobile worker data refers to the physical location of the workers, not whether they are using a mobile device. We divide them into three mutually exclusive categories: office-based workers, nonoffice-based workers, and home-based workers,” says Emily Taylor, the market research and intelligence firm’s senior analyst, mobile research. The last category conjures up images of independent workers
— freelancers, contractors and outsourced service providers — but now also comprises full-time employees, including call-cen- tre attendants, proofreaders, medical record transcribers, insur- ance claims clerks, etc. Books catering to this demographic oſten feature the tagline Working in Your Pyjamas. However, telecommuter or workshiſter may be a more suitable
term for well-educated, higher-paid knowledge workers who con- tribute from offsite locations, including their homes, cars, coffee shops or clients’ premises. “Workshiſting is defined as working at an alternative work-site. In fact, a better definition might be moving work to people instead of people to work,” says Robyn Bews, executive director of WORKshift Canada, an initiative launched in Calgary by the federal government to promote flexi- ble work. “This permits knowledge workers the freedom to do their jobs
when and where they believe they can contribute most effec- tively,” says Bews. When managers consider offering work-at-home or work-out- side-the-office options to their employees, they often start by establishing a sound business case for doing so. Measurable benefits and advantages must exist for both sides to offset the added cost and hassles of making the change. Since improving productivity is one of management’s top-of-mind goals, the ques- tion is, does working from home or elsewhere besides the office make employees more productive? The answer is yes. Or rather that’s the conclusion of a working- from-home field experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, Shanghai-based online travel agency, conducted by Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom. Call-centre employees who volunteered were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months. The March 2013 report “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment” noted that “home working
led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shiſt (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter [and more convenient] working environment).” The firm improved total productivity by 20% to 30%, creating about US$2,000 in annual savings per employee working from home. Two-thirds of the gain came from reduced office space and the rest from improved employee performance and reduced turnover. In a January 2014 Harvard Business Review article, “To Raise
Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home,” Bloom qualified the report’s findings. “The more robotic the work, the greater the benefits, we think.
More research needs to be done on creative work and teamwork, but the evidence still suggests that with most jobs, a good rule of thumb is to let employees have one to two days a week at home,” he said. “It’s hugely beneficial to their well-being, helps you attract talent and lowers attrition.” Improved employee performance — for example, higher pro-
ductivity for call-centre staff — is easily calculated thanks to the stopwatch-based system for measuring 19th-century factory- worker efficiency developed by the father of scientific manage- ment, Frederick W. Taylor. However, that approach is less useful for evaluating contributions from knowledge workers. According to Alison Konrad, Ivey Business School professor
and coauthor of a 2013 case study of Telus’ telecommuting initia- tive, “Knowledge workers are required to adapt to unfolding work requirements, adjust creatively to dynamic situations and apply professional judgment. None of these processes are easy to assess in terms of quantity, quality or effectiveness.” And yet other academics, some casting a doubtful eye on cor-
porate claims of munificent, self-reported telecommuting bene- fits, concede that productivity levels of telecommuters and those of their office-based colleagues are more or less the same. In a research paper, “The Dark Side of Telecommuting — Is a Tipping Point Approaching?” Stephen Ruth, a professor at Virginia’s George Mason University, citing other academics’ research, stated, “Telecommuting has a clear upside: small but favorable effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfac- tion, performance, turnover intent and stress. Contrary to expec- tations in both academic and practitioner literatures, telecom- muting also has no straightforward, damaging effects on the quality of workplace relationships or perceived career prospects.” If employee productivity based on location is a wash, what are
the measurable advantages of introducing telecommuting? Reduced real estate costs leap to mind. A 2014 study by commercial real estate giant CBRE Ltd. found
that, globally, workers spend less than half their workday (47%) working independently at their desks. The rest of their time is spent in meetings or working face-to-face, or virtually, with others. As a result, many employers are busy right-sizing and modern- izing their office space to reduce costs and meet the needs of
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