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 “We have many reasons to expect that telecommuters should work as
well or better than others,” said Ravi S. Gajendran, professor of
business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
There are many jobs that require people to show up and be present,
like surgeons and nurses who need to be next to their patients, but
for people with more autonomous jobs, like insurance claims
adjusters, their work mostly involves themselves and a computer
screen, Gajendran told Reuters Health.
For the latter group, working remotely saves time commuting and
putting together an outfit for the day, he said. And without office
cues that the workday has ended at five PM, people are liable to
stay “plugged-in” until much later, without even realizing it, he
said.
He and his co-authors sent questionnaires about remote work to 500
full-time employees in various professions, 323 of whom returned the
surveys. Almost half the respondents also had their work supervisors
fill out a questionnaire to rate the employee’s performance.
 About 37 percent of the employees said they sometimes worked from
home or from a virtual or satellite office during working hours.
Most worked from home.
Employees who telecommuted tended to be rated higher for working
well with others and for job dedication by their bosses, according
to the results published in Personnel Psychology.
This is not the first evidence that telecommuting employees are
actually more productive, said Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld, professor of
management at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York
University.
“I would say at this point we have pretty much gotten a conclusion
that telecommuting does augment performance,” said Wiesenfeld, who
was not involved in the study.
“What we don’t know, or we feel like it varies, is whether the
benefit comes from working longer hours, or not being able to turn
off, working evenings and weekends, or from something else,” she
told Reuters Health.
“It could be there’s higher wellbeing, there could be creativity
benefits too,” she said. Working parents have lower stress levels
when they have the option to work remotely, she noted.
In 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer put an end to “remote work” in an
effort to foster more collaboration.
“I think that it is clearly not a good policy if the focus is on
getting people to have higher individual performance,” Wiesenfeld
said of outlawing telecommuting. “But I don’t think that is the
reason that she implemented that policy.”
“Arguably the problem with Yahoo was the culture,” she said.
The employer questionnaire also assessed how close the manager was
to the employee, asking how often they would be willing to “bail
out” the employee.
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Based on the results, workers who had a good relationship with their
boss performed the same whether at the office or at home. But those
without a good relationship worked harder from home, “perhaps in an
attempt to make the boss realize it was a good idea to give you the
perk,” Gajendran said Unlike other workplace benefits such as
health insurance, which is available to every employee without
discrimination, the opportunity to telecommute is more
idiosyncratic, Gajendran said.
People with good relationships with their boss may get this perk and
not think much of it, but for those with poorer relationships,
getting the perk may move the needle of performance more, he said.
In the same vein, the researchers also found that telecommuting
improved work performance more when working remotely was not the
norm in the company culture.
Since jobs vary widely, whether or not telecommuting is an
appropriate option and what the office policy should be will be
specific to each situation, Gajendran said.
“If we genuinely believe the telecommuting benefits employees, how
can we maximize those benefits,” he said.
“Does the manager feel like they can manage, is there a trusting
culture, is it an organization where people are evaluated on
outcomes rather than being present in office from 9 to 5? These are
questions that every company has to recognize,” he said.
The true determinant of the productivity of the telecommuter is not
just work location, but the support system, training and culture of
the business, Gajendran said.
 “In some office cultures, showing up, coming in on weekends, and
staying late is valued instead of quality of work,” he said.
The organization has to be willing to change that type of culture,
he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1jwRxAn Personnel Psychology, online August
15, 2014.
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