Work To Make Work From Home Work

While former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s report to work order memo in 2013 was a defining moment for advocates and critics of working from home in the 2010s, the recent COVID-19 outbreaks seem to be on its way to being the defining moment of the 2020s. As COVID-19 has started to spread across borders, along with misinformation about the disease (yes, it is worse than catching the flu), many businesses and organizations in regions with outbreaks have started to ask their employees to work from home. Will this enable a broader shift toward remote work? While there isn’t a definite answer and much depends upon the duration and severity of the outbreak, as more people are opting into working from home, it’s a perfect time to revisit the idea.

Work from home (WFH) came into the spotlight ever since the 1970s in the form of telecommuting (commuting over telecommunications), and gained popularity in the 1990s with a set of zany catchphrases (“work is something you do, not something you travel to”, “work is what we do, not where we are”). Its pros and cons have been hotly contested over time, with nearly every modern publication that’s had anything to say about management science from HBR and MIT Sloan to Vox Recode and even Quora participating in the exchange. We’ve seen big tech names such as Dell, Amazon and SAP implement work from home measures and recent data have shown a steady rise in the number of employees working remotely. Although we associate work from home and remote work with a ‘Silicon Valley work culture’, that’s not necessarily true as seen by the majority of Google employees who do not work from home and instead prefer what has essentially become a sliver of the shadow of Bournville. So what exactly is work from home? Why does it seem so popular and are there any advantages for the organization? What are some drawbacks? Are these drawbacks critical and how can organizations use their management toolkit to overcome these drawbacks? Should all organizations and employees try working from home?

What is work from home?

Work from home falls under a large umbrella of terms for working outside of a traditional office as opposed to working on-site, which are often used interchangeably and are simply confusing. They broadly include remote work and telecommuting:

• Remote work: Employees work outside the traditional office, often across borders and timezones, with team members who are equally as diversely located. Employees are not expected to physically commute to their work and use a variety of online tools instead to coordinate with colleagues. This is also increasingly being referred to as work from anywhere (WFA).
• Telecommuting: Employees can regularly work from anywhere outside of their traditional office space, including hopping over to the nearest cafe, renting a co-working space or even setting up shop at a food court. Each company has its own set of guidelines over whether they want the employee to alternate between telecommuting and working on-site or if they want the employee to simply telecommute. Under this group falls work from home where employees can regularly work from their home or a home office, as well as freelancers and independent entrepreneurs who consistently work from their home office. Telecommuting also includes employees who temporarily work from home, because of external circumstances such as bad weather, illness or a personal emergency.

What are the advantages of work from home?

The largest and primary advantage of working from home is the increase in productivity, as a result of increased focus, time saved that is otherwise spent on commuting, and employees feeling relaxed and comfortable in an environment of their choosing. This is well documented in a Stanford study of Ctrip, one of the largest travel service providers globally. The 2013 study was a randomized control trial on work from home, which assigned employees to work from home for 4 days each week. The study finds that over the course of 9 months, performance rose nearly 13% and work from home employees were more productive per minute. While a caveat to understanding this increase in performance is that work from home employees took lesser breaks and sick days, employees also mention that quieter working conditions helped them focus on the task and increase their productivity. The turnover rate also fell sharply by over 50% and this finding pointed to another major advantage of working from home: employees tend to feel more positive about their work and find themselves making progress, which considerably raises job satisfaction. Employees are now able to structure their work around their lives rather than the other way around.

Flexible work arrangements are also an attractive recruitment tactic and strategy for retaining high performing employees. This is particularly true as millennials now comprise a large proportion of the workforce. Some millennials edging toward managerial positions are more comfortable with using technology for telecommuting as opposed to accepting the idea that the only way to increase productivity is physical proximity. Moreover, with skyrocketing rent prices in large cities, more millennials are more open (or in most instances — pushed) to moving away from large cities to less populated regions for various reasons, including the rent, environment, and community. High rents also affect office space and expenditure, especially for small organizations or organizations based in cities with ballooning real estate prices. In fact, a key reason behind Ctrip’s decision to experiment with work from home arrangements was the climbing rent costs in Shanghai.

An evident and important advantage of work from home is that individuals who have been left out of the workforce or forced to take a career break since they are not able to work on-site because they are caretakers, having young infants or any number of good reasons, can work from home.

What are the disadvantages of work from home?

A commonly cited drawback of working from home is the idea that creativity and collaboration cannot take place digitally, and require in-person participation. This was a prime reason for Marissa Mayer’s decision in 2013. It is also supported by the media richness theory (MRT) in communications, which purport that online digital communications are not “rich communications” and not advanced enough to replicate face-to-face communications. Interestingly this idea of the need for a physical space to stimulate creativity and teamwork has also been the impetus behind redesigning what a traditional office space looks like — from cubicles to more open, meeting and brainstorming friendly spaces.

Other frequently touted cons are that employees are easily diverted from their work from the minefield of distractions at home — including the TV, fridge, children of family members, and an urgent gnawing need to spring clean your kitchen. Traditional cubicles and offices reinforce the idea of a ‘working space’ and force you to concentrate on the task and cannot be replicated at home. However, on the flip side to this prevalent preconception by organizations, research shows us that employees actually suffer from being unable to unplug and end up working for longer hours than they would on-site, further deteriorating a work-life balance.

Working from home could potentially also decrease job satisfaction. According to the job characteristic theory which is used in work design, a crucial part of organizational management and human resources, online communication tools may decrease the frequency and depth of feedback. Employees may receive ambiguous information and unclear expectations, and impersonal feedback which may harm the employee’s productivity, satisfaction, and growth.

Surprisingly, research points out that the biggest drawback of working at home is loneliness. In Ctrip’s case, many employees chose to go back to the office after the experiment concluded because they had missed social interaction. Meeting and socializing with other people are a significant part of work-life and having to work alone can be isolating in a world that’s already inspiring headlines about generations that are disengaged, isolated and lonely because of their devices (of course there are good, compelling arguments against this so we’ll let you be the judge of this assessment).

However, while long-term romantic relationships are seen as a possibility (although some would argue, rarely viable), friendships are easily forged on online platforms, and personal relationships are sustained over time and space through IMs and video calls, we often view working from home as being impossible because you cannot possibly work, and work productively, without physically swiping into your office and canvassing your cubicle for a stapler. Work from home or remote work has been touted only for high performing employees with a high work ethic so far. Yet, as we’re seeing from the COVID-19 outbreaks, work from home may be an inevitable reality for many organizations in the future, so how do organizations guarantee that their employee will get their work done?

There are two aspects to the question that organizations will have to answer: 1) Can the work be done remotely? 2) Is the employee capable of working remotely?

Can the work be done remotely?

There are a surprising number of jobs that can be done remotely, not to mention an assistant development chef, a spaceship physics developer, an outdoor gear tester and a senior traffic engineer. There are also jobs that require or are even based on the idea of a physical hands-on approach, but most administrative tasks, coding, technical support and in fact most cubicle based office work can benefit from introducing work from home. Even implementing a work from home once a week will help you reap the advantages mentioned above. The decline in meaningful feedback and unclear expectations are red flags for ineffective team communication and contrary to what media richness theory tells us, online communication today is astonishingly second nature. Digital media and the internet have started to influence the way we speak, use punctuation and even alter our grammar rules and vocabulary. While technological advancements might have made remote working a possibility, working from home has also pushed ahead technology and we’ve seen a rise in new office productivity tools. We use an array of online tools just to brief a colleague sitting a row away, catch up on updates from another team on a different floor of the same building, and share memes. We’re already essentially working remotely within the confines of a traditional office facade. If you’re convinced that your organization or team cannot afford to work from home even once a week, approach the problem differently. Instead of fitting work from home onto the job, assess if the job can be changed to allow working from home and access those benefits. As Peter Hirst from MIT Sloan puts it, “can we change the job design so that everyone (…) has access to that sort of flexibility?”

Is the employee capable of working remotely?

Do employees who are easily distracted by the TV while working at home suddenly find the ‘will’ to become highly functional and productive when given an office cubicle? A repeated theme behind ‘debunking’ the fears of organizations, is the realization that trying to implement work from home can expose flaws in the core of the job design. When that happens, rather than shutting down the notion of work from home until a real emergency arises, we need to take a serious look at the job design. While an environment that helps employees focus and be productive without unwanted distractions is vital, so are the work and responsibilities given to individuals that make them feel that they are productive, contributing and an important part of the team. If someone plays solitaire all day at work because they feel unfulfilled, unmotivated and neglected, they will also play solitaire when working at home.

Instead of looking at the root of the problem and asking yourself how to motivate solitaire player numero uno (I confess, I have been this solitaire person), solely blaming the environment merely takes away any possible benefit you could gain from remote working and, more importantly, does not address a flaw in your organizational management. Treating all work done at home as being unproductive biases you against fairly evaluating the different types of work arrangement, and is grossly unfair to all the freelancers, particularly in the creative field, who work three jobs at home to create more in this attention economy. How was ‘working from home’ never a good enough excuse for a bad paper in school or college?

However, loneliness and creative collaboration remain important drawbacks that organizations can’t ignore and they also pose big questions about societal ramifications from digitalization of work. As with everything, taking things in moderation is always the go-to advice, and regularly alternating work from home with on-site work could help organizations still achieve team collaboration and build trust with the productivity gains. For instance, a pilot team from the executive education program at MIT Sloan School mandates Wednesdays for face-to-face interactions while the rest of the team members’ schedules are “aggressively flexible”.

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases have surged in South Korea, organizations have started to implement work from home and many remote office communication services have started to offer free trials. At Defora, we decided to experiment with working from home as the number of cases in Seoul, where we are based, is nearly at 100. Our organization has plenty of cross-team collaboration and meetings and we’ve been using our own app Defora (the Beta version is coming real soon!) to align priorities, receive updates, and generally be on the same page. For instance, our sales and marketing teams created a ‘business development’ group on Defora to organize all our cross-team collaborations and we’ve started creating discussion activities where all members are invited to participate to set agendas, delegate responsibilities and deliverables by the next meeting, and receive cross-team feedback. Since half of our members are working from home this week, we’ve used Defora to set agendas, brainstorm ideas, give and receive feedback, and exchange opinions over the past week. Turns out, using Defora has condensed the aim of our cross-team meeting over video call to confirming whether we were all on the same page and it has halved our meeting time. I know I’m biased but it has been refreshingly productive! I was energized after the meeting to start working on my tasks, as opposed to what usually happens — feeling drained and unmotivated. Stay in tuned for more updates about our experiment with working from home, and whether Defora does actually help us address the common drawbacks with remote work! If you’re unsure about how Defora works and you’ve just been reading the past few sentences without understanding them: here’s the Medium article about our showcase in Geneva, and our website!