Schlechte Performance im Homeoffice – Wahrheit oder Mythos?
Working outside of the office is often seen as less productive - but is that actually true?
STATISTICS AND FACTS
All of the existing research indicates that remote teams are more productive than traditional in-office teams. On average, a well-coordinated, dispersed team leads to a 13% increase in work efficiency.
Many managers worry that their employees will be less productive when they're not in the office. But there's a rational explanation for this concern: a few days of observing employee behavior is enough to make anyone suspicious of how they might spend their time at home. Surfing the internet and using social media are at the top of almost every survey, and people actually spend almost twice as much time doing these things at work than they do at home.
What does this mean? Especially that the "idle time" at home is only half as long as at work is actually a positive sign for the case of working from home. As painful as it may sound, if employees want to surf the internet or take care of personal errands during work hours, they will do so whether they are at home or at work. The watchful eye of the boss does not help as much as one might think.
Another example is the call center CTrip, which collaborated with Stanford University on a study. The randomly selected participants worked from home for 9 months. Half of the employees worked from home, while the other half stayed in the office as a control group. The study results and performance evaluations were surprisingly positive: there was a 13% increase in productivity, uninterrupted work time was maintained for longer periods, and more calls were completed per minute. The participants also reported increased satisfaction with their work. Ultimately, the study was such a success for the company that they offered all employees the opportunity to work from home after the experiment – more than half of them took them up on the offer.
There is another, seemingly invisible, advantage to remote work: it allows businesses to tap into talent pools beyond their immediate vicinity. This is an approach that JetBlue Airways has successfully adopted. The company has agreed with its employees that they will work in the office for at least 3 hours per week, with the rest of their time being spent working remotely or from home. JetBlue has found that 3 hours is more than enough time to maintain a solid relationship with the team. At the same time, the airline has a much wider reach when it comes to finding qualified employees. This includes well-educated, experienced mothers who have traditionally been seen as a financial liability by other organizations. In JetBlue, they are contributing to a more efficient workplace.
During the recruitment phase, it's possible to assess whether a candidate would be a good fit for a remote working arrangement. This opens up a much larger pool of potential candidates to choose from, since you're not limited to those who live in your local area.
It's important to only hire candidates that you trust - obviously. Lack of trust in an employee is a sign that you made a bad decision during the recruitment process. As Chris Hoffman from IT Collective (a 100% remote company) so eloquently put it:
"The physical space of the office can be used by managers as a safety net. They can sweep any disorder in their team neatly under the rug instead of dealing with it. The ability to walk back and forth in the corridor every 15 minutes to check on every microtask of their employees can sometimes hide bad decisions made during the recruitment process".
He also believes that IT Collective halts collaboration when an employee is unable to manage their time and workload. This provides the opportunity to build a team where every employee makes a valuable contribution.
A MANAGER NOT A NANNY
The examples above underscore an essential skill of any good manager: trust in his or her employees. If you're an employer and you automatically assume that your employees are going to be as lazy as a bear in winter, that's probably not the right approach—especially because of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The resulting outcomes will reflect those low expectations. As trite as it sounds, simply treating employees like responsible adults can be enough to get them to exceed your expectations.
As an employee, you might ask yourself: what do you prefer – having your manager check in on your work regularly, or wait to review the finished product? I think the answer is simple – it ultimately depends on you and whether you want someone breathing down your neck constantly. If you work with a specific goal in mind, you'll be surprised at how much leeway you actually have.
