| Abstract: |
About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are
concerns this can lead to "shirking from home." We report the results of a WFH
experiment at CTrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency.
Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned to work
from home or in the office for 9 months. Home working led to a 13% performance
increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer
breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a
quieter working environment). Home workers also reported improved work
satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate
conditional on performance fell. Due to the success of the experiment, CTrip
rolled-out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental
employees to re-select between the home or office. Interestingly, over half of
them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%. This
highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern
management practices like WFH. |