How productive are telecommuters? It depends.

This is the first in a series of posts inspired by interesting Google searches that led people to this Blawg.

The search I’m focusing on this time was simply “how productive are telecommuters”

The current post in this Blawg that shows up is: “Fascinating Facts About Telecommuters,” which only briefly mentions productivity.

I decided to dig a bit deeper.

One academic study I didn’t read (skipping ahead to the conclusion works for me most of the time!) is entitled “Predicting Telecommuter Productivity. “ It concludes:

Results revealed that high-productivity and low-productivity telecommuters differed in terms of beliefs & attitudes toward telecommuting, interaction effectiveness with managers and family members, and resource availability and a distraction-free environment.

In other words, according to this study the answer to the question about telecommuter productivity is “it depends.”

Another statement giving a mixed answer to the productivity question is from“Confessions of a Full-Time Telecommuter”:

For self-motivated employees, telecommuting means a productivity boost. Focused and dedicated individuals will get far more work done at home than in an office. . .

Some employees will prefer to come to the office because home is not conducive to work. The key is to have the flexibility to support the differing work styles of various employees.

Other sources are less equivocal, finding telecommuting positively impacts productivity.

For the Washington Post, Amy Joyce wrote: “Telecommuters found to be most productive workers”

She reported on a study by AT&T, where about 90 percent of management employees work from home at least some of the time, while 30 percent work completely from home.

AT&T’s senior vice president of Internet telephony noted that “companies that don’t permit teleworking fall flat during weather or other disasters, when employees might have worked from home, even if they could not travel to the office.” Yet “41 percent of companies in 2004 did not have telework in their business continuity plans, while 21 percent said it was already highly integrated into company plans.”

The AT&T veep interviewed said that “many companies assume working from home will result in less productive employees. However, the opposite typically is true . . . . People who work from home are ‘less subject to distraction. They feel more in control in terms of that interruption when people just pop into your office. That doesn’t happen,’ ”

According to the State of Arizona’s “Telecommuting Zone” webpage:

[S]urveys consistently show The State of Arizona Telecommuting Program has demonstrated increased productivity from the viewpoint of the supervisor, the telecommuter and the non-telecommuting coworkers.

On a page entitled “Implementing a Telecommuting Strategy,” Stallion, a company selling products that enable telecommuting, states:

[M]any studies reveal a consistent 10% - 30 % increase in employee productivity, derived from less time spent getting to and from work, fewer disturbances and greater work-scheduling flexibility. The cost savings derived from these areas are recurring, they are multiplied over the years. The Gartner Group estimate that a typical telecommuting employee will save their employer around $5000 over a five year period.

“Stress management for telecommuters” contains a variety of suggestions for telecommuters, including dealing with this productivity issue:

Household Distractions - Blurred boundaries between work and family may interfere with telecommuter productivity.

The suggestions:

have dedicated work space at home, preferably with a door that locks
work space should give family message that telecommuter is working and is not to be disturbed
teach family members when it is OK and not OK to interrupt
make sure plan is in place for children to be cared for while you are working

Finally, this article starts out very negatively, like a confirmation of management’s worst fears, but goes on to some great suggestions, again showing the answer really is “it depends”:“Survey results report productivity lag among teleworkers”

Some 40 million Americans work from home on a part-time basis, statistics show. But new survey findings from CareerBuilder.com show a large segment of teleworkers may not be doing much working at all.

Covered by the anonymity of an online survey, the 2,450 teleworkers were brutally honest about the lack of productivity when working from home. So honest, in fact, that 25% admit they spend less than one hour on office work when working from home. More than half (53%) work for less than three hours from the home office, and just 14% say they work a full eight-hour day.