Work From Home Works
2nd October 2023
It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home. But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits. We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home in the same way we saw factory redesign to take advantage of electricity. Management, for example, is shifting from input metrics–do you show up?–to output metrics–did the work get done? Designing and validating new metrics takes time, but these changes are helping to increase the benefits of work from home.