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Came here to find this. Precisely what I thought - I think that some people work better remotely and some work better in an office setting (like myself). If yo
by inglor 8y ago
Came here to find this. Precisely what I thought - I think that some people work better remotely and some work better in an office setting (like myself).
If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer and more likely to work harder to prove it can work.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoStill interesting that people who volunteer for remote work are more productive on average than those who prefer office work.
- isostatic 8y agoAnd cheaper of course - no need for a desk ($2k/yr), means they should be paid more.
- MoBattah 8y agoHave you ever seen the accounting side of this? I've previously seen accounting docs at a major defense firm I worked for. They tallied the exact dollar amount spent on each employee's square footage of office space on a monthly basis. Furthers the argument you make.
- isostatic 8y agoWell it's fairly simple - we have a building that only has office people in (not many, but some) The cost of that building divided by the number of people there. There's then power, heat, cleaning, etc, but that's all small fry compared with the rent or opportunity cost of an office building. The technical infrastructure (Cisco switches don't come cheap) is probably offset by the cost of supporting remote infrastructure, vpns etc. The cost per deal in central London is on the order of $10k-$20k a year. I'll take that in cash thanks. http://www.cityam.com/233082/london-office-rents-tube-map-heres-how-much-desk-space-costs-across-the-capital-in-one-simple-map http://www.cityam.com/233082/london-office-rents-tube-map-he...
- tysonzni 8y agoThe paper mentioned how randomization (a lottery draw on odd/even birth dates) was done among employees who expressed interest. So it is a randomized experiment.
- dpark 8y agoRandomized but drawn entirely from the pool of candidates who expressed preference for working from home.
- tysonzni 8y agoYeah you're right. Randomization at least ensures internal validity of the study as applied to people who are interested in WFH. Whether it generalizes to others is an open question.
- a_imho 8y agoIf control group is selected from people interested in WFH they have incentives to validate the study too. Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?
- dpark 8y agoI don't know what it means to "have incentives to validate the study". The study is useful but the participants are biased and that will necessarily influence the results. > Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with? Very likely, but even ignoring that, the sampling bias means that the study is confirming that people who want to work from home do better with that arrangement, rather than demonstrating that work from home is in general a better arrangement. If you want to study X vs Not-X and draw your sample population entire from the group that prefers X, you will like find that X is better in whatever ways you choose to measure: happiness, productivity, retention, etc. Imagine you want to study open office floor plans vs private offices. If you include only open office advocates in your study, you'll probably find very different results than an study that includes only private office advocates.
- V-2 8y ago> If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer And people who are better in-office workers volunteer not to go home :) I guess this does mimic real life, no?