Working Paper: NBER ID: w18871
Authors: Nicholas Bloom; James Liang; John Roberts; Zhichun Jenny Ying
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.
Keywords: working from home; employee performance; randomized control trial; telecommuting; management practices
JEL Codes: M1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Working from home (J29) | Employee performance (M54) |
| Working from home (J29) | Minutes worked per shift (J38) |
| Working from home (J29) | Calls per minute (L96) |
| Working from home (J29) | Job satisfaction (J28) |
| Working from home (J29) | Attrition rates (J63) |
| Working from home (J29) | Promotion rate (J62) |
| Post-experiment working arrangement choice (C90) | Performance gains from WFH (J29) |
| Performance (D29) | Working arrangement choice (J29) |