“The concern is that there is some underlying characteristic of people that is driving whether one wants to become a remote worker, and that characteristic is also correlated to productivity,” explains Choudhury. This implementation process enabled Choudhury and his co-authors to avoid what is known as the selection problem in social science research. The program transitioned patent examiners to a work-from-anywhere policy over 24 months, shifting new examiners each month based on union-negotiated quotas. Seeking to increase efficiency, the agency implemented the Telework Enhancement Act Pilot Program (TEAPP) in 2012. The USPTO provided the perfect opportunity. To study the productivity effects of work-from-anywhere policies, Choudhury looked for a setting that would allow the researchers to isolate productivity changes among workers with similar job functions under different remote-work conditions. Choudhury says the results have important implications for workers, who could potentially move to lower-cost areas, reduce commuting costs, and live closer to family and friends. The study’s findings can help firms understand the effects of various flex-work options, and support certain types of employees as they negotiate with employers. While digital technology has made workers more efficient and accessible than ever before, many companies have been slow to let employees work from home regularly, let alone from anywhere at any time. “While prior academic research has studied productivity effects of ‘working from home’ that gives workers temporal flexibility, ‘work from anywhere’ goes a step further and provides both temporal and geographic flexibility,” says Choudhury, who co-authored the paper, (Live and) Work from Anywhere: Geographic Flexibility and Productivity Effects at the United States Patent Office, with HBS doctoral student Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson, executive professor of management at Northeastern University. The team found that employees with liberal “work from anywhere” arrangements, similar to those offered at Akamai, NASA, and Github, among others, were 4.4 percent more productive than those following a more traditional “work-from-home” policy that gives schedule flexibility but requires workers to live near the office. Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, and fellow researchers compared the outcomes of flexible work arrangements at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Companies that let their workers decide where and when to do their jobs-whether in another city or in the middle of the night-increase employee productivity, reduce turnover, and lower organizational costs, new research suggests.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |