‘The office is closed’: Company forces its 900 employees to work from home

AN AUSTRALIAN company has kicked off a major experiment, and its 900 employees won’t get a choice. It sounds like something too good to be true.

WOULD you prefer to work from home?

Some call it the future of work, others call it ‘shirking from home’. But 150 employees at this Australian company weren’t given a choice last Wednesday.

It took weeks of planning and IT support, but MEC, an advertising company with offices in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane, pulled off the day-long experiment without a hitch.

It was part of a broader initiative run by parent company GroupM called ‘The Floor is Closed’, designed to promote flexible working conditions.

Sister companies within the GroupM stable will follow suit in the coming four to six weeks, with around 900 employees in total to take part.

“We put a lot of planning into the day in terms of IT support and it was a huge success. There is no reason why people can’t work from home and be productive,” MEC chief executive Peter Vogel said.

He added while the day was “symbolic”, the point was to attract the best talent. “If you don’t offer flexibility, there may be some talent you miss out on,” he said.

GroupM chief executive John Steedman said there was a huge misconception that people working from home were not as productive as those sitting in an office.

“I completely disagree. The home environment can actually be more productive than sitting in an open-plan environment where there are distractions,” he said.

The goal for the company was to have employees work from home at least 12 times a year, he said, but the key was flexibility.

“We have people now that work part-time here and part-time at home. I wouldn’t want people working full-time at home as obviously it’s important you have some sort of interaction with people within the organisation, but certainly on an ad hoc basis I have no issues.”

It doesn’t necessarily have to be working from home, Mr Steedman added. “It can be at a park, it can be at a cafe. Just not a pub.”

But does it actually make people more productive? According to a recent Stanford University study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, yes.

In that case, the researchers examined the work habits of employees at Ctrip, a 16,000-strong, listed Chinese travel agency. Call centre workers were randomly assigned to work either from home or in the office for nine months.

The researchers found home working led to a 13 per cent performance increase, of which 9 per cent was from working more minutes per shift due to fewer breaks and sick days, and 4 per cent from more calls per minute, which they attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment.

Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction, and their attrition rate halved. Due to the success of the experiment, Ctrip expanded the option to work from home to the whole company.

Study author Professor Nicholas Bloom told the Harvard Business Review the move saved the company an estimated $2500 ($US1900) per employee over the nine months.

While working from home isn’t for everyone, Professor Bloom said as a general rule of thumb, employees should be given the option one or two days a week.

“Right now the employees who spend significant amounts of time working from home are on either end of the income spectrum,” he said. “Solitary, per-hour workers like call centre reps, proofreaders, and developers, whose output can be easily tracked; or professionals and senior managers, who presumably are highly self-motivated.”

Some who volunteered to work from home in the Ctrip study opted to come back to the office after the nine months, and those were generally the worst performers, he noted.

“They had tried it and figured out that it wasn’t right for them. But the company still ended up with the best, most motivated home-based workforce,” he said.

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