Staff ‘more productive’ working from home

BlueZebra has found staff have been at least 20 per cent more productive working from the kitchen table or the home office.

Colin Fagen, managing director of Blue Zebra insurance, at home in Sydney’s north. Picture: Nikki Short

As businesses begin eyeing a return to the office, one Sydney-based insurance broker has found staff have never been more productive than they are now working from home.

BlueZebra chief executive Colin Fagen said he found staff had been at least 20 per cent more productive working from the kitchen table or the home office.

But Mr Fagen said bringing a new car insurance product to market so quickly would not have been possible if the business did not already have a suite of tools and a flexible workforce.

“We’ve been able to bring a new product to market in three to four weeks — normally that’d take insurers six months,” he said.

“Our technology is newer and I’d suggest we’re a lot more nimble than a lot of competitors. Large corporations suffer from having a frozen middle where a lot of initiatives don’t come out very quickly.”

Mr Fagen said because the three-year-old business went into the crisis with a flexible workforce of 18 employees, the changes brought about by COVID-19 were not much of a departure from the norm.

“I think we’re comfortable being decentralised, not having to be next to each other all the time,” he said. “The team is very much outcome-oriented, in uncertainty they keep going, they don’t stop, whereas in big businesses they all put the brakes on.”

He said they’d been so successful during this period they were planning on bringing to market four more products in the next few months.

Robyn Johns, senior lecturer in human resources management at University of Technology Sydney, said previous research had shown people working from home were often more productive, but this could be because they were putting in more hours.

“We’ve been forced into this situation and they’re finding out now we can get the job done and you’re going to get a lot of people who don’t want to come back into the workplace,” she said.

“The literature finds people are very satisfied with working from home, but generally that’s been out of choice, that’s what’s different at the moment.

“I did read some research where it looked at the numbers of hours or days people worked from home and found the more that increased the less satisfied they were.”

She said there was the added problem that people working from home during the COVID-19 crisis were unable to benefit from the rest of the world being at work.

“In my job, I do work from home. I have a combination of working from home and in the office and when I want to get things done I will work from home because I don’t get disturbed,” she said.

“I think that’s a big thing at the moment for a lot of people working from home — in the past it was productive because kids were at school, but with homeschooling and multiple people at home people are fighting for space (and) that’s a challenge.”

Dr Johns said certain personality types would thrive from working at home, while others would find it isolating and stilted.