Cookies?
Library Header Image
LSE Research Online LSE Library Services

Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment

Bloom, Nicholas, Liang, James, Roberts, John and Ying, Zhichun Jenny (2013) Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP1194). London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance, London, UK.

[img]
Preview
PDF - Published Version
Download (1MB) | Preview

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.

Item Type: Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/series.asp?...
Additional Information: © 2013 The Authors
Divisions: Centre for Economic Performance
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
JEL classification: J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Time Allocation, Work Behavior, and Employment Determination and Creation; Human Capital; Retirement
Date Deposited: 07 Aug 2013 15:33
Last Modified: 13 Sep 2024 20:24
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/51525

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics