Does working from home make employees more productive?

REMOTE WORKING, relatively uncommon before the pandemic, has gone mainstream. Before covid-19 roughly 5% of Americans worked from home. By May the figure had risen to 62%. By October 40% were still shunning the office. Both employers and employees have grumbled that the shift to home-working has been disruptive. But according to new research by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, two doctoral students in economics at Harvard, firms may be better off.

Ms Emanuel and Ms Harrington analysed the performance of call-centre workers employed by a big online retailer between January 2018 and August 2020. They found that the average worker answered 26 calls a day, or about one every 20 minutes. But comparing the call records of on-site and remote staff, the researchers found that the latter spent an extra 40 seconds on each call, making them 12% less productive.