The bulk of the programming work in this world was not performed by handsome people in suits or fine cloths at clean desks in fabric covered boxes with serious professional expressions on between the hours of 9 to 5 under the direction and supervision of a non technical manager (with regular staff meetings).
The best programming is on par with performing neurosurgery on humans, we don't put neurosurgeons in a cubicle from 9 to 5 and measure them by how many hours they sat in the surgery room chair. We don't force them to "look busy" in their cubicle after they did a tough operation for 3 hours. A good neurosurgeon has to be on top of his game when he is cutting people. Humans are not on top of their game when they are forced to "look busy" for 8 hours a day.
I didn't say anything to the contrary. I am merely pointing out confounding factors in such a short experiment, even though its results actually support my own opinions.
I also believe one day is too short to measure anything here. If everyone in your office disappeared for exactly one day, would anything really be different when you got back the next morning? It happens all the time on company holidays.
Have those O2 employees work from home for a whole week and let's see where it goes.
Working in a place where that was required damn near drove me crazy and made me extremely unproductive (since you learn how to look busy and find yourself using your newly acquired skill at every possible opportunity, possibly out of spite). Managers take note - you are shooting yourselves in the foot with such policies.
I work for a big corporation and work from home roughly 4 days a week. I go into the office for that other day just so I have some human interaction (And to make sure the people who sign off on my invoices know I am still around!)
I generally work normal business hours and I am definitely much more productive at home than in the office. A lot of my work involves writing documentation or complex scripts, the types of things where you need to "get in the zone" and all of a sudden you realize 5 hours have passed and you've forgotten to eat. In the office it's hard to focus like that as everyone around you is talking about football scores, people are on conference calls with the speakerphone on etc.
I don't think it works for all types of roles, but for me it doesn't really matter where I am. I work on servers remotely, I dial into conference calls and communication between team mates happens over IM/Email.
I have worked for employers in the past where they had the attitude of "If you're not in the office, you're not working". I think that is a very poor attitude, especially when you are dealing with IT workers who are expected to be on call.
Counterpoint; after some time experimenting, I work much better at work than I do at home.
Work, for me, is fairly relaxed; I can turn up whenever and leave at my convenience. Attitudes are relaxed and I have my own office.
At first working at home was great and I was very productive. But then the temptation of procrastination crept in. I slept later because "I don't have to travel anywhere", and that got to the point I would start work at 11 and finish by 3. There were few interruptions to break up my day so I got bored faster.
I enjoy working at work now; it is much more sociable.
People like working from home. They don't have to commute, they can sit a watch telly, they can go into the garden. Lovely.
Under those circumstances how many people are going to come back and say 'actually I was less productive, I don't think you should let me work from home again.'
I've worked at home for the past 5 years and I find that it's a bit of a mixed bag: While I'm able to have epic work sessions at home lasting far longer than a typical work day (I usually work one or two all-nighters throughout the week), I'd have to say I work more consistently in an office setting.
With that said, offices come in so many shapes, sizes, and varieties. Some are absolutely hell, while others look like adult theme parks!
I like working from home 1 or 2 days a week. I can take the dog for a walk over lunch, I don't have the commute (1 hour each way) and I have a much more comfortable working setup at home than in the company office. That I can't be interrupted is great, I'm not uncontactable as I'm on IRC but I choose when that happens rather than someone else deciding when.
More than that and I see diminishing returns, it's harder to bring structure to the working day and the communication thing is much too skewed in my favour.
As I'm currently in the middle of research trying to get to the productivity of programmers, my first question (since the one-day caveat has already been pointed out) is they say they're more productive, and they have incentive to. Were they actually more productive? Are there productivity measures in place for each employee? (This was most of the HQ staff, so not all were programmers/knowledge workers.)
I think the main reason people may be more productive working at home is less interruptions. It's too easy to ask something that was not really needed if your coworker is 5 meters away from you... And even when some interaction is needed if people are not physically in the same place they'll use the email that does not need to interrupt the receiver.
If you get some headphones (not even music needed, though it helps) it will make them think twice about trying to talk to you because the interruption is so much more noticable. It works quite well for me.
I sometimes get "Hey, you look busy!" as they come into my office.
A couple of days ago, a coworker came in to chit-chat and I kind of stayed focused on my computer screen (while showing some modicum of politeness by saying "uh-huh" every once in a while while she talked). Eventually she said "wow, you're really busy, aren't you? What're you working on?"
I work 3/5 days from home, and I'm way more productive.
BUT, I also find that it's been very, very difficult to build the relationships required to do effective innovation or research and development. There's just not enough recurrent team communication to get ideas to stick or be elaborated.
However, another variables in my case is that ~85% of my team is telecommuting from around the US. And, to make it worse, our team started off telecommute. I have only ever worked in-person with the rest of the team 3 times, ever.
I suspect that the best mix would be all of us working from home most of the time, but with more opportunities for 'all-hands' co-working team sessions.
> On the day, the 3,000 O2 employees saved 2,000 hours of commuting time, with the majority of that saved time (52 percent) spent working.
That seems positive for O2, and I'm not sure it would last.
My hours are 09:00-18:00. Just because I have to leave the house at 08:00 to commute doesn't mean that's the time I should start work if I'm telecommuting.
a side note - after such experiment, if any worker comes back and say he feels more productive at office than at home, write down his name and pay attention to his work: he is either a pretentious corporate ladder climber trying to impress his boss, or if he is a developer or engineer, with great work ethic.
I can't think with 60 or 100 other people in the same room, so if you want the job done, give me my own office or give me my home office or give me head!
To the best of my knowledge, the O2 HQ in the UK is not in London, it's west of Heathrow airport in Slough.
Most people will either commute via car, or train. As someone who works from home ~3 days a week, and 20% at customer sites, a season ticket is a waste of money - even if you work from home 1 day a week, take out holidays, the season ticket is starting to save you a lot less.
I save £7/$11 a day on transport alone by not going into the office, not to mention the more valuable commute time savings. Food, I spend about the same or slightly less at home, as in the office we've got partially subsidised canteen.
Edit: I forgot to add, I'm putting about half that saving aside to improve my home office environment. The first savings went on a new printer/scanner, the next will soon be a nice high res. second display & maybe stereo bluetooth headphones.
Well, some will drive and a lot will get a coffee or breakfast to drink and eat on the train, and save money too on the cost of lunch which can be made more cheaply at home. Frankly, I'm surprised that it was only £9k...that's only £3/person, i.e. a coffee from Starbucks. I would have expected them to save much more.
