Workers Driven to Work—Even When Not Driving to Work

Self-Starters: Enabling workers to telecommute elevates job satisfaction, lowers turnover, reduces stress, contributes to work/life balance and strengthens job performance. Those are the overarching findings of a comprehensive examination by researchers at Pennsylvania State University. They looked at nearly 50 studies on flexible scheduling, spanning 20 years and nearly 13,000 employees. “Our results show that telecommuting has an overall beneficial effect because the arrangement provides employees with more control over how they do their work,” says Dr. Ravi Gajendran, one of the co-authors. Gajendran and Prof. David Harrison also discovered that people’s relationships with co-workers and supervisors did not suffer as a result of working outside the office—with one exception. “Employees who worked away from their offices for three or more days a week reported worsening of their relationships with co-workers. However, managers who oversaw telecommuters reported that the telecommuters’ performance was not negatively affected by working from home.”

Also, women appear to derive greater benefits than men, according to the authors. That assertion is based on certain study samples that found women received higher performance rankings from supervisors, along with improved prospects for career growth.