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Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by inglor on Friday May 11, 2018 @03:19AM (#17045519)
Came here to find this. Precisely what I thought - I think that some people work better remotely and some work better in an office setting (like myself).

If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer and more likely to work harder to prove it can work.

Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by lawnchair_larry on Friday May 11, 2018 @04:13AM (#17045702)
Still interesting that people who volunteer for remote work are more productive on average than those who prefer office work.
Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by isostatic on Friday May 11, 2018 @03:42PM (#17050307)
And cheaper of course - no need for a desk ($2k/yr), means they should be paid more.
Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by MoBattah on Saturday May 12, 2018 @02:48AM (#17052829)
Have you ever seen the accounting side of this?

I've previously seen accounting docs at a major defense firm I worked for. They tallied the exact dollar amount spent on each employee's square footage of office space on a monthly basis.

Furthers the argument you make.

Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by isostatic on Saturday May 12, 2018 @06:27AM (#17053382)
Well it's fairly simple - we have a building that only has office people in (not many, but some)

The cost of that building divided by the number of people there.

There's then power, heat, cleaning, etc, but that's all small fry compared with the rent or opportunity cost of an office building.

The technical infrastructure (Cisco switches don't come cheap) is probably offset by the cost of supporting remote infrastructure, vpns etc.

The cost per deal in central London is on the order of $10k-$20k a year. I'll take that in cash thanks.

http://www.cityam.com/233082/london-office-rents-tube-map-he...

Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by tysonzni on Friday May 11, 2018 @04:27AM (#17045752)
The paper mentioned how randomization (a lottery draw on odd/even birth dates) was done among employees who expressed interest. So it is a randomized experiment.
Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by dpark on Friday May 11, 2018 @05:14AM (#17045896)
Randomized but drawn entirely from the pool of candidates who expressed preference for working from home.
Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by tysonzni on Friday May 11, 2018 @05:25AM (#17045930)
Yeah you're right. Randomization at least ensures internal validity of the study as applied to people who are interested in WFH. Whether it generalizes to others is an open question.
Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by a_imho on Friday May 11, 2018 @08:22AM (#17046722)
If control group is selected from people interested in WFH they have incentives to validate the study too.

Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?

Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by dpark on Friday May 11, 2018 @11:44AM (#17048189)
I don't know what it means to "have incentives to validate the study". The study is useful but the participants are biased and that will necessarily influence the results.

> Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?

Very likely, but even ignoring that, the sampling bias means that the study is confirming that people who want to work from home do better with that arrangement, rather than demonstrating that work from home is in general a better arrangement. If you want to study X vs Not-X and draw your sample population entire from the group that prefers X, you will like find that X is better in whatever ways you choose to measure: happiness, productivity, retention, etc.

Imagine you want to study open office floor plans vs private offices. If you include only open office advocates in your study, you'll probably find very different results than an study that includes only private office advocates.

Re:Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home by V-2 on Friday May 11, 2018 @07:42AM (#17046489)
> If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer

And people who are better in-office workers volunteer not to go home :) I guess this does mimic real life, no?