Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals
Preprint
- 7 May 2021
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier BV in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Across a variety of measures we find that hours worked increased, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by 10-25%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.This publication has 25 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Value of BossesJournal of Labor Economics, 2015
- LETTING DOWN THE TEAM? SOCIAL EFFECTS OF TEAM INCENTIVESJournal of the European Economic Association, 2015
- Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment *The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014
- Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and GenderAmerican Economic Review, 2011
- How Does Information Technology Affect Productivity? Plant-Level Comparisons of Product Innovation, Process Improvement, and Worker SkillsThe Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007
- The Adaptive Lasso and Its Oracle PropertiesJournal of the American Statistical Association, 2006
- Team Incentives and Worker Heterogeneity: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Teams on Productivity and ParticipationJournal of Political Economy, 2003
- Beyond Incentive Pay: Insiders' Estimates of the Value of Complementary Human Resource Management PracticesJournal of Economic Perspectives, 2003
- Performance Pay and ProductivityAmerican Economic Review, 2000
- The effects of hours of work on health: A meta‐analytic reviewJournal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 1997