Are at-home workers more productive? Part 2 Whether working from home pays off in terms of productivity is a hot topic in business circles. We recently wrote an article about the benefits of working from home. In the article, we cited a recent Stanford University study that found at-home call center representatives for a travel company completed more calls than in-person representatives. They were also less likely to quit their position. Two other studies, in addition to the Stanford report, demonstrate the increased productivity of at-home workers. A 2012 study at Brown University, cited in Forbes, found a 12 percent increase in performance for a group of 255 call center employees who worked from home. The actual experiment, conducted by a NASDAQ-listed Chinese firm over a nine month period, found that working from home led to more minutes worked per shift as well as increased productivity. There are further benefits of working from home, according to Stanford Business Professor Nicholas Bloom. “It’s hugely beneficial to their [workers’] well-being, helps you attract talent, and lowers attrition,” Bloom explained to the Harvard Business Review. Bloom knows this first hand, since he ran a working-from-home experiment, together with graduate student James Liang, co-founder of the Chinese company, Ctrip. The experiment ran for a period of nine months with Ctrip’s employees. Bloom reported that the “positive impact of working from home was pretty constant over that entire period, suggesting that it wasn’t driven just by some initial burst of enthusiasm.” Bigger companies, including JetBlue, also see the benefit in working from home for their employees. Explaining the decision to Professor Bloom, the company cited greater access to educated and high-ability mothers, who wanted more flexibility in their professional lives. JetBlue also believes that the policy has enhanced the quality of its workforce. To improve your company’s customer service solutions and customer retention, consider working with a onshore customer service contact center that embraces the At-Home Agent business model.