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.
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.
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...
Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?
> 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.
And people who are better in-office workers volunteer not to go home :) I guess this does mimic real life, no?