People who work from home are more satisfied with their jobs | Hacker News Reader

People who work from home are more satisfied with their jobs

gigaom.com

84 pointsjimsteinhart53 comments

I have gone full circle. At first I loved the idea of working from the house. Years later, I love the office. The best mix is a combination of freedom of being able to pick your hours and working from home but still having that work place to go to.

I like this idea. There should be some sort of "base" that you go to, though, it shouldn't be a requirement that you be there all the time. I feel like humans respond better to changing environments and being able to jump between the home, office, or wherever influences a much better mood and willingness to be productive.

Certainly. I find my concentration collapses after 6-7 hours in one place. Shifting location gives me a fresh wind.

That is, I can productively work 14+ hour days, but only if I can flip between 2-3 locations. And even when I'm working shorter hours, I really benefit from being able to get up and walk away whenever my thinking is stuck in a rut

>I feel like humans respond better to changing environments and being able to jump between the home, office, or wherever

At my apartment, I've been moving from one room to another until I get bored of working in each, then the circle repeats. Same with coffee shops. I do have a desk/office space at work, and I actually enjoy going there as well on occasion (well I have to be there a bit more often than on occasion), because it means an environment change.

Completely agree. Right now I'm sitting in the garden under a tree. When it gets too hot (mid-afternoon) I'm going down to the office, where I've also scheduled all my conference calls for this afternoon so I can focus on working the rest of the week. The flexibility to do both is extraordinary for my well-being, as there are days I simply don't feel like working alone.

I agree with this. This is especially true if you have small children. Working at home is great since you can help your wife now and then, but you can't do it 5 days a week. You need to get out of the house, even for just a little bit.

+1. I work from home but need to go into the office once in a while. Variety being the spice, and all that.

This is why I love co-working spaces.

Note what it actually said:

"Spending less than 50 percent of the week in the collocated office affords more flexibility and aids in the balance of work and personal roles, which teleworkers find satisfying."

Less than 50%. When I was a more of a contributor versus my current manager role, coming into work 2 days a week and getting my stuff done at home would have rocked.

There are also many things that weren't said. I have a 10x16 office with a door and windows. The folks on my teams are in 4-person semi-private pods with plenty of room with attractive color schemes, reasonably high quality furniture and natural light. It's work, but everyone is pretty happy.

In other roles, I've been in 4x4 high-wall cubes in windowless pens with 40 people where the brightest colors in the room were the red nubs on IBM thinkpads. That was a miserable working environment.

Personally, I'd rather work in my current environment than home. On the other hand, I'd rather work in my basement sitting on a stool and using my furnace as a desk than previous, crappy office environments/cattle pens.

Right, there are lots of factors.

I prefer working from the office, but I imagine I would have a different opinion if working from the office requires a long commute or scraping ice off my windshield in the morning. I also work for myself, so it's MY office. ;)

I also somewhat enjoy the feeling of being among the hustle of downtown. There is energy there. So many people doing their thing to carve out their slice of the pie and I'm among the relatively happy and successful. That's motivation and energy that I don't feel at home.

Another factor I forgot about is career goals. If you love programming and that's your chosen profession that you intend to practice, it's great.

If you career goal is to move up through the organization though, missing the chance encounters with people in the hallway or not being seen is a liability that may negatively affect you. I've noticed in my career that being in the right place at the right time means something.

The "out of sight, out of mind" treatment is hard to get away from if you work in a office where telecommuting isn't the predominant mode.

You have to work harder during your in-office time to create facetime opportunities. That may mean doing the rounds, spending time in common areas, talking to someone face-to-face instead of emailing and, unfortunately, going to meetings.

Making your schedule of in-office/at-home days public knowledge helps colleagues from scheduling important events on your at-home days (but not all the time).

It's also vitally important to follow-up on your phone and email conversations. It's too easy for people to ignore your VM's and emails so, you have to make them accountable digitally as well as in-person.

It's more work to make sure you're not forgotten but, for me, giving up the commute is worth it.

Well said.

"In other roles, I've been in 4x4 high-wall cubes in windowless pens with 40 people where the brightest colors in the room were the red nubs on IBM thinkpads. That was a miserable working environment."

I work in one of those environments right now, and let me tell you, I am honestly 500% more productive on those occasional days where I work from home. Not just happier, but leaps and bounds more productive.

It's not just the change in surroundings, but also the change in attitudes. People seem to be less susceptible to the subtle inanities of "office mode" when out of the office. For instance: when I'm working from home, I can be efficient. I don't need to fritter away 4 or 5 hours straight in strings of pointless meetings. (That's not a critique of group collaboration, per se, but a critique of meetings-for-the-sake-of-meetings, which are quite common in corporate America and probably account for 75% of the weight of my meetings in any given week).

I find that working from home 2 days a week is a very good change of pace. I get to avoid the commute, and I can just hop on conference calls with people back east or overseas right away in the morning (I live in California, and work with people all over the US, as well as in Europe and Asia). I still get to meet people in the local office, have lunch, and so on a few days a week, though, as well as get away from the house.

I did end up putting together a large "standing desk" area in the garage, though, in our detached garage. The house was just a bit too crowded. Putting together the space in the garage, complete with air conditioner, was a good thing.

I think personal autonomy is underrated in most facets of life - we're just seeing the effects of it in this article on this particular study.

I really really really disliked growing up in my family. It's not that I hated them, but I hated having to be around them all the time. Forced vacations on someone else's schedule, forced meal times, etc. I just really hated it. That was taken (even by my family) as rejecting them, which wasn't the case, but hard to articulate when you're 9.

I really enjoy having time with my brothers now (and my parents) but it's because it's on my time and my schedule.

I am pretty sensitive to sound, and having to sit around people who chew with their mouth open is torture. Same thing with gum chewing. I left a job once partially because I was forced to sit in the same room with someone who'd taken up gum chewing. Growing up with the family, meal times were really bad. Now, as an adult, I can politely leave the room for a few minutes if I need to (to destress) but as a kid, I couldn't.

Being able to control where you work is great, but just reaffirms that as humans, we are happier when we are in control all aspects of our own lives.

As someone also rather sensitive to sound, I highly recommend Bose noise canceling headphones. It is the perfect socially frictionless solution to loud office environments.

A) it's expensive B) doesn't work all that well all the time to block out any passing road/truck noise

What's working nearly as well for me (I've tried the bose headphones - not comfortable for long stretches for me) is $5 in-ear earbuds running whitenoise, sometimes with classical music overlaid.

Dunno about you, but as someone who's highly sensitive to sound as well, I found my Sony noise cancelling headphones made everyone elses sounds crystal clear - with the HVAC and desktop whirring cancelled, I could eavesdrop up to 4 cubes away.

I think noise-isolating earbuds or headphones are what you want. Just completely block out external sound, listen to nature/bird chirps or your favorite music.

Exactly - it was odd, but most of the noise cancelling headphones I've used do just that - they cancel some noise, which makes other stuff all the more noticeable. Blasting whitenoise in to my ears does the opposite, but muffles most minor noises.

I think that this study fails to address that they may confuse cause and effect. What is the reason for a telecommuting arrangement? Why doesn't that person just move closer to the job location? The answer is often that he has family ties. I would suspect that telecommuters are significantly more likely to have families, and that may have a pronounced effect on their views of their work life.

I don't know, my reasons for working remotely have never had anything to do with family. Even now that I've got the wife & kid, they're not the reason I'm remote.

To put it bluntly, nobody has an office at the beach. Certainly not the beach in the tropics where I want to be. If there was a Google campus on a remote reef pass in the Mentawais, I might consider taking a seat in a cubicle. But there's not.

We're living in the future, where laptops weigh two pounds and good wifi is everywhere. That means my office can be anywhere I want it to be. As it turns out, I don't want it to be in an office park in the suburbs. Fortunately, it's 2011, so that's not an issue.

I'll add my own bit of anecdata. I love my family fiercely, but trying to work while they're around is very distracting for me (often this is through no fault of theirs at all) and is likely to have an adverse impact on my productivity. That doesn't mean I never choose to work from home based on family-related reasons. It just means that, everything else being equal, I wouldn't choose to work from home in order to be closer to my family; in that case, I'd rather simply spend less time at the office.

Here's what does make me choose to work from home, usually one day a week, in no particular order of importance:

# Avoid driving. Santiago is a jungle on wheels and even one day of not having to deal with it helps immensely.

# Wake up later than usual and/or have a short nap after lunch. It might make me spend less time doing my work, but I'll be a lot more focused on it.

# Listen to the music I want, on my speakers, as loud as I want (within reason, of course). At the office I use headphones, to avoid bothering my co-workers, but it's really not the same thing.

# My coffee might suck compared to Starbucks, but it's a lot cheaper than it. And it's infinitely better than the free coffee at the office.

# My home computer has no annoying web filters. I can hook up my company laptop to its VPN and use my home computer for browsing in those idle moments.

# Hot water! Believe it or not, Chileans don't have a habit of washing hands with hot water. It probably has to do with the fact that they use mainly gas to heat water. Whatever the reason, being able to say "and now I'm going to wash my hands with hot water" is a really pleasant change ;)

In short, it's creature comforts that drive my decision to work from home. Most of that stuff could be improved by living closer to the office or the company providing better "stuff" on their premises, but those solutions seem rather inefficient compared to giving employees freedom to choose to work from home.

Bleh I find most coffee to be better than starbucks. Barring of course the free coffee I get in my office. That stuff tastes like hot mud.

I'm not following the logic on the hot water issue. What does heating it with gas have to do with it?

Many countries don't have gas piped in, so a pipe is connected to a tank of gas sitting outside and often only used for cooking.

It is probably difficult or non-sensical to run a gas line or store natural gas on-site at an office building simply to heat the water for washing hands. I assume the same office building does not have hot showers or baths, either.

My questions, though, does his home hot water heater use gas or electricity to heat the water?

It's just my theory, but after 12 years here I haven't found anything to replace it.

You see, the vast majority of homes use tankless gas water heaters. I'm not sure why, maybe it's the most efficient or most economic solution when your primary source of heating is gas.

Whatever the reason for, it's the reality and one consequence is that nobody likes to keep it turned on for longer than it's absolutely necessary, both for safety reasons and to avoid racking up the gas bill. So everyone is simply used to washing their hands with cold water at home. Since that's what they're used to at home, they don't expect anything different anywhere else.

I think the biggest roadblock to moving closer to work, is that a lot of people are home owners.

And selling a house is a pain in the ass and is a huge commitment.

Which would be fine if there was job security, but in this day and age, you won't be working for a single company your whole life

Even renting, moving for work is ridiculous. If you work in The Metro Area (whichever one that is) jobs can be all over the place. Wherever you move, most of the jobs are not there. Not to mention the expense of moving; I wonder how long it takes to recover the cost of a move?

Add a family and kids and now you're uprooting everyone in your house from their schools and relationships and jobs.

We just bought a house within biking range of both of our offices. Yet we both really like spending 1 day a week working from home.

1) getting away from coworkers and the office allows you at times to focus on the actual work you're doing.

2) we have a kid and extended family who live nextdoor, so having family around is good, but they're distracting.

3) change of pace ... nice to be able to do yoga at lunchtime without worrying about changing/etc.

> I think that this study fails to address that they may confuse cause and effect. What is the reason for a telecommuting arrangement?

From another angle: companies that are open to the idea of remote workers are more likely to show healthy levels respect and trust for their employees.

I'm going a bit bonkers working from home, to tell the truth. The biggest problem is the fuzzy line between work and home.

this was exactly my experience as well. another big factor was the im/email only communication 99% of the time started making my coworkers feel like anonymous web people. kind of surreal. I lasted about a year and a half before I ended up going back to an office gig.

You've heard of skype, yes?

This hits the nail on the head, for me. I thought staying motivated would be my primary problem before I started, but what's definitely worn me down the most is the lack that delineation -- both in my routine and in the physical separation of work and home.

I've tried to remain positive -- and have for the most part -- but after time, and especially when I have projects at work accumulating, it's extremely easy to feel trapped at work/home.

"The biggest problem is the fuzzy line between work and home."

This is something you learn to manage. The fuzzy line is there whether or not you work from home. If you are a programmer or other IT type you probably already have the ability to do _some_ work from home and possibly have to be on-call sometimes (or all the time -- which I've done before).

There are ways you can manage this line while working from home, but having worked on-call, in both remote and non-remote settings, separating yourself is far more difficult when working from home.

Even when working on call, or doing some work from home, you can still maintain the mindset, "This is my home. I'm at home now. Work can't touch me here." I have tried to maintain that separation while working mostly from home -- by even physically removing myself from my office outside work hours -- but, over a long period of time, I can't help but feel my personal life is my work. I can never fully separate myself from where I normally work.

However, it's not fair to say that everyone will have the same experience, there are a lot of factors: work load, expected duties, office communication, and even your office layout -- I was worn down the most when I didn't have a dedicated office. Personally, I can't wait to get back to an office setting.

Worked from home for about 7 years ... at first this was a problem, but the biggest step you can take to solve this is getting an office space in your home, where the only thing you do there is work ... it helps a lot if it has doors that you can shut so that you can give yourself the mental feeling of 'going' to work.

The second thing you can do is have set hours ... doesn't mean you force yourself to be up at 9am ... but do make it regular, even if it is from 12pm to 3pm (or whatever) take it seriously. No TV (can't stress this enough), no running to the store, or the post office to take care of that quick thing.

Those two things really helped me a lot, hope it helps you out too.

I love working from home, although my trip into town for a Ruby user group meeting was the first time I've been outside in three weeks.

I'm not a naturally social person, so without being forced to interact with other people by work I'll tend to only talk to my wife and the daily Skype meeting with colleagues in the office.

That's probably not healthy.

I've been a teleworker since 1989. Then, I had a phone, micro-Vax and a UUCP connection. Sounds primitive, but I and a few others were the proving grounds for today's remote and mobile work force. Not everyone can work well at home. It's hard to separate home from work; especially because my company has a global presence, my work "day" begins when I rise and ends when I retire. Make certain that you take breaks, make time for family and personal interests. Get a dog! My dog and office mate is actually a big help. His bio and exercise needs keep me from working inappropriately or harmfully long stretches without breaks; in fact, he brags that he's the reason I don't have repetitive motion, back or neck injuries.

I worked from home for years until our first child came along. Now I've started renting office space and I am happy to have a natural separation between work and home. When I switch the computer off and go home, I switch off and relax.

I now realise that this separation is important for your long term health and relationships.

Yeah I'm working at home a lot right now and it's not everything I hoped it would be. There's the nagging feeling all the time that "I could be working on X right now, the computer is right over there..."

It helps to have a real home office, a place you use for work and nothing else, in a separate room if you have the space. It also helps to set "work hours" otherwise you feel sort of like you're always (at least potentially) at work.

Having worked many jobs from an office, both cubes and private offices, and now working from home, I can say I LOVE working from home. I get interaction like I did before, phone, IM, email, etc. We have meetups all the time, and I still go out to lunch with folks so I can be around others once in a while.

I'm more productive, I'm happier, and I really think it shows in my work.

Of all the job changes I've had, this has been by far the most pleasant change.

The article mentions "Spending less than 50% of the time in the office," I think the key there is choice. As soon as going to the office every day isn't compulsory, you feel that you have more freedom; very few people respond well to a situation where they're told they "have" to do something (or is it just me?!).

You can also pick your working environment to suit your mood, I find sometimes I want minimal distractions and no commute so I work from home for a bit; after a few days of that it's refreshing to be in the office and around people for a while and then the cycle repeats.

What I'm getting at is I think people who have the option to work from home are likely to be more satisfied rather than people who exclusively do.

I love telecommuting. I have yet to find an office environment which feels right. Really, what do i end up doing? Sitting down and writing code? That can be done almost anywhere. Meetings? Chat and Skype.

Of course there are problems but i dont see them as a reason not to telecommute. If anything they present great challenges to overcome.

People have to be more satisfied with their jobs to work from home.

I'm not sure that's a given ..., I've known quite a few people who didn't like their gigs and would 'work from home' a lot ... they eventually got canned for poor performance

would like to know why you think that though.

Not having to keep a seat occupied in the office 5 days a week 8 hours a day also makes me happy.

Also, I suppose people that work from home are satisfied with their job exactly because the job allows working from home. It's not that common yet, so if you want it and find a job that allows it, it's double fun.

Well, if you have the yard space, and need the separation between work and family, I recommend something like this:

http://modern-shed.com/home.aspx

I used to have a rigidly self-enforced work/home schedule, when I was out of the office I was really out of the office.

Right now I am working from home, and I find I work from the moment I get up until the moment I go to sleep. I was considering going back to working at the office but I realized that back when I refused to work from home, I spent most of my time worrying about work. At least now I can get up in the middle of the night to check email.

Being able to control the HVAC of your home is also a plus. Take my office as an example: In the midwestern US, we are in the middle of a heatwave, and the A/C has malfunctioned in our part of the building. With temps pushing 85 it's impossible to be productive. If I were at home, I would be comfortable. Even if my A/C were out at home, I could always take my work to the coffee shop.

I work from home and its depressing sometimes, but it could be my job, its pretty boring.

Maybe I have weak self-control but it takes more then 8 hours to get 7 hours of work done from home at least.

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