| dc.description.abstract | In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic required hundreds of thousands of Norwegian employees
to primarily work from home. Many companies are now considering their future practice
of home office. We report the results from analyzing performance and survey data of call
center representatives at a major company in the Nordic bank and insurance market. In
the period from early January to late August 2020, we find that home working led to
a decrease in the time spent on handling each call. Thus, there was a small increase in
productivity relative to the time actively spent on performing work tasks. On the other
hand, our findings also imply that the employees had more and/or longer breaks when
working from home. These effects equalized each other with the result being that there
was no significant difference in terms of daily productivity (total number of calls handled).
Moreover, we also find that working from home led to a small decrease in the quality of
the work.
The effects of working from home did not vary between characteristics such as age,
gender and experience. Rather, the effects seemed to depend largely on employees’
individual preferences and motivation. We also find that employees understood whether
they performed better or worse at home. Interestingly, there were no correlations between
how they performed and their preferred use of home office. The latter was determined
by other factors that were not directly related to performance, such as commuting time,
living arrangements and age. We believe that our findings will apply to other jobs which
share the same characteristics as the work design of call center representatives. | en_US |
