Boost Productivity By Working From Home, Really!

When I first began working from home, I had a big problem. I didn't know how to shut it down. I would wake up and immediately jump on the computer and have to get pulled away late at night by my wife. Apparently, I'm not alone in this boost of productivity.

I bump in to people all the time who wonder how I'm able to get anything done at home. They often suggest they'd be too distracted by their comfortable surroundings. They might be surprised  then by a recent survey out of Brown University, which found a 12 percent increase in performance for a randomly selected group of 255 call center employees who volunteered to work from home. The study was conducted by a 13,000 employee NASDAQ-listed Chinese firm over a nine month period and found within the performance boost was an 8.5 percent increase in the number of minutes worked per shift and a 3.5 percent increase in the performance they squeezed out per the minutes they worked.

Where the study gets really interesting, however is in the job satisfaction portion. At-home workers had a substantially higher job satisfaction compared to those who were not able to work at home and their job attrition rates dropped a whopping 50 percent. So you'd think these workers would never give up working from home, right? Wrong. After the experiment, nearly half of the employees changed their minds and returned to the office and two-thirds of the employees who wanted to work from home changed their minds.

Of course, not all employees are the same nor are the job requirements. I edit, write and code for a living so having a quiet sanctuary with a telecommuting presence has been nearly ideal. What's missing is the camaraderie and human interaction. Disruptions is actually one of the reasons the authors of the study believe productivity goes down when in an office. I know when I was working in the building for a previous publication, I would regularly get side-tracked with conversations about the previous night's episode of Mad Men or get called to the conference room to celebrate a birthday. To be honest, I loved these moments and miss them.

Perhaps that's why so many of the workers who experienced the isolation of working from home changed their minds. Here are three of my tips on how to get the most out of working from home while keeping your sanity:

1. Schedule face-to-face meetings. Yes, you're working from home, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't also get out every once in a while. I've mentioned in the past how I meet at least monthly with my mentor. We try to keep these meetings business-focused, but we also allow ourselves to engage in the social gossip we miss out on from being in an office together. I also make regular plans during the week and on the weekends to get out and meet with friends so that I don't feel isolated during the week.

2. Learn how to get the day going and to shut it down. As I mentioned, I had a difficult time shutting it down. As a business owner, I often remind myself that if I don't get something done it won't get done, and that is a big motivator for me. But as Diane Gottsman, owner of The Protocol School of Texas, a company specializing in etiquette training for corporations, universities and individuals mentioned in a previous column, it's important to create work hours. Now, I'll add that even though you've established these hours, working from home provides the flexibility to change or modify them to suite your needs. Moreover, since you don't have an unpredictable commute, you might be able to start earlier or end a bit later if that latitude is needed. This is a trick I implement when I know I'm up against a few deadlines.

3. Create a rhythm to your day. Just about every morning and afternoon moves the same for me. I have a work ritual of when I check e-mails, when I engage on the social networks, when I plow through my e-mails, when I write my columns, and so on. I prioritize the importance of these tasks and give myself lenience to drop or shorten a task if I'm falling behind. By repeating this process day in and day out, like a quarterback feeling the pressure in the pocket, I know when I'm ahead of schedule and when I'm falling behind. Of course, when all else fails and you really want to skew those productivity numbers, there's always the weekend to catch up.