Telecommuting is a win-win for employees and employers, resulting in higher morale and job satisfaction and lower employee stress and turnover. These were among the conclusions of psychologists who examined 20 years of research on flexible work arrangements.
The findings, based on a meta-analysis of 46 studies of telecommuting involving 12,833 employees, are reported in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.
“Our results show that telecommuting has an overall beneficial effect because the arrangement provides employees with more control over how they do their work,†said lead author Ravi Gajendran.
“Autonomy is a major factor in worker satisfaction and this rings true in our analysis,” says Gajendran. “We found that telecommuters reported more job satisfaction, less motivation to leave the company, less stress, improved work-family balance, and higher performance ratings by supervisors.â€
In addition, the employees in the study reported that telecommuting was beneficial for managing the often conflicting demands of work and family.
Contrary to popular belief that face time at the office is essential for good work relationships, telecommuters’ relationship with their managers and co-workers did not suffer from telecommuting with one exception. Employees who worked away from their offices for three or more days a week reported worsening of their relationships with co-workers.
However, managers who oversaw telecommuters reported that the telecommuters’ performance was not negatively affected by working from home. And those who telecommuted reported that they did not believe their careers were likely to suffer from telecommuting.
Women telecommuters may derive even greater benefits from telecommuting. The authors found that study samples with greater proportions of women found they received higher performance ratings from their supervisors and that their career prospects improved, rather than worsened.
Telecommuting has a clear upside: small but favourable effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent and stress.
Reference
Gajendran, R. S. & Harrison, D. A. (2007), The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 1524-1541.
