There has been a lot of good research done on the subject of remote work and the effect of that on productivity. It breaks into two categories: questionnaires/self-assessment, and objective/inductive.
There has also been a lot of poor journalism, click-bait writing, and general mediocrity by the business press, ranging from self-described “office whisperers” to happy-at-home journalists. They seem to agree that working at home is definitely more productive, and they cite one another to prove it.
They also mis-use the research by pointing to self-assessment studies which report that people feel like they are more productive at home, or cite the ubiquitous Bloom study from 2012. The fact that people who like working from home report that they are more productive there is pretty unsurprising–the more interesting results come from inductive studies that try to correlate outcomes with controlled WFH data, which in many cases show the opposite result.
The attached white paper does a non-academic review of the academic literature (including Bloom et al; featuring a three-page bibliography for those with patience), expresses skepticism about self-assessment generally and motivated reasoning on the part of many writers, and throws shade on some Dunning-Kruger type analysis prevalent on the inter-webs.
If you are a nerd and like scanning journal articles, or are annoyed by the glibness of the popular press on a pretty nuanced issue, you should take some time to read the piece so you have some information the next time someone says that one should “follow the data” which “proves” that WFH is more productive.
Here is the article:
