American scientists have studied the effectiveness of the so-called “home office jobs” – the phenomenon which has become extremely popular lately. The notion refers to the kind of job with the worker not visiting the office on a regular basis, but doing his work remotely – at home, for instance.
The advantages of a home office job are evident to both the company and its staff, but its effectiveness in comparison with the usual office work is falling behind, according to the researchers. The journal The Psychological Science wrote more about it.
The study involved several labor groups of the scientists, who had a home office job creating articles for the print media and the Internet. Their work was compared with the work of the scientists, who would every day come to the office and create their opus next to each other. In the course of the study, the authors analyzed more than 35,000 joint scientific publications written by 200,000 scientists. Since several names are traditionally used to sign such papers, the analysis took into account how far from each other the authors were while working on the article.
The researchers then assessed the popularity of the studied articles – that is, how often references to them were made in other scientists’ papers.
It turned out that the most objective popularity had been won by the materials that had been written by groups of scientists working in the same room: they had been referred to 45% more often than the papers written by the home office research teams.
Unfortunately, the authors of the study did not mention how different the results of the home office job and the conventional way of working were in other spheres of human activity. In any case, the results of this study can motivate a lot of people to improve the effectiveness of their work.
Source of the image: Photl.
