Does home working effect productivity and team feeling? My personal findings whilst growing a team

As working from home is a hot topic right now it made me reflect on my own experiences over the years whilst growing a team:

When we launched back in early 2013 we implemented "one day a week working from home" fairly quickly. We decided on Friday more from a personal perspective rather than a business reason. We took it as far as literally closing the office on Fridays.

Admittedly I personally loved working from home from time to time, but it also helpt with getting strong talent on board as, at the time, not many recruitment businesses were offering this (at least not in Barcelona). Based on feedback we received from colleagues during exit interviews, it also have seemed to have helped with keeping strong talent on board for a longer time. Especially in Tech Recruitment there was/is a high demand for experienced people, so our team members were approached on a regular basis (understandable as they are awesome!).

I remember several people asking me things like "so you have a 4 day work week?" or "This will negatively reflect in your results, so why do you allow this?".

To reflect on these comments:

"So you have a 4 day work week?"

Not at all, we worked 5 days a week like most companies out there.

As we implemented a central CRM/ATS system early on, activity levels were fairly easy to track (in case company results were lower than expected, otherwise I never focussed on this too much).

I never really saw a difference between activity levels on a random Tuesday compared to Friday. Candidates were called as much on Fridays as on Tuesdays, clients were attended to as expected, also on Fridays.

Of course everyone is different and everyone plans their working weeks in different way. Eg, we had colleagues who preferred to cramp 90-95% of their calls into Monday - Thursday and use the Friday to catch up on everything else they haven′t had time for that week. But when you compared the average amount of "candidate and client contact points" per week, it did not differ from someone who spread out their calls between Monday - Friday.

"This will negatively reflect in your results, so why do you allow this?".

When it comes to results, this is also very easy to track. We never saw a significant negative change in results, so in my opinion there was no reason to worry.

Could results have been even better if we had a "5 day working in the office" week in place? I have no idea as we never really tested it extensively. At times though we did have colleagues who preferred to come to the office on Friday (as an exception) because eg they were doing construction work in their own building so couldn′t concentrate. Over those weeks we also didn′t see a positive spike in results, but as again this is based a little data.

So everything about the home working days was positive?

As I was a big fan of working from home myself, over the years I tried to implement next steps in our "working from home strategy". For example, closing the office also on Tuesdays. We tried that for a few weeks, which effectively meant we were working from home 40% of the time.

One thing that, for the longer term, is as more important than managing on results is making sure that people are happy working in your business. As working from home was part of our culture we always made sure to keep checking with our colleagues how happy they were about the home working strategy.

And surprisingly (at least for me at the time) I started to feel more and more push back. Key reason: we were slowly losing the "team feeling" which partly kept our people on board in difficult times (also data gathered during exit interviews).

It became clear to me that "working from home" doesn′t automatically appeal to everyone. So we changed it back and said that people could choose wether to work from home or come to the office on Tuesdays. Over time we changed it to "flexibility across the week" except for Fridays when we kept the office closed.

In general every single day (except for Fridays) we had at least 90% of our team in the office since that change.

My personal conclusion:

There is (at least in our business) a clear cut off line in how far you can push this without it effecting the "team feeling". Working from home is also something that needs to fit in your company culture.

As we promoted it from the beginning we also made candidates aware that interviewed for a position in our team. I actually had a few cases of people that decided not to join us because they felt they needed a more structured (100% in office) environment.

Happy home working people, and to others...hope you can go back to the office soon enough again!