Remote work readiness: what decides whether working from home suits you

In 2010 the Chinese travel company Ctrip ran an experiment with call-centre staff who had volunteered to work from home. Half of them, chosen by date of birth, worked from home for nine months while the rest stayed in the office. Nicholas Bloom and colleagues, who published the results in 2015, found that the home workers were about 13 percent more productive, partly because they took fewer breaks and sick days. Yet when the experiment ended and everyone could choose, about half of the home workers went back to the office. Many named loneliness as the reason.

The same arrangement suited some people and wore others down. Remote work readiness is our name for the habits and conditions that decide which group you are likely to fall into.

Four problems that keep coming back

In 2021 Bin Wang, Yukun Liu, Jing Qian and Sharon Parker studied people who started working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. They described four main challenges:

• work-home interference, when chores and family break into work time and work spills into the evening
• ineffective communication, when information that used to travel across a desk gets lost
• procrastination, with no one around to notice that a task has not started
• loneliness, from losing the small daily contact of an office

People who got support from colleagues reported fewer of these problems, and self-discipline made a difference to how well people coped with them.

What our test asks

Our remote work readiness test has 10 statements that we wrote ourselves, based on that study, so it is a self-reflection tool, not a validated questionnaire. You rate each statement on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, and you get one overall score.

The statements cover self-discipline ("I can plan my own workday and stick to the plan"), written communication, asking for help early, a place to work, technology and keeping in touch with colleagues. Two statements are scored in reverse, because agreeing with them lowers your readiness: "At home something constantly pulls me away from work: laundry, the fridge, the couch" and "Without daily contact with people at the office I feel cut off and lose motivation."

Boundaries are a preference

In 2000 Blake Ashforth, Glen Kreiner and Mel Fugate described how people manage the line between work and home. Some prefer segmentation: separate places, times and even clothes for work. Others prefer integration: answering a work message during dinner or hanging laundry between meetings does not bother them. Neither style is wrong. Trouble starts when your style does not match your situation, for example when someone who needs separation works from the kitchen table of a shared flat.

That is why one statement asks whether you can close the laptop at the end of the day and leave it closed. At home, that habit has to do the job a commute used to do.

Reading your score

A low score does not mean you cannot work remotely. Look at which statements pulled it down. Most of them describe habits or conditions that can change: a fixed start and end time, a corner used only for work, a short written update at the end of each day, a regular call with a colleague that is not about tasks.

The statement about feeling cut off is harder to change with habits. If it fits you strongly, a hybrid arrangement with some office days may suit you better than working from home full time, and choosing it is a sensible decision.

If the line between work and the rest of your life has already blurred, take the work-life balance test and read how to find balance between work and life. For the planning side of working alone, try the time management test.