Top Highlights

• Bloom and Liang found that people working from home had completed 13.5 percent more calls than the office staff did, while also taking fewer work breaks and sick days during the nine-month period.
• Bloom explained. In addition, employees who worked from home quit at half the rate of employees who commuted to the office each day to work the phones. In looking for an explanation for the dramatic increase in performance, Bloom and Liang found that it wasn’t so much that working from home boosted performance as it was that working from an office ...
• The optimal engagement boost from working remotely happened when employees spent between 60 and 80 percent of their time off-site—that is, three or four days out of the week.
• I look for a clear and concise answer to this question: “What are we fighting for?” Not “Who are we fighting?” That’s a question about competitors and sets up an us-versus-them competitive mindset that likely won’t be useful. “What are we fighting for?” might mean “What is the problem in the world we’re trying to solve?” or “What is the injustice i...
• We’re talking about longer-term purpose. And so, when I ask teams “What are we fighting for?” I am checking to see if they’ve translated the organization’s stated purpose in their minds to something larger—something that would even be seen as the superordinate goal discussed previously. It defines, in short, precise language, why the organization e...