Telecommuting policies have diffused widely across organisations over the past few decades. Specifically, as of 2016, a third of all workers in the U.S. had the option to work from home at least part of the day and 23% of employees worked some or most (10-99%) of their usual hours at home. The current COVID-19 global pandemic has instigated a massive experiment in telecommuting around the world. While scholars and practitioners have long debated the potential benefits and costs of implementing telecommuting policies, we still have limited knowledge of when and how telecommuting impacts employee performance.

One reason for this lack of knowledge is that telecommuting arrangements for each employee are seldom recorded in a form that can be analysed. In addition, prior literature on telecommuting relies mainly on case studies, interviews, and surveys to evaluate the effect of telecommuting in organisations and thus is often unable to provide causal evidence on the impact that telecommuting has on employee performance.

To surmount these difficulties in empirically testing the impact of telecommuting on employee performance, I conduct three studies related to telecommuting and employee productivity. In the first study, “The Effect of Telecommuting on Information Acquisition: Evidence from the U.S. Patent Office,” I investigate the association between telecommuting and employees’ information acquisition patterns in an environment where thorough search and acquisition of information is essential. This study presents two contrasting predictions as to the relation between telecommuting and employees’ information acquisition. On the one hand, I predict that telecommuting hampers information acquisition because of reduced communication with colleagues. On the other hand, I predict that telecommuting enhances information acquisition because telecommuting can shift commuting time into work time and enables quieter and uninterrupted working environments. I use the U.S. Patent Office (USPTO) as a setting and seek to conduct empirical tests to address this research question.

In the second study, “Subordinates’ Task Performance and Departure Rates when the Supervisor Works from Home,” I investigate whether office-working subordinates show a lower level of performance when their supervisors work from home, relative to when their supervisors work at the office. This scenario stands in contrast to virtually all the prior literature on telecommuting that focuses on the impact on the performance of telecommuting subordinates working on tasks. In practice, however, many organisations demand employees have several years of work experience on the job for training purposes before they start to work from home, leading to a situation where they need to work at the office but their experienced supervisors work from home. I use the USPTO as an empirical testing ground and conduct empirical tests.

In the third study, “The Effect of an Electronic Monitoring System on Employees’ Productivity in Telecommuting Arrangements,” I examine whether the implementation of an electronic monitoring system affects telecommuters’ productivity. When employees work from home, organisations have traditionally placed a stronger reliance on output-based controls due to the inability to physically observe their employees. Due to recent advances in technology, however, many organisations now use input-based controls. One such input-based control is an electronic monitoring system, which records the number of hours spent working and leaves out any time in which an employee does not perform work activities. I take advantage of a field-research setting in which the organisation adopts an electronic monitoring system for its telecommuting employees.