Working from home increases productivity.

The strongest single piece of evidence is a randomised experiment at a Chinese travel agency: call-centre staff who worked from home became about 13% more productive, and attrition fell. But the gain came mostly from working more minutes per shift and taking fewer breaks — a task (answering calls) that is easy to measure and needs little collaboration.

The result does not generalise cleanly to every job. Follow-up work on hybrid arrangements finds roughly neutral effects on output with clear gains in retention and satisfaction, while creative and coordination-heavy tasks can suffer without in-person contact. The honest summary is: remote work can raise measured productivity for well-defined, independent tasks, and its biggest reliable benefit is lower quit rates — not a universal productivity boost.