AMSTERDAM – Employees working from home are often ignored by their employer when it comes to promotions. Businesses still appear to consider office attendance to be of great importance.
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Research performed by the London Business School confirms this. Researcher Daniel Cable compared the chances of being promoted of outworkers and ‘traditional employees’. It turns out that managers consider employees actually working in the office are more ‘reliable’ and more ‘productive’, regardless of the quality of their work. Visibility creates the illusion of worth, according to the research. People leaving the office last at the end of a working day leave an impression, even if that extra time was used to check their social media.
Encouragement
What is remarkable is that this is even the conclusion for businesses which explicitly encourage their employees to work at home. Many flex workers are wise to this and therefore send their bosses detailed accounts of their performed activities. Especially working mothers are burdened by this ‘attendance culture’. This group is more likely to work at home in order to combine their job with taking care of their children. Cable concludes that outworking will probably only lose its stigma if a majority of workers will become outworkers or if the boss him or herself will become an outworker.