Business leaders yet to be convinced of the benefits of allowing staff to work from home are being urged to measure productivity to gain the evidence that they need.

The Telework Association says that managers who do monitor the productivity of remote workers will soon be persuaded of the advantages that working from home could bring to their business.

Shirley Borrett, development director at the Telework Association, said that because they can’t see remote workers, some companies have concerns about how productive they will actually be.
However, she commented, “If managers measure people by what they expect them to do … then they're not going to have a lot of problems managing people remotely.”

Ms Borrett urged companies to judge productivity on whether home-based workers were meeting realistic targets set within reasonable timescales. She pointed out that not being able to see staff was not a key issue in supervising them.

The comments came following recent statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which revealed that the productivity of UK employees increased by 0.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2010, compared to the same period in the previous year.