Home working survey results
You may remember I conducted a survey on the site just before Christmas, and I’m very grateful to the 150 people who took part, for your time and for contributing to some interesting findings.
It was, of course, a small and unscientific sample and I decided to make many questions open-ended, rather than soliciting yes or no answers, in order to gather the most information. So the findings are qualitative rather than quantitative and should be viewed as indications of what home workers are thinking, rather than absolute proof, but in that light here are some of the results:
I’m sure none of you will be surprised to hear that the four biggest challenges for us in order of significance are time management, which in most cases means working too many hours, being distracted by family, friends and neighbours, isolation and motivation.
I applaud the honesty of the respondents, who when asked how they combat these challenges, replied ‘I don’t’! Those who do try to combat them do so either through determination and discipline or by various methods of getting out of the house, including coworking, Jelly and networking.
I was pleasantly surprised that when asked to describe the way they usually feel about working from home, 37% gave a mixture of positive and negative answers, 38% gave entirely positive answers and only 8% totally negative. Yes, I realise that doesn’t add up to 100 and the reason is that the remainder either didn’t answer the question or in a way that was difficult to interpret as positive or negative!
What I also learnt from the exercise is how difficult the art of eliciting information is, and the truth of that old quote ‘There are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics.’ I’ll be back with more results soon.
More home working survey results including the top 5 reasons for working from home.
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
This is interesting – albeit not suprising – results. They are not easy challenges to deal with so it will good to hear more of how people are dealing with these and have these results changed from previous surveys?
This was my first tentative try at a survey, Chet, so I have no point of comparison. I must say I was surprised by the very low figure of 8% for people feeling negative about working from home – as you say, it holds some quite difficult challenges so I was expecting more dissatisfaction. I can only assume that for many the positives outweigh, or at least balance, the negatives.