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Right Now | Travel’s Toll


COMMUTING’S IMPACT ON CREATIVITY

Long commutes harm productivity and innovation.

by Erin O'Donnell

September-October 2021

> Illustration by Gwen Keraval


Illustration by Gwen Keraval



Andy Wu web page 

 

As america’s workplaces regroup after the pandemic, a team of researchers
suggests that companies take a closer look at one of the potential drudgeries of
office life: the commute. 

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In a study conducted before the pandemic, Andy Wu, assistant professor of
business administration, found that the farther employees must travel to get to
work, the more their productivity and innovation suffer. The idea for this study
emerged while Wu was in graduate school; he and a fellow student had
inadvertently stayed in their office after hours, brainstorming research ideas.
When they noticed the time, “We started complaining about the need to commute
home,” Wu recalls, which led them to consider how a commute affects employee
performance.

It certainly has an impact on employees’ physical and mental health. “The prior
literature shows very clearly that commuting causes depression, heart disease,
mental stress, and increased rates of obesity,” Wu says. But he and colleagues
Hongyu Xiao, now an economist at the Bank of Canada, and Jaeho Kim, a former
research associate at Harvard and current graduate student at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wanted to measure precisely how travel to and
from work influences an employee’s productivity and ability to innovate. They
chose to study inventors, whom they saw as a good stand-in for a range of
skilled, creative workers. And thanks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,
Wu explains, “There are very good records of what inventors produce and the
impact of what they produce.”

The researchers studied 3,445 inventors working at 1,180 firms from 1997 to
2012, a period that they chose intentionally because it largely predates broad
telecommuting and remote work. The inventors lived and worked in five U.S.
metropolitan regions, including the Boston-Worcester-Providence area and San
Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area; home-buyer data revealed how far employees
traveled to get to the office. Wu and his colleagues focused on firms that moved
to new offices during that period, enabling them to compare the productivity of
employees in the same firm who had their trip to the office shortened with those
who faced a longer commute.

The study revealed that for every 10 miles of added travel distance, the firms
that employed those inventors registered 8 percent fewer patents. Even more
dramatic, the patents’ quality—measured by the number of times a patent was
cited by other inventors—dropped 11 percent with every 10 miles added to an
inventors’ commute. 

Firms’ best-performing inventors suffered the greatest productivity losses when
their commute grew longer.

One of the most surprising findings, Wu says, is that firms’ best-performing
inventors suffered the greatest productivity losses when their commute grew
longer. This raises important questions about where company leaders should
establish offices to foster innovation and growth. “Companies often determine
their office location based on where their CEO wants to live,” he says. “But
this might be the wrong way to do it. Instead, where do your best inventors want
to live?”

Wu theorizes that short commutes support innovation by giving employees more
time to spend in the office, and more opportunities for in-person collaboration,
while removing the stress and physical strain of a long commute.  Because many
U.S. workers had commute-free arrangements during the pandemic and liked them,
some are tempted to see Wu’s findings as support for work-from-home scenarios,
but he stresses that’s not the case: “Commuting is bad, but that doesn’t
automatically mean that remote work is good. Having people in the office for
water-cooler conversation is very important for innovation, and we don’t have a
virtual substitute for that yet.”

Some companies are already adopting strategies to cope with the commuting
conundrum, particularly in regions where housing is expensive and limited.
Google is building a company town for employees near its offices in Mountain
View, California, and Facebook has offered employees cash incentives to move
nearer to work. Skillz, an e-sports and video-gaming company cofounded by Casey
Chafkin M.B.A. ’11, was preparing to sign a lease on a large office building in
San Francisco before COVID. “But through the pandemic it occurred to them that
this would be inefficient, especially in the remote-work era,” Wu says. “They
decided instead to acquire several smaller offices scattered around the city and
the Bay Area so every employee would have an office close to them. That way they
can come into the office, but also have a minimal commute.” 

The study has limitations; it did not examine how different methods of commuting
might influence productivity. Could a relatively peaceful train commute induce
fewer negative effects compared to driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic? And
although Wu thinks that these findings would apply to highly educated workers in
other fields that require technical skills or creativity, such as software
development, he believes they wouldn’t necessarily hold true for other types of
occupations, such as administrative staff or factory workers. He also wonders
how the work-from-home options adopted during the pandemic might change the
negative impact of being far from the office, and notes that this could make for
interesting future research. 

The study on commuting has received plenty of attention, in part because “it
seems that everyone has very strong feelings about their commute,” Wu says.
“Those that are in C-suite positions or HR positions need to take commuting into
account when making decisions for the firm. The commute is not just the workers’
problem. As a manager, it’s your problem too.” 

Andy Wu web page 

 


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