Freedom to use vacation time to attend celebrations with family and friends helps improve performance for employees who work far away from their hometowns, new research by Prithwiraj Choudhury suggests.
When employees move away from their hometowns for work, they suffer psychological costs that negatively impact job performance. But companies can mitigate these effects by adopting specific human resource policies, says Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
The study of workers’ social attachment to their hometowns is becoming more important, Choudhury says, as people increasingly choose to live and work close to where they grew up, often foregoing economic opportunity to do so.
“Vacation flexibility means being able to go to your manager and say this is when I need to go home because this is when my family is coming together"
“These psychological costs of moving are really important because, if you think about it, if you get career benefits and, in many cases, a wage increase from moving, what might be holding people back is their attachment to their hometowns,” he explains. “This social attachment is not an economic construct; it’s a psychological construct—the happiness one gets by being close to family and friends—and it needs to be taken into account.”
By giving workers the flexibility to take vacation time when it is most meaningful to them and by proactively considering employees’ potential to build workplace friendships, firms can minimize the psychological costs of homesickness, which increase depending on how far the employee is from home, according to Choudhury’s study, Social Attachment to Place and Psychic Costs of Geographic Mobility: How Distance from Hometown and Vacation Flexibility Affect Job Performance, which was published in January.
The costs of homesickness
To better understand how moving away from home affects work, Choudhury and co-author HBS doctoral student Ochan Kwon first interviewed 30 employees of an Indian technology firm that randomly assigns workers to eight production centers spread across the country. They learned that first-year workers were usually permitted to travel home for the festivals of Diwali, while the more experienced third-year workers had to stay behind to manage projects.
“They said it’s often miserable to be away from home, but it’s really, really, really miserable to be away from home during Diwali,” Choudhury recalls.
By analyzing company performance data, the researchers were able to make a causal connection between “vacation flexibility” and job performance. On average, among workers with low vacation flexibility, adding 10 hours of travel time to the worker’s hometown lowered the likelihood of receiving the highest performance rating by 3 percent.
“Vacation flexibility means being able to go to your manager and say this is when I need to go home because this is when my family is coming together,” says Choudhury. “So, for a Chinese migrant, it might be more important to go back home during the Chinese New Year, rather than during the December break.”
Although the study was able to exploit the random assignment of workers to different locations, thus avoiding the problem of selection bias, it remained unclear whether the senior workers suffered more because they had vacation flexibility earlier in their employment and then lost it, or simply because they did not have it when they were more experienced, Choudhury says.
Practice is as important as policy
For the company, allowing first-year workers to travel for Diwali while more senior employees stayed behind was an informal practice, not written policy, Choudhury notes. He points out that practice is as important as policy, and the two often diverge, such as with companies that have “unlimited vacation” policies where, in reality, no one feels comfortable taking paid time off.
The researchers’ interviews also revealed a second factor that helped mitigate homesickness among workers assigned to far-flung places: workplace friendships. Workers with colleagues of the same gender and who spoke the same native language as they did were more likely to have stronger workplace friendships and thus were not as miserable about missing the festivals back home. Choudhury stresses that the finding is not anti-diversity but instead speaks to the importance of and factors that foster social connection.
The study delves into one facet of Choudhury’s three-part research agenda surrounding the geographic mobility of workers. He previously studied the productivity benefits of geographic mobility. His “ROPE” framework explores four mechanisms that impose costs and/or constraints when workers experience geographic mobility: regulation (visas, etc.), occupational licensing, personal/psychological costs, and economic costs. He is currently studying productivity effects of new forms of remote work, such as “work from anywhere” and “all-remote work” arrangements on individuals, companies, and communities. He says he hopes to shed light on trends in geographic mobility and remote work that have implications for firms and individual career outcomes.
“People are not moving far away from their hometowns like they used to,” he says, “and there has been no empirical investigation of what management practices can be helpful in making those who do move away more productive.”
About the Author
Kristen Senz is a writer and social media editor for Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.
[Image: FatCamera]
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