Since 2020, about 25% of all US workers are hybrid workers, with about 15% working fully from home. What could explain this ongoing trend in remote work? Aside from evidence for increased productivity and well-being, personality characteristics can help explain work-from-home preferences.

On episode 118 of The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with world-renowned personality psychologist Adrian Furnham, PhD, to talk about a recent paper he authored on the personality characteristics of people who prefer to work from home.¹

The work-from-home phenomenon is a far-reaching issue. “The study I was doing was a simple preference study. If you have the option to work from home, would you like to take that up?” Adrian said. He asked nearly 1,200 people whether they would prefer to work from home. He also collected data on their sex, age, education, politics and religion, and self-esteem, including personality characteristics.

Work from Home: The Basics

So, what effect did personality characteristics have on people’s preferences for working from home? “Our finding through this study was that conscientious, adjusted people preferred to go to work, not to work from home,” Adrian said.

Conscientiousness

“Conscientiousness is one of the best predictors of success at work,” Adrian said. “Conscientious people are planful, organised, and obey the rules.” His study found that conscientious people preferred not to work from home, either going to work sometimes or always. They are likely to prefer the facilities and contact with colleagues that can improve the quality of work. They also understand that they can do some types of work in an office more efficiently than at home. In other words, they can likely discern whether the task they’re doing is affected by their location.

“My initial hypothesis was that conscientious people would prefer to work from home because you can get things done, you’re not likely to be interrupted, and so forth,” he said. He was surprised that conscientiousness consistently indicated the preference of not working from home.

Adjustment

Nearly all studies show that low adjustment is related to a strong preference to work from home. This preference is likely because less adjusted people feel safer at home. They want to avoid the stress and pressure that commuting and performing in a workplace can cause. Someone with higher adjustment is likely to be more tolerant of stress and more resilient in the face of minor inconveniences.

Sex, Age, Education, and Location

Because the study included demographic data, Adrian was able to see trends in other factors that influence work-from-home preferences. Women consistently prefer to work from home, compared with men. Younger people prefer not to work from home so they can socialise with colleagues. People who prefer to work from home tend to belong to a higher socioeconomic class, have higher education, and hold technical or professional jobs.

Of course, people’s preferences to work from home can also vary based on where they live. Some people’s homes might not be conducive to the nature of their work, which may benefit from access to peers or equipment; the office might simply be a better work environment. Other people are affected by the cost of living, making complex economic decisions about where to reside in relation to the workplace based on environmental or transportation needs.

Some trends in working from home may also have to do with cultural expectations. Adrian gave the example of Japan’s work culture, where employees tend to stay in the office as late as their bosses do.

Motivation to Work from Home

Two other personality characteristics are loosely related to working from home: (1) tolerance of ambiguity or uncertainty avoidance and (2) autonomy of choice. Some people are very uncomfortable with or intolerant of ambiguity. They dislike working environments that are not certain and clear, preferring to work from home where they can have more control over their surroundings and make things predictable with rules or habits. Those who are more tolerant of ambiguity prefer to go to the workplace.

Another issue with working from home is the idea of autonomy—control over when, where, and with whom you work. “We know from [Daniel] Pink’s work on drive that one of the great predictors of intrinsic motivation is autonomy,” Adrian said.

Even if people don’t have many choices, they still view having choice as valuable. “To offer people options like the possibility of working from home is increasingly attractive. It’s a motivational variable to everybody, irrespective of your personality,” he said.

Adrian added that his own preference is to begin working at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and finish his six- to eight-hour workday before lunch. Yet he also wants the option to collaborate with colleagues or deliver a lecture in person. “Nearly everybody likes the idea of hybrid working because you have all sorts of options, better work-life balance, different environments,” he said.

Measuring and Monitoring Work from Home

Adrian suggested that the best way to measure remote work is by the quality of the output, not by when or where the tasks are performed. “The trouble is for most people, it’s not at all clear what the performance [metric] is,” Adrian said. “Sometimes you can measure quantity, but you can’t easily measure quality,” he added. For instance, academic performance can be measured by number of publications. But merely having published doesn’t mean any of the works are bestselling, award-winning, or groundbreaking.

“So, are people more productive at work or at home? Well, what is the measure of productivity?” He told a story about people who drove buses in London being measured by the speed at which they traveled their route. This led to bus drivers not stopping to pick people up so that they could complete their routes faster. Ludicrous! This shows how difficult it can be to collect performance data that is significant and comprehensive—even for a job with measurable outputs, such as sales, research, or transportation.

Organisations need to recognise that people want to have autonomy about where they work to the extent that their tasks allow that flexibility. Hybrid work is now a reality, and it’s likely to continue. “We have to work out the situations in which hybrid is good for both parties, where people thrive working from home and thrive working from work,” Adrian said. “There’s plenty of research for us to continue to do.”

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 118 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

*This post originally appeared on Hogan Assessments