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Bill Gates’ No.1 employee perk that matters most

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Microsoft founder Bill Gates once famously said that the number one employee benefit is a flexible work arrangement.

Now a comprehensive study from Harvard Business School (HBS) backs this up, revealing that organisations that enable their employees to ‘work from anywhere’ and work whenever they choose, wind up with employees who are more loyal, productive, and cost efficient.

“While prior academic research has studied productivity effects of ‘working from home’ that gives workers temporal flexibility, ‘work from anywhere’ goes a step further and provides both temporal and geographic flexibility,” said HBS professor Prithwiraj Choudhury.

The research of Choudhury and his colleagues specifically compared how productive, loyal and cost-effective employees at the United States Patent and Trademark Office became when they were permitted to work flexibly.

In addition to higher productivity by individual employees, Choudhury discovered the programme led to US$132 million in additional fee revenue, a 4.4% reduction in recruiting and hiring costs – and savings of $38.2 million on office space and related expenses.

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