Personality Traits, Remote Work and Productivity

The future of teleworking ultimately depends on its impact on workers’ productivity and wellbeing, yet the effect of remote working on productivity is not well understood. This paper investigates the link between personality traits and workers’ productivity when working from home. We exploit a survey providing measures of the “Big Five” personality traits for more than 1700 recent teleworkers. We document strong links between personality, productivity, and willingness to work from home post-pandemic. Other things equal, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience are positively associated with a higher productivity from home, especially for females. These results suggest that pro-teleworking employers will observe positive selection on personality traits into their workforce. On the other hand, the link between Extraversion and preference for teleworking is negative. Our findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all policy is unlikely to maximize neither firms’ productivity nor workers’ satisfaction