Working from home is awesome…but is it right for you?
Working from home is awesome…but is it right for you?
Being part of or engaging a remote workforce has many benefits
Advantages:
- Stop the long daily commute
- Escape the stress of the city centre
- Spend more time with family
- Improve your stress levels and mental health
- Plan your day around you not your meetings and public transport
The companies that realise this, have a distinct advantage when it comes to the competition for talent. It is still the exception rather than the norm and only after trust has been established, will flexibility be allowed. Often employees had to provide a strong case for it, stating family or health reasons; the point being, an employee feels that have to justify the option.
Nowadays, many companies are beginning to look seriously at it, take PWC. The onus is on the manager to provide a business case as to why a role cannot be done remotely or flexibly.
Disadvantages:
- You need to be disciplined – You can often find yourself still eating breakfast and reading the news at 10am in your dressing gown.
- Easy to become distracted – you think a colleague asking you if you watch Game of Thrones is a distraction, try a super cute 3 year old banging on your office door shouting “Daddy/Mummy, come and look at this, look what I’ve done… its amazing”. Its very hard to ignore. To be as productive as possible, you must be able to separate your work from your home life. If you can’t ignore the TV or the dog, then WFH probably isn’t for you
- Bad internet connection – Having video conference calls with a slow or poor broadband connection is not only frustrating but embarrassing. If you have a poor connection and have a call, get yourself down to the gym or costa to use their wifi!
- No VPN – you need to be able to access your work files and shared drives. Without a VPN or access, having
2 different types of work on different laptops is a nightmare, or worse, emailing yourself back and forth. - Ineffective relationships – Sometimes you need to get in front of people to build lasting and effective relationships. Although working from home is great, you do need to get out and about to make it work!
- People are different – some people embrace and understand the idea of working from home; they understand that people have different priorities, brains and life goals…. others see it as someone being lazy and having a day off! Although these people are living in the dark ages and frustrate the hell out of me, they are colleagues, stakeholders, board members, we need to ensure that they see our productivity. We have to manage different personalities in working world, and so if you are WFH, and not in the office, make sure you are on the calls and make yourself heard.
- Where is Tom? Make sure that you let your colleagues know when you are WFH, a WFH calendar invite will do the trick.
- Feeling guilty – just because you are starting work at 930am, don’t feel guilty (unless you were meant to be on a call at 830am…. then…. you are naughty!), nowadays work is measure on output and productivity not clocking in and out. As long as you get the work done and to a good standard, who cares when you do it!
- Don’t fake it – A few years back there was a trend to schedule for emails to be sent at 12am, to show your boss how hard you were working, a very sad but real trend! don’t fall into that nest of vipers! Show your productivity with output!
Businesses are now understanding the fact that a happier workforce is a more productive workforce, but also that a reduced number of people in an office is cheaper for running a business. For more info on my own personal Work life Blend Journey have a read
