Skip to main content

Why working from home is a bad idea

A couple of years ago I wrote this piece about how to work from home. From the stats and comments I received, it looked like a pretty famous topic close to many people's heart. However, after having worked from home for 2 years (and also having worked from office before that), I believe today that working from home ALL THE TIME is not such a good idea. 
I am not denying the benefits of WFH entirely. You get to babysit when needed, spend time with parents if required, run errands etc. But, this cannot be the norm! The days you decide to work from your home should be an exception which should be generously allowed by your employer. Like, an acquaintance who worked from home for 6 months to look after her bed ridden mother. Or, like another friend who could work from home while her husband got transferred from city to city.
But what changed my mind? Here it is -
  1. Networking: one of the main advantages of going to an office facility is when you come face to face with people who matter. This helps you network and build professional & personal bridges. Without being physically present, you are left to virtual means to achieving the same results. 
  2. Work environment: When everyone around you is working, you want to be working. If others around you are watching TV, reading books or worse having a siesta, how can you work?
  3. Accelarators: The scanner, the VOIP, the copier, the dispatch office are all so handy and co located at your work place. You waste very little time doing any of these over head activities. That is a pain when at home!
  4. The Commute: Your commute to and from office is the time you gradually go from 'home' mode to 'work' mode. Take that away and you are left feeling guilty most of the day for mixing work with family.
  5. The work-life boundaries: When working from home (especially in India), it is difficult to convince your colleagues that though you are working from home, you need a lunch break! or that at 6 PM, when rest of the world is commuting back home, you need to take your kids to the park!
Just like everything else in life, access of WFH is not good. So, let your employees work from home, don't make them work from home.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RSS - an answer to the caste discrimination

One of my old post on Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh drew a comment today. It posed a few question about the stand RSS takes on the issues of caste system in our contry. The reader also asked if RSS could be a possible solution. And this, my dear readers in the fuel for this post. Let me put forth some facts about the organisation called RSS right at the beginning. RSS is a social organisation. There is no formal registration and participation is completely voluntary. It is not a political, religious or profit making orgnisation. There are no posts, there are only responsibilities (in fact that what they are called). These facts make it clear that this is a place where entry and exit is pretty easy. There are no costs involved with either. Which means there is no-one who can tell you that he will get you registered with the RSS and do you a favour. RSS is for everyone. In my opinion it is a perfect place where caste ism cannot exist. There are no reservations for a certain community. T...
9 comments
Read more

A Beginners guide to working from home

I just switched jobs a month ago. Along with other things, my new employer is a huge supporter of working from home. While my previous employer wanted me to be in office for 9 hours 15 minutes (I know, it's a weird number!), now I am pretty much by myself. This is a drastic change in work environment, schedule and methodology. Not just for me, but for my family as well. It has it's merits and demerits though. On the positive side, I save time and money on commute, get freshly cooked lunch, can help my wife with chores and plan my evenings better since I know when I will be home from work(!). On the flip side, there are challenges like being taken for granted, assuming your availability all the time, domestic distractions (kids, food, sleep, guests, salesman, TV etc.), infrastructure issues (electricity, Internet and telephone) and personal lethargy. I badly wanted to overcome the challenges because I began to feel that my productivity while working from home was worse than wh...
6 comments
Read more

The oscar for dilemmas

As I was travelling from Goa to Pune in a Bus, I overheard some conversation and could see a lot of dilemma on the face of a fellow passenger. As the story evolved, I could connect with him. Thus it went: They were a couple, he was with his fiance/wife/girlfriend (a non-ma/behen relationship). There was another girl (pretty) who wanted to a lady's seat. She could get it only if this gentleman would give up the company of his travel mate as there were no other female passengers on the bus. I have been through similar situation and have said no and felt guilty about it till the society at large did something equally unjust to me. But this incident in the bus the other day, sparked off some more such dilemmas that I have come across quite often. I thought of having a golden globe of dilemmas; put them on the blog and see which is the most common dilemma. First being the one above, the second dilemma that comes to my mind is of cheating in exams. No No. Me cheating is taboo enough! It ...
2 comments
Read more